Yaga Trailer Scores Baba Yaga to Season of the Witch

Donovan recorded “Season of the Witch” in 1966, and horror has been borrowing it ever since. The first full trailer for Yaga uses Alanis Morissette’s cover of it, and the pick does a lot of work: AMC+ is not selling a campfire story about the Slavic witch who keeps a house on chicken legs, it is selling a fog-bound coastal mystery in which the folklore is the suspect list.

The series premieres with two episodes on Friday, October 23, exclusively on AMC+ in the U.S., then runs weekly to a two-episode finale on November 27. Eight half-hour episodes in all, adapted by Kat Sandler from her own stage play.

Noah Reid plays Rapp, a private investigator who turns up in the coastal town of Whittock looking for Henry Park (Hudson Williams), the missing heir to a powerful local fishery. Between him and an answer sit Carson (Clark Backo), a local detective who does not want the help, and Katherine (Carrie-Anne Moss), a university professor described in the official synopsis as having “a taste for younger men,” plus a town of people with second lives and, out in the surrounding wilderness, ancient magic. AMC+ gave the series its first look at San Diego Comic-Con back in July.

Morissette Instead of Donovan

The needle drop is the most useful thing in the cut. Donovan’s original is the version that gets used with a wink, the shorthand for a movie that finds its own witchcraft a little funny. Reaching for a cover instead reads as a decision to play the myth straight, which is the more promising version of this premise. Eight half-hours is the right container for it too: a small-town mystery this size goes stale at an hour a week, and bookending the run with double episodes means it opens and closes with momentum rather than a single tease. Bell Media’s vice-president of content development and programming, Justin Stockman, called it Crave’s “first-ever half-hour drama” when the series was ordered.

Kat Sandler’s Witch Started in a Toronto Theater

Yaga began as Sandler’s 2019 play at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre, which took Baba Yaga away from the child-eating hag of the bedtime version. “Yaga has evolved from myth to stage to my first greenlit series, reclaiming the wicked witch and reshaping her as an incendiary feminist antihero for our time,” Sandler said when the series was announced. She is showrunner, writer and an executive producer. Moss executive produces as well, alongside Mackenzie Donaldson and Andrew Miller.

Freddy’s Last Director Is Behind the Camera

David Frazee (Chapelwaite, Reginald the Vampire) and Rachel Talalay split the directing, and Talalay is the name genre readers should catch. She came up through the Nightmare on Elm Street series on the production side before directing Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare in 1991, and has spent the decades since on Doctor Who, Riverdale and a long run of genre television.

The supporting bench is deep in Canadian genre faces. Katharine Isabelle, the country’s most reliable horror lead since Ginger Snaps and American Mary, is in it, and so are Sheila McCarthy, Megan Follows, Patrick Gilmore, Hiro Kanagawa and Emilija Baranac. Moss has worked this side of the street before: she played Claudia Wolf in Silent Hill: Revelation in 2012, a franchise now being rebooted again.

Yaga is a Crave original in Canada, produced by Blink49 Studios and Front Street Pictures, with AMC Global Media holding the U.S. rights. What the trailer does not settle is how literal the magic gets. A show can promise ancient power in the woods and hand over a metaphor, and the October 23 premiere is where that question gets answered.