Endless Vacations at Crystal Lake
A tour of the lake(s) that made Friday the 13th so terrifying.
I love Crystal Lake. While the Friday the 13th films are often riddled with plot holes, weak characterization, and disheartening amounts of violence and nudity, the backdrop of Crystal Lake is one thing that can be counted upon. By turns, Crystal Lake is idyllic and chilling, placid and unsettling, and it marks an essential element of the canonical Friday the 13th films. With that in mind, I’m going to take a chronological tour through the various lakes that bore the name Crystal over the course of the series. In doing so, I want to paint a picture of the composite Crystal Lake that exists in my mind. Crystal Lake is a major reason why I keep coming back to these movies, and I’m sure other fans feel the same. In fact, Crystal Lake might just be more iconic than Jason Voorhees himself.
Crystal Lake is at its most quintessential in the original Friday the 13th. In this film, Crystal Lake is a narrow strip of water ensconced in trees, reeds gently swaying along its shores. During the day, its waters cast off a bright, coruscating blue while the fledgling counsellors partake in some recreation, lounging on the pier and swimming. You feel as if you are on vacation with them. It’s tough to believe this place has a “death curse,” as per the warnings of Crazy Ralph and other local yokels. This hardly seems like somewhere a neglected child could drown. All the while, the surrounding foliage shimmers, belying the presence of an unidentified onlooker. Then, as night falls, the wind picks up, and the water turns black and choppy as a thundershower ensues. This is my favorite moment in the movie, when the pace accelerates, and the camp staff-members start dropping off in short succession. The lake itself becomes a harbinger of the fate that will befall the counsellors and Steve Christy, the owner. In this way, Crystal Lake serves as a narrator who speaks only with ripples and lapping and whitecaps. But it’s not the most reliable narrator. Though it appears to be the picture of sylvan tranquility at the conclusion of the film as Harry Manfredini’s ostensibly redemptive end theme swells to a close, Crystal Lake’s calm surface is punctured by an undead Jason, who pulls sole survivor Alice into the water with him. It’s still up for debate among the franchise faithful whether that closing sequence was a dream.
In actuality, the original Crystal Lake isn’t really a lake at all. Rather, it’s the so-called “Sand Pond” at Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco in New Jersey, where Boy Scouts have partaken in all manner of recreation for decades. Pond or not, it punches above it’s weight as a full-fledged lake in Friday the 13th. The mercurial waters provide an apt backdrop for slaughter, the cinematographers expertly accentuating their depths. Director Sean S. Cunningham was mindful of getting a waterside setting, as he received waves of inspiration from the Italian giallo film A Bay of Blood, which lavishes in shoreline shots amidst its gory kills.
The Crystal Lake of Friday the 13th Part 2 is equally epochal. Here we move down the lake and wind up at Camp Packanack. This section of water is wider, its surface solid cobalt with a steep beach and thicker, greener foliage surrounding. Underneath a distinctive white lifeguard tower, the counsellors splash around breezily. This stretch of lake also has a rutted-out trail down by the water line. Part of me is perpetually walking that trail with the young lovers Sandra and Jeff as they go off in search of the fabled Camp Blood on a far-off shore, dodging branches all the while. Here, the overlap with A Bay of Blood is even more obvious, as that film also features a scene on lakeside path with gnarled trees. When Sandra and Jeff cross the barbed-wire fence into Camp Blood and encounter a dead animal that may be the dog of fellow counsellor Terri, the water glimmers indifferently in the background. By night, Crystal Lake is black and impassive. As Terri wades in naked, we wonder if the (e)motionless lake will ever return her to shore.
Curiously enough, Part 2's Crystal Lake is also a pond in the real world. North Spectacle Pond, as it is known, was part of Connecticut’s Camp Kenmont, an operational summer camp. While the ponds in Part 1 and 2 would pass as lakes for people raised in flyover country such as myself, those on the eastern seaboard obviously have higher standards for what makes a lake. I suppose when you live within driving distance of the Great Lakes, bodies of water with both shores visible constitute “ponds.”
The Crystal Lake in the ensuing sequels sinks to a lower water mark. Indeed, the stretch of lake at Higgins Haven in Part III looks a lot more like a pond. It’s shallow, green, and sludgy, and could be termed a slough. When the corpse of Mrs. Voorhees jumps out of the middle of the “lake” in the denouement, it appears as if she’s standing in knee-deep water. In real life, this Crystal Lake is one of the creeks, or perhaps a brook, at Veluzat Movie Ranch near Santa Clarita, California. The crewmembers of Part III did yeoman’s work to make a California stream look even remotely lake-like.
The Crystal Lake in Part IV feels far more inviting, giving the impression of a familiar old swimming hole. And going for a dip is precisely what the Part IV characters do, in the buff to boot. The real-life location is Zaca Lake in California, so it’s at least nominally a lake. Surrounded by shrubby hills, we might properly call it a tarn. Regardless, it makes for quite a topographical departure from the more rustic, tree-lined lakes of Parts 1 and 2.
Although these bodies of water in Parts III and IV are by no means the archetypal Friday the 13th lake backdrop, I refuse to let them confound my overall vision of Crystal Lake. I assume that the events of Part IV take place on a hilly branch of Crystal Lake, and Higgins Haven, meanwhile, is built adjacent to one of its inlets.
Friday the 13th Part V does not have Crystal Lake. It doesn’t have (spoiler alert) Jason Voorhees either. On account of the latter, many consider this the worst entry in the series, but it’s the former that bothers me more. The lack of a lake is more jarring than Jason’s absence.
