The rumours doing the rounds online recently are indeed true – The Craft is getting the reboot/remake treatment at Blumhouse and Columbia Pictures, with Zoe Lister-Jones now confirmed by Deadline to write and direct.
You may recognise Lister-Jones’ face if you’re a fan of TV sitcom Life In Pieces, where she stars opposite Colin Hanks, or as Fawn in New Girl, but she’s also the director of a string of well-received feature films, including indie efforts Lola Versus, Breaking Upwards and Band Aid. Now, she’ll be in charge of bringing us a new version of The Craft, which we really hope will be great.
Arriving all the way back in 1996, making it we-don’t-want-to-do-the-maths-re-the-years-because-we’ll-feel-even-more-ancient-than-we-already-do years old, The Craft was a deceptively silly teen horror movie that has stood the test of time due to its otherwise complex themes such as empowerment and sexual assault. It made a little (but not a huge amount of) money for Columbia Pictures at the box office back then, but performed well upon its home release, and these days you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t have a fair amount of love for it.
The Craft‘s story revolved around a grieving young girl called Sarah (Robin Tunney) arriving in LA and starting at a new school, while she is learning to embrace her natural gift for witchcraft. She’s soon noticed by a trio of fellow outcasts (Fairuza Balk, Neve Campbell and Rachel True) who encourage her to develop her supernatural skills further, and their power as a coven grows, but when Sarah decides to go out on a date with a popular boy at school (Skeet Ulrich), things soon turn nasty, and the other girls begin to take their newfound powers too far, which leads to a face off between Sarah and her only friends.
It’s not known what the remake film will be about, whether it will be set in the same universe, or whether any of the original stars will return to make an appearance, but we’ll keep you updated on how things are going.
With the speed in which Blumhouse turns these projects around, we could see this materialise as soon as next year, but no release date has been announced yet.
