When you’re working on a franchise that is so beloved to so many horror fans, a designer of any kind really has their work cut out for them. On CRYSTAL LAKE, A24’s new Friday the 13th prequel series focusing on Pamela Voorhees, costume designer Cristina Spiridakis was up for the challenge.
A big fan of the series herself, Spiridakis spoke with RUE MORGUE about what went into designing this series, whether that be creating period-style outfits for everyone, or recreating the iconic blue sweater that Pamela wears in the original film.
How did you go about reinventing the famous blue sweater that Pamela wears, and how did you decide when to use it in the show?
I was a summer camp kid, so I grew up on this franchise. When I was meeting for the show, I was living with somebody who was a big gamer, and we played the old Friday the 13th video game while I was watching the movie. We had both screens in the living room. It was an amazing reminder of all the iconography of the show and the things that are important to the fans, but when I was watching the video game and realizing that one of the things you could do to beat Jason was wear Pam’s sweater, I was like “I love this.”
So Brad Kane and I decided to discuss where it is important, and from the perspective of working on a beloved franchise, where we are doing a retelling, obviously there are things in the story out of canon, it was important to me to put it in the first episode, so the diehard fans knew that the people who were making the show were fans, and that we were going to speak to it. And also, for me, putting it there led people to wonder “oh is that it? Are we ever going to see it again?” Which I really appreciated.
Because our decade is different- we’re in the 70’s, and obviously the original film was 1980- to be in character with our Pamela Voorhees, we chose a late-1960’s silhouette for the sweater. I gave the sweater that fit Linda [Cardinelli, who plays Pamela] best to a knitwear designer named Maria Ficalora. We gave her clear images of the original sweater, and she replicated the knit pattern on the original sweater to fit the size and the pattern of our sweater. So we had it made by a custom knitwear artist, so that one was used for most of the beauty shots. And later on when the sweater comes back, we had it mass-manufactured using the one Maria made us as a sample, because we needed so many.
It was really important to me, especially because we were changing the silhouette of the sweater, we weren’t doing the flannel and the turtleneck underneath because we shot in the summer and it was 100 degrees. We’re retelling- I wanted to make changes and make it our own, but I wanted to make sure it was as close to the original as possible.
There’s several Easter eggs in the show that are spotted by diehard fans. Ralph has his fishing hat, and one extra has the green jersey with the 00 on it, straight out of the original. How did you source the pieces that were from the original?
Oh we made them all! Actually fun fact, we found a vintage sweater in that same color, we had the vinyl printing done. There’s a scene where they’re by the fire right before counselors get murdered, we went through that scene take by take by take and adapted those pieces to our color palette, and our world.
Ralph is fascinating because his costume in the original movie is so weird. You could have a million conversations about, “oh he just showed up that day,” or god knows what happened. It’s so strange. Because Brad developed Ralph- his story, the taxidermy, his military past- we were able to do more with it. But that hat is so funny. We knew we were gonna have him on the bike, and we were going to use that hat, and I was like “that hat is so bizarre”.
I had this fisherman hat, honestly that we bought at H&M, and I pulled the ribbon brim from a very old, dry rotted vintage hat that we had. We hand applied that, and we gave it to Rob Christie, our textile artist. And Rob just destroyed it, he destroyed all of Ralph’s pieces. Ralph’s taxidermy apron is covered in fake blood and fake fur and fake entrails.
There was a lot of points in the story where there’s retelling and reimagining, ideas that we changed, and I know that we can’t please everybody. Making a television show is a wild experience, there’s hundreds of people involved in the decisions. And I do know, going forward, that there’s some things people might not be happy about, but I think there are things like this that we did that I hope people know what a huge fan I am. So many people on my team have grown up on this franchise, and so a lot of work went into honoring it, but renewing it.
How did you contrast Pam’s dimmed-down color palette to the rest of the town?
As you go through, even at the end of episode one, when a backstory is implied for Pam, it was important to have her feel like she’s hiding in plain sight, but she’s also kind of in mourning, kind of down. In the flashbacks with Jason, the colors are brighter, but not by that much.
The palette for the town of Crystal Lake was what we called “picnic palette”. There’s color everywhere, especially with Rita. We tried to keep everything a little bit more exuberant. And Pam’s colors are deep jewel tones, darker colors, the ability to move a little unnoticed, even though obviously her son the way he was, put a highlight on her. She’s also a guarded person, and doesn’t want to stick out that much.
You have a strong love of 70’s fashion. In this show, you get a lot of different versions of 70’s fashions going on between the characters. What did your research look like for these designs?
Well Rita’s my Rhoda [of Mary Tyler Moore], because I loved Rhoda. I was always a Rhoda, I wasn’t a Mary. I used a lot of 1970’s catalogues, Sears catalogues, and so many teen magazines. Seventeen Magazine, and then we’d get like Ebony and Jet, because Briana is the only person that’s in the city. Rita is pretty current, but she still lives in a small town. Briana’s silhouettes and colors are the most on-trend as to what was in the magazines and what was in the catalogues and things. She’s a young woman, she lives in the city, and it’s a good contrast to her brother and his simple life, and the people around him.
We also did a lot of historical research, to make sure that the strife and the politics of the time were apparent, and remember the things in the world at that time. In every fitting, there was always a themed playlist, we pretty much only listened to 70’s music in all the fittings, or sometimes weird remixes of horror film soundtracks. Our fitting room had a huge mural of a lake. We locked in, we were such nerds.
CRYSTAL LAKE is now streaming on Peacock.
