Back in December there were rumblings - born of a question buried in some market research - that a new version of teen-horror The Craft might be in the works. Those rumours have now been confirmed, with the news that oiginal studio Sony are once again behind the new project{
If her name's unfamiliar, Janiak is what you might call an up-and-coming filmmaker, and she's moving quