This post contains major spoilers for Crystal Lake on Peacock. If you want to avoid them, read our pre-show coverage instead. Just don’t read it by a fire in the woods of Camp Crystal Lake….
Friday the 13th established Pamela Voorhees as the greatest mother in horror film history, but Jason’s lesser known father Elias never appeared in any film. His story and role in the iconic slasher’s life has always been told in other mediums until Crystal Lake made Elias a big part of Jason’s story. It also changed Elias’ own origin story, including his last name. Instead of a brash, abusive, unintelligent man, the Peacock series made Jason’s dad a respected, loving monster who secretly made his son into an indestructible weapon.
Crystal Lake played with the franchise lore, both as established on screen and off. The series created a new backstory for Jason, his mother, and his father. Instead of Elias Voorhees the show introduced Hamish Linklater’s Elias Wittering. He was once a low level salesman for the Bellflower corporation. He was also in love with a budding singer, Pamela Scott, who was pregnant with their child. When she almost lost the baby, he got his company to bring them down to Texas so she could partake in experimental clinical trial meant to save the pregnancy. Or at least that’s all she thought it was.
Bellflower doctors saved the pregnancy, but Pamela was the only mother to ultimately survive Project Argonaut. Her son Jason was also born with cranial deformities and suffered from severe seizures. But the experimental, secretive procedures Pamela underwent during her pregnancy was only the beginning of Bellflower’s plans.
Doctors gave Pamela powerful drugs to control her mood. (After years of taking them, they altered her personality so much it made her inclined to violence.) Meanwhile, Elias was bringing their son to endure grotesque and painful procedures. In just four years he’d risen far up the Bellflower executive ranks thanks to Project Argonaut, which he ultimately oversaw. It was designed to make humans capable of withstanding nuclear war, which Elias said was inevitable. The first and only truly successful test subject was his son Jason. Bellflower doctors had made Jason into the human equivalent of a cockroach, a person capable of withstanding “radioactive bombardment.”
Jason was essentially immortal. As a baby, he survived drowning after an exhausted Pamela fell asleep with Jason in the tub. But it was more than that. Trauma made Jason stronger. It also accelerated his physical growth.
Elias and the awful scientists he worked with—the people who made children into test lab monsters—wanted to create a human who would survive a nuclear blast. What they did was accidentally create an indestructible monster that can never be killed. It’s Crystal Lake‘s own explanation for why Jason Voorhees can never die.
When the sweet young Jason drowned in Crystal Lake, he lost his humanity. He returned to the woods as an entity of pure evil. But he still retained the awful powers his father had given him in life. Jason then showed his (much more stylish and ruthless) dad just how successful Elias had been. That masked killer crushed his father’s head when they reunited in the woods eight years after Pamela had fled Bellflower.
Jason had no love for his father, but he spared his mother. Somewhere in the madness of his mind, he remembered how much she had loved him. But eventually she will die at Camp Crystal Lake same as her husband Elias, because unlike their son Jason Wittering Voorhees, Elias did not make her immortal. He just turned her into a monster.