The Peacock series spent $76.1 million across seven counties and returned the franchise to Blairstown, where the 1980 original was filmed.
Crystal Lake, a Friday the 13th prequel set in the 1970s, premiered Oct. 15 on Peacock. The production spent about $76.1 million in New Jersey over 82 days of filming last year, and the state committed up to $26.9 million in tax credits for it, according to a spokesperson for the New Jersey Motion Picture and Television Commission (NJMPTVC), part of the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA). The eight-episode series drew 1.3 billion viewing minutes in its first 11 days and ranked as the No. 3 streaming original for the week of Oct. 19, per Variety, citing Nielsen ratings.
Good Jobs First, a subsidy-tracking nonprofit that compiles state disclosure records, lists an NJEDA award of $26,939,818 to Camp Blood Productions LLC of Jersey City, filed under state fiscal year 2026. The entry logs $76,099,505 in capital investment into the production.
The production applied for the award and shot under the working title "Mama's Boy," the name on its filming permit, according to northjersey.com. Filming ran from June through October 2025, working at sites across seven counties.
Michael Lennox directed the A24 production, which stars Linda Cardellini as Pamela Voorhees, Jason's mother. The production hired about 1,500 people during the shoot, according to the film commission.
The show returned the franchise to Blairstown
Blairstown Township, in Warren County, supplied the town for the original 1980 film. When Friday the 13th lands on the calendar, the community of around 5,750 people draws several thousand visitors over the weekend, many in hockey masks, according to the Ridge View Echo. The town's Friday the 13th museum closed permanently in January 2023, as did the neighboring Blairstown Museum across the street; according to visitingamuseum.com, both were privately run.
In August 2025 the production returned the franchise to the shuttered Blairstown Museum on Main Street, where a display still pays tribute to the series. Crystal Lake Locations Manager Dena Ghieth called the display "a shrine to all things Friday the 13th" in an interview this month with New Jersey Monthly.
Crews spent the weekend before the Monday, Aug. 11 shoot rolling Main Street back to the 1970s, the Ridge View Echo reported, down to a "Founders Day" banner hung over the roadway as set dressing. The shoot landed on a Monday, a day when most Main Street businesses are closed, so disruption was minimal.
Lisa Amon, who serves as treasurer of the Blairstown Enhancement Committee, said: "As BEC treasurer, I find it great, because they support our town, but also people get to see the beauty in our little town." She added, "They could have done this anywhere, but they chose to come back and do it here."
Matt Keller, a resident the paper calls "Blairstown's own Jason-in-Residence," watched the setup. The Echo credits Keller with helping spark the town's Friday the 13th tourism. "This is great, seeing this all come back to where this started," Keller said. Showrunner Brad Caleb Kane said this month that Blairstown "hasn't changed in 45 years."
The production considered using Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco, the scout camp near Blairstown where the original film shot its camp scenes, but settled on Camp Ocawasin in West Milford, Passaic County. Ghieth walked NJ.com through the other sites. Boonton, in Morris County, hosted four locations: a bowling alley under the Elks lodge became the fictional town's hangout, and an empty storefront became a diner. The Star-Ledger newsroom was another build, with the production taking over an unused floor of Newark's National Newark Building — a set Ghieth described as "peak '70s."
The shoot also used the Keansburg fishing pier in Monmouth County, St. Agnes Roman Catholic Church in Atlantic Highlands, the Bergen County-owned former Camp Tamarack in Oakland, the Cinelease-Caven Point stages in Jersey City, storefronts on Hawthorne Avenue in Hawthorne, the Ramapo Station fire tower in Wanaque, Camp Winnebago in Rockaway Township and Lewis Morris Park in Morris Township, a roster catalogued by NJ.com and New Jersey Monthly. "New Jersey just has such a wealth of these little towns," Ghieth told NJ.com.
The production's approach came down to "going back to the original places and really bringing that through-line into the current incarnation of the story," Ghieth said to New Jersey Monthly this month. "The care we took with the project, I hope it shows on the screen."
The production also closed a 98-year-old Passaic County landmark for a week: Rutt's Hut in Clifton, open since 1928 and home of the Ripper, a deep-fried hot dog shuttered for filming in early August 2025. It was the site’s second closure that summer; the stand had closed for two days in July for a BetMGM commercial, according to northjersey.com. WPST reported the dates Aug. 4, its writer having learned of the production through the Jersey Hot Dog Joints Facebook group, which has more than 67,000 followers. The owners told northjersey.com they could not discuss the shoot at the production's request.
The credit is capped, transferable, and not yet final
The NJEDA credit is calculated at 30 to 35 percent of qualified expenses depending on the type of spending. Productions can also earn up to four more percentage points for meeting diversity and local-hiring commitments. The state does not send the production a check: the award reduces New Jersey tax bills, and a production company that owes little New Jersey corporate or income tax can sell it to a company that does, at a discount. Certified credits have sold for an average of 93 cents per dollar, according to a 2024 state audit. But the final figure is set only after an independent accountant certifies the production's spending, and it can come in lower than the award.
Since 2020, the state has awarded more than 1.2 billion in credits across film, television and digital media projects, according to NJ.com, and allocates 430 million a year across its credit programs. The commission announced in an Oct. 21, 2025 release that overall in-state production spending hit a record 833 million in 2024 across 556 productions, with more than 30,000 crew hires statewide. An Aug. 19, 2025 release cited Happy Gilmore 2, which reported 152.5 million in eligible spending over 64 days in the state. The program, reestablished in 2018, runs through 2049.
The program "is not designed to boost the state's economy or provide jobs," a 2024 audit by state auditor David Kaschak found, and nothing in state law requires NJEDA to measure whether it pays for itself. The same audit found NJEDA had adequate controls to run the program but said "legislation may be needed to increase the economic benefit" and flagged weaknesses in the expenditure certification process. The audit covered 151 approved projects with estimated credits of 704.9 million from July 2020 through December 2023; only 147.2 million of it had been certified by then.
In its response, NJEDA agreed to train and publish a list of the accounting firms that certify expenses, and to have an independent reviewer check certified projects. "This approach ensures the integrity and accuracy of our procedures, while also fostering transparency and accountability," wrote Tim Sullivan, NJEDA CEO at the time.
The Garden State Initiative, a conservative research group, argues the credits do not generate activity sufficient to cover their cost, citing a 2024 audit of New York's film credit that found a "net-negative" return of 31 cents for every dollar awarded to films. The New Jersey Policy Perspective, a progressive think tank, opposed the program's 2023 expansion and called film credits "a bad deal for states, yielding pennies on the dollar while leaving Hollywood studios the lion's share of the benefits" in 2024 testimony to lawmakers.
NJEDA commissioned an outside study of the program's economic impact in August 2024, comparing 2019 with 2022, and said at the time that the study would be completed by the end of that year. The Garden State Initiative says that comparison could bias the results in the program's favor: 2022 was a pandemic-rebound outlier, and 2019 was the program's first full year, when activity was still limited.
The camp the production couldn't use is open to fans
Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco, still an active scout camp and a horror fan destination, sits on private property owned by the Northern New Jersey Council of Scouting America, formerly the Boy Scouts of America. Showrunner Brad Caleb Kane walked the property while scouting locations. "It's still there and it's still intact, and we walked through it, because we couldn't shoot there," he said. Crystal Lake Tours runs tours at the camp; camp alumni plan and execute them. According to the company, the 2025 tour season drew fans from every state and at least 18 countries. Proceeds from the tours fund camp restoration and youth camping programs.
The tours have run at the camp since 2011, in formats ranging from walking tours of the filming sites to overnight stays that include canoeing on the lake, though the company has offered the overnight format on only nine weekends since the tours began. In 2019, it says, the camp hosted the largest gathering of cast and crew from the original film since its release. The company notes that October tours have sold out and its remaining 2026 dates run in November, with tickets more than 90% sold as of late October.
"I do have ideas for Season 2 in mind," Brad Caleb Kane told Deadline. When the outlet asked why the production brought the franchise back to New Jersey, he said: "Because honestly, like trees look different in Jersey. You can't re-create that feel anywhere else, so we wanted to re-create that feel and the only way to do it is in the same state.”
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Sources
Crystal Lake Tours, "Upcoming Tours & Events" (accessed October 28, 2026)
Deadline, "'Crystal Lake' Slashes Its Way to Strong Debut Audience" (October 27, 2026)
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Good Jobs First, Subsidy Tracker, entry: Camp Blood Productions LLC (accessed October 28, 2026)
My Walk in Manhattan, account of the closed Blairstown museums (October 2023)
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Photo: Enzo Arcamone / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0