Parts VI and VII represent a return to form, at least as far as Crystal Lake is concerned. Critics hail Part VI as one of the best entries in the series by virtue of its tongue-in-cheek tone, but the lake looks earnestly unnerving. By now, production had moved to the South, namely Georgia’s Lake Rutledge in Camp Daniel Morgan. Dull green and overhung with foliage, this lake gives off a swampy, serpentine vibe. Pines can convey remoteness, but this type of weighty woodland tangle unique to the South adds a sense of webby morass to the horror. This is the kind of lake beneath which a monster like Jason deserves to be bound.
And while Part VII is widely regarded as one of the worst Friday the 13th entries, the lake isn’t fodder for criticism. The film was shot at Byrnes Lake in Alabama, which builds upon Part VI’s bosky, nigh-riverlike feel. This lake evokes a Southern Gothic heaviness that provides some much-needed grounding to a movie that has Jason flying through the air willy nilly during his climactic showdown with a telekinetic teenage girl. In the end, the girl’s deceased father, who drowned in the lake, springs up to pull Jason back in. Seemingly, this atones for the father’s abusive behavior in the film’s prologue. All told, there’s quite a cast of characters amassed at the bottom of Crystal Lake.
In the eighth installment, Jason Takes Manhattan, things go off the deep end with both plot and setting, including the lake. In this movie, Crystal Lake is keeping afloat massive cruise ships and has a mountainous background, attributable to the filming location in the shipyards of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Now Crystal Lake connects with the ocean, apparently. At this juncture, my disbelief is no longer suspended, and, were I to accept this inland sea as canon, it would detract from my overall vision of Crystal Lake. A creek is a lot easier to fathom than an ocean, so I tend to leave Part VIII out of the composite Crystal Lake in my mind.
The same goes for the lakes in the later Jason films made after the IP left Paramount for New Line, eschewing the Friday the 13th title in the process. Crystal Lake appears only in establishing shots in Jason Goes to Hell and merely as a feature of the spaceship’s holodeck in the futuristic Jason X. As the Lake becomes less prominent, the series suffers for it. The Crystal Lake in the 2009 Friday the 13th remake is serviceable, but it’s little more than a recreational lake in Texas, barren of foliage or hillocks. It looks kind of boring, and, to my mind, it barely holds water.
The sole salvageable lake in the post-Paramount Jason films appears in Freddy vs. Jason. This is the real-life Buntzen Lake in British Columbia, and for the daytime exteriors, it provides rolling, verdant scenery on par with the early Paramount offerings. But it is the crepuscular shot of Jason dragging a body out of the water that endures. Foggy, narrow, and staked with spindly, dead trees, the lake has an ethereal, dreamy quality that juxtaposes jarringly with the hulking quiddity of Jason Voorhees. This almost muskeg-like area convincingly passes for a remote stretch of Crystal Lake where campers would know better than to go. Ergo, it wins a place in the composite Crystal Lake inside my head.
We are now ready to dip our oars into that composite Crystal Lake. In my mind, Crystal Lake is far from a pond but instead something akin to a Great Lake. But rather than the sustained depths, distant horizons, and overall inland-sea feel of the actual Great Lakes, Crystal Lake has a different vibe entirely and is something much greater. Crystal Lake has encompassed creeks, brooks, sloughs, inlets, ponds, and proper lakes, as well as (less plausibly) an ocean. It has held mothers, fathers, and zombified sons beneath its surface, and doubtlessly a few dead teens. It has carried many different feels within and between its onscreen depictions — tranquility, joy, and desire, but also rejection, terror, and malice. Sometimes it has been entirely unfeeling. It has looked sunny and welcoming, deceptively; it has looked outright miry and inhospitable. Thus, my imaginal Crystal Lake is a sprawling body of water with many arms, each bearing its own idiosyncracies, each with its own bleak story to tell. Like my own personal holodeck, this Crystal Lake in my imagination can shift and reconfigure according to my mood and preference. Perhaps we might envisage Crystal Lake as a hydra, with many necks and many heads. Crystal Lake can grow as many necks as there are sequels, reboots, or fan films. This is the greatest lake imaginable.
There’s an inadvertent genius to the interchangeability of Crystal Lake. It begins with the name bestowed upon it by screenwriter Victor Miller, as there are dozens (or hundreds) of bodies of water named “Crystal Lake” in the English-speaking world. Crystal Lake could be anywhere. The makers of the sequels seemed to operate with this in mind as they chose so many dissimilar bodies of water for their settings. After twelve films, Crystal Lake becomes something of an omni-lake.
Every time I fire up a Friday the 13th movie, or at least Parts 1 through VII (excluding V), I am embarking on a vacation to this tremendous, terrifying omni-lake. This composite Crystal Lake far surpasses an actual lake. I don’t have to pack up gear and pitch a tent, after all, but its appeal involves so much more than that. Crystal Lake contains all possible lakes. It’s these massive, conglomerating, transformational capacities that make Crystal Lake the best camp slasher backdrop, bar none. While The Burning and Sleepaway Camp each feature wooded lake settings and use them to great effect, these bodies of water don’t have a name and a presence like Crystal Lake. Even in the very first Friday the 13th, Crystal Lake and its surroundings stand as an indomitable force (I’ve heard one commentator describe the Camp as a character itself, and the same could be said of the lake), steering the mood and the narrative, and the lake’s potency swells to increasingly mythical proportions with each sequel. The psychological impact of Crystal Lake burgeons and brims over as the body count amasses along its multifarious shores.
Accordingly, in its many forms, Crystal Lake is the archetypal slasher-movie lake. In its imagined, composite form, Crystal Lake is a monstrosity of powerful, protean impressions and associations, thus making it an oceanic force in horror. Crystal Lake is mightier than Jason himself, as it’s the one thing that can recurrently keep the killer down. Against the span of Crystal Lake, Jason is mere froth. For this viewer, then, Crystal Lake transcends Friday the 13th.
