Arts & Culture

Friday the 13th Returns to Its Jersey Roots in New Prequel Series

The new prequel series Crystal Lake filmed all over New Jersey.

by Amy Kuperinsky October 9, 2026

Linda Cardellini plays Pamela Voorhees in “Crystal Lake.”Matt Infante/Peacock

Camp Crystal Lake was never the same after Pamela Voorhees and her son Jason came to town.

New Jersey gave us one of the most infamous big-screen killers in horror history as the wild-eyed, sweater-clad Mrs. Voorhees had her bloody revenge in Friday the 13th (1980). Pam, queen of mommy murderers, used a knife, axe and machete to slay her victims, cutting a searing figure in the first summer camp slasher film.

Now she returns to the place that started it all—the fictional town of Crystal Lake, New Jersey.

The prequel series Crystal Lake, starring Emmy winner Linda Cardellini as a younger Pamela Voorhees, premieres October 15 on Peacock. Get ready for blood spatters galore in this slash-happy origin story (all eight episodes will be released at once for your Halloween-season binging pleasure). But it’s not all about gory kills. Each hour-long chapter illuminates the humanity of the rage-powered Pam and phantom-like Jason, who went from drowned child to hulking killer in a hockey mask over the franchise’s 12 movies.

Friday the 13th famously filmed in New Jersey and has long been associated with the state. However, the movie sequels were filmed elsewhere. Crystal Lake creator and showrunner Brad Caleb Kane (It: Welcome to Derry) made the series a true return by revisiting the story’s blood-soaked Jersey roots.

William Catlett films a scene in Boonton Township as Levon Brooks, police chief of Crystal Lake and former Newark cop. Matt Infante/Peacock

“New Jersey was such a great canvas for us,” says Dena Ghieth, the show’s location manager.

Friday the 13th remains a point of pride for many locals. “Everywhere you go, the people who live there and are part of this history of this movie will come out and tell you their stories,” Ghieth says. “They’ll have a little photo taped to their storefront of the still from the movie. It’s really an incredible thing to be a part of.”

In the chronology of events from Friday the 13th, Jason drowns in 1957. The new series shifts this timeline forward to the ’70s. Callum Vinson plays Jason Voorhees, 11, a camper at Camp Crystal Lake who meets his fate in the lake as his mother, Cardellini’s Pam, works as a camp cook. The drowning and disappearance of Jason, a child whose disability and chronic health issues have made his mother hyper-vigilant, sends her into deep grief, setting the stage for the Pam-centric show. Crystal Lake‘s exploration of love and trauma also flashes back to Pam’s life as a young mother, revealing more about her history with Jason.

The show’s production team visited Friday the 13th filming locations in the greenery of small-town Warren County. Ultimately, the crew built out the fictional Crystal Lake and the series’s Wessex County across seven Jersey counties (see full list of locations below).

The production spent more than $76 million filming in New Jersey over 82 days between June and October 2025, receiving a $26.9 million tax credit, per the state Economic Development Authority.

Victor Miller, the screenwriter of Friday the 13th, is an executive producer of Peacock and A24’s Crystal Lake. Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco, a Boy Scout camp (the scouting organization is now known as Scouting America) in Hardwick Township, played Camp Crystal Lake in the 1980 slasher film. Location scouts visited the same camp for Crystal Lake, but landed on Camp Ocawasin in West Milford as the main camp for the series. The camp serves as the setting for the show’s titular lake and foreboding woods.

Other camp scenes and forested areas in the show were filmed in Passaic and Morris counties at Rockaway Township’s Camp Winnebago, another scout camp; the former Camp Tamarack at Ramapo Valley County Reservation in Oakland; and Skyline Lakes Clubhouse in Ringwood.

Rebuilding Crystal Lake, New Jersey

One corner of New Jersey that routinely draws fans for Friday the 13th tours is a familiar part of Crystal Lake’s rural landscape.

“We filmed in Blairstown, which was just an incredible experience,” Ghieth says. “So many of the people who live in that town have their own stories of when the original was filmed.”

Just look at the Blairstown Diner, a 1979 filming location that hosts screenings of the Friday the 13th movies and proudly claims the title of “America’s Most Popular Horror Diner.”

“So much of that lore that is just woven into the story is just so special to us,” Ghieth says. “Going back to the original places and really bringing that through-line into the current incarnation of the story … the care we took with the project, I hope it shows on the screen.”

A behind-the-scenes look during the filming in Boonton Township. Matt Infante/Peacock

Crystal Lake filmed at the shuttered Blairstown Museum, which has a display that she calls “a shrine to all things Friday the 13th.”

Scenes at the beginning of Crystal Lake seem to match the movie’s small-town scenery beat for beat, mirroring specific places, visual cues and people from Friday the 13th.

Thanks to the wizardry of production designer Lester Cohen, the restaurant interior where Crystal Lake locals gather for food, gossip and fear mongering was recreated in an empty Boonton storefront. Boonton and Boonton Township hosted several locations in the series.

As the cast and crew filmed, fans showed up to the New Jersey sets wearing franchise merch, body art and the Jason hockey masks that launched countless Halloween costumes.

Backstories With Cred

Crystal Lake isn’t confined to its woodsy slasher town—the story also takes place in a real New Jersey city.

Newark became the urban center of the show, both onscreen and off. William Catlett plays Levon Brooks, police chief in Crystal Lake who becomes a close friend of Pamela Voorhees. He moved to the sleepy town after a harrowing tenure as a cop in Newark during the 1960s, after becoming embroiled in a police corruption scandal.

Devin Kessler plays the chief’s sister, Star-Ledger reporter Brianna Brooks. Her investigation of killings in Crystal Lake compels her to look into the history of a shady chemical company sued for selling tainted products. Ghieth says the production built the newspaper offices inside the National Newark Building, home to Newark Film Studios. “Having a show that was so peak ’70s, the newspaper building would not look like that now—smoking cigarettes in there and all that stuff,” she says.

The sleek corporate headquarters for the mysterious company the reporter investigates is represented by several Jersey sites: part of William Paterson University in Wayne as well as the town’s Dobco building (formerly home to Toys R Us headquarters) and an office complex in Montvale.

Amusement park and carnival scenes were filmed at Keansburg Amusement Park.

“The other place that we really loved shooting was Hawthorne, where we had our police station,” Ghieth says. That set is featured in one particular scene that raises the stakes significantly (and really hinges on the layout of the space). Chief Brooks’ base of operations found its home at a vacant Hawthorne Avenue storefront that was formerly home to a flooring business, she says.

“We scouted a long time for that location.”