Crystal Lake FX: The Death Of Willow

Willow is a young woman and member of a nomadic hippie group. The group is hired to help prepare Camp Crystal Lake for reopening. Willow arrives in town searching for her friends from the group.

Her arrival in Episode 4: A New Beginning masterfully recreated the iconic opening hitchhiking scene from the original 1980 Friday the 13th film. Willow hitchhikes, stops at the diner in downtown Crystal Lake, interacts with locals (including Ralph), and heads toward Camp Crystal Lake to join her friends.

While walking through the woods, she steps into one of Ralph’s traps and faces the wrath of Jason Voorhees.

Her body is later discovered hanging in Ralph’s slaughterhouse shed. This discovery helps the police (Levon and Dorf) realize the recent deaths are not animal attacks but the work of a human killer.

Actress Oona Roche played Willow and did an excellent job portraying the ill-fated character. For Willow's death, Oona had to endure not only prosthetics work on her ankle for the animal trap scene but also had to withstand 14 hours in the make-up chair for her life cast to be completed.

The images below show Oona in the chair as the effects team work to complete the life cast.

Presto FX took over from this point as mentioned before they had to work on the prosthetics on Oona's ankle to show the animal trap damage that the Willow character endures. Below are images of the make-up work as well as the prop traps used during production.

The biggest work that Presto FX took on for Willow's death was creating the life-size prop of Oona's body for the final demise of her Willow character. Willow is skinned from head to toe by Jason Voorhees before being hung in Ralph's shack. Using Oona's life cast, weeks of work was applied to creating the gruesome effects of Jason's learning to live in the woods and mimicking Ralph.

The full eight-episode season of Crystal Lake is now available to stream on most platforms, including Peacock (U.S.); also, on Sky Atlantic/NOW in the UK/Ireland, HBO Max across Europe, Middle East, and Africa, and Crave in Canada.

Crystal Lake stars Linda Cardellini as Pamela Voorhees, with Callum Vinson as young Jason Voorhees, plus William Catlett, Devin Kessler, Cameron Scoggins, Gwendolyn Sundstrom, and others (including Nick Cordileone as Crazy Ralph). 

Brad Caleb Kane is executive producing Crystal Lake together with A24 and an executive producing team that includes Marc Toberoff and Victor Miller (Friday 13th LLC), Robert M. Barsamian and Robert P. Barsamian (Horror Inc.), Stuart Manashil, Tyson Bidner, Michael Lennox and Roy Lee