The Friday the 13th series resonates with me as a disabled man. As most horror movie fans already know, it centers around a slasher villain named Jason Voorhees, who drowned in a lake at a summer camp as a little boy. The reason? He was disabled, and the camp counselors were too busy having sex and smoking pot to be attentive to his special needs.
I have three additional reasons for identifying with this character: Our mothers share the same first name (Pamela), we’re both Jersey boys, and like him, I nearly died at a lake at a young age (in my case nearly being murdered when I was 12 in an antisemitic hate crime). While those parallels are unique to me, though, millions of people can identify with being disabled and neglected.
That is why, to celebrate this Friday the 13th that falls on June 13, 2025, I’m going to discuss what Peacock’s upcoming Friday the 13th TV series can do to effectively realize its potential as a vehicle for social commentary on disability rights. Brad Caleb Kane, best known as the singing voice for Disney’s Aladdin, is the showrunner and creator, and he has kept most of the premise under wraps. All we know for sure is that the series is tentatively called Crystal Lake; it stars Linda Cardellini (perhaps best known as Velma Dinkley in the first two live action “Scooby Doo” movies); and it is a prequel to the original 1980 movie, which established Jason’s backstory and his mother’s subsequent murderous rampage.
Why the new series seems promising—and what I learned from “Barbie”
From both an artistic and a disability rights perspective, this sounds very promising. Yet I’d add some twists of my own. Since this new series is being helmed by people best associated with non-horror kiddie fare like Aladdin and Scooby Doo, I figure I can take a page from a movie from the same genre to draw inspiration: Barbie, which knew how to find social commentary in its schlocky premise (in its case, feminism).
Indeed, I came up with many of these ideas while watching Barbie with my partner earlier this year. As someone whose disabilities prevent him from driving a car, picking up nonverbal communications, and easily recognizing different faces, I suspect Barbie tapped into a dormant part of my psyche that always knew how the tragic tale of Jason Voorhees could be better told.
At its core, it’s a story about disability rights and a character study on how a grieving mother copes with both her own and society’s failures toward her child.
Some ideas I have for the new series:
As in the 1980 opener, the remake’s premise should be that Pamela Voorhees is a single, low-income, and overworked mother of a disabled and disfigured child employed at a 1950s American summer camp (New Jersey, no less!). Her only “mistake”? She took her eyes off her son for a few minutes.
Every parent understands the dilemma: You love your kid and want to be as vigilant as possible, but you’re still a human being. Inevitably, there will be occasions when your attention can’t be entirely focused on your offspring. It makes sense that Pamela Voorhees would have had that happen, and it would make further sense that, because both the camp counselors and campers didn’t care about her kid (and often bullied him for being disabled), they let him die.
I do not doubt that Pamela Voorhees would be wracked with guilt for her shortcomings as a parent (perceived, real, and/or both) and with rage, much of it justified, at those who neglected her kid because he was different.
From that point on, there exists a rich mythology of potential “Friday the 13th” stories in which Pamela and Jason Voorhees could be featured as the simultaneous slasher villains. The lore already established in the dozen flicks released from 1980 to 2009 established that Jason is more zombie than human. The ninth film, Jason Goes To Hell (which I love as a movie but despise as a “Friday the 13th” sequel), even introduces a body-swapping superpower and literal demonic origins to the lore, all of which can be built upon in creative new ways. It wouldn’t even be a leap to establish that Jason is being somehow controlled by his dead mother.
There is a whole lore to “Friday the 13th”:
The first movie explicitly says that there were various strange deaths in the 1960s and 1970s. An entire period piece-based franchise could occur that tells stories from those times, featuring the dual villains. And the coolest part? You could keep linking back to the 1980-2009 movies in ways that make the new series consistent with the old (which is admittedly often not consistent with itself) while endowing new meaning to familiar and beloved stories.
Additionally, this is a fantastic opportunity to do insightful writing about (a) topics of maternity and the horrible pressures that come to bear on low-income single mothers, particularly those with disabled children, and (b) how those same children are let down by a society that cannot properly accommodate them.
This is the idea I had while watching Barbie. That film is a masterpiece because it uses a superficially frivolous topic (that is, a movie about a toy) and crafts a profound narrative. Director Greta Gerwig and her co-writer Noah Baumbach had the character Barbie exist in a world run by women, inverting the patriarchy that defines the modern world with a matriarchal counterpart. Even more subversively, the movie includes explicit commentary about feminism, toxic masculinity, oligarchy, and consumerism.
Given my lifetime of struggling as a disabled person, it is pretty obvious why I came up with that aspect of the story while watching “Barbie.” Similarly, given that I’m a former Salon Magazine culture critic who has written extensively about disability rights and their depictions in cinema (I’m especially proud of my review of Music, the wretched Sia movie about autism), it makes sense that my mind would go in this direction.
Categorized:Editorials