Some days, stardom is a bloody mess

It’s always unfortunate when a bag of blood bursts onto your face.
But when it happens several times in a row? You know you have a rough job.
That’s what happened to Linda Cardellini (shwon here) while filming “Crystal Lake,” which arrives Thursday (Oct. 15) on Peacock. “There were a lot of clean-ups and re-dos,” she said.
The blood — well, fake blood — was supposed to splatter just right, she said. “For it to really have its full impact on my face took a few takes.” Hey, when you sign up for a “Friday the 13th” prequel, you know it could get messy.
All eight parts of “Crystal Lake” arrive on one day, offering a mid-month peak for an October that is stuffed with Halloween-style horror.
As Brad Kane, the series creator, sees it, that’s just what we need. “People are wound pretty tightly” now, he said, so horror is helpful. “It’s primal, and I think it’s a release valve.”
Cardellini agreed. “You feel very present when you are watching horror,” she said, “because you are scared and you are involved.”
Kane has done this before, as showrunner to HBO’s prequel of “It.” Then came his shot at the “Friday the 13th” franchise.
“I’ve seen almost every one of these movies in theaters, first-run,” he said. That started when he was 9 and saw “Friday the 13th Part III” in 3-D. “It blew my mind.”
Not everyone held a high opinion of the films. “They were considered exploitation flicks,” Kane said. The original “was meant to be just sort of a thrill ride.”
That was in 1980, two years after “Halloween” had drawn praise. This time, critics were unimpressed. The Variety trade paper said “Friday the 13th” was “low-budget in the worst sense — with no apparent talent or intelligence.” Leonard Maltin called it a “gory, cardboard thriller” and “one more clue to why SAT scores continue to decline.”
But the films kept coming. The fourth was called “Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter” … and was followed by eight more.
That ended in 2009. After 17 years, Kane had the go-ahead to re-start it.
He went back to film in Blairstown, the New Jersey town of 5,700 where the original was shot. “It’s like Mecca for ‘Friday the 13th’ fans,” he said. “Fans make pilgrimages.”
And he crafted an explanation for why summer campers would be stalked by a fierce killer. We meet her first as a deeply caring single mom.
That’s familiar territory for Cardellini. She started in perpetually likable roles — “Freaks and Geeks,” “ER,” even two “Scoobey-Doo” movies.
Then came the acclaimed “Brokeback Mountain” and more. Lately, she’s done offbeat streaming shows, including “No Good Deed,” “DTF: St. Louis” and now “Crystal Lake.”
That’s “how crazy my choices are,” Cardellini said. “That’s what’s exciting to me about being an actor …. If I have not done it, I really am keen to do it.”
And she had definitely not been hit by a bag of blood. Now she has. Often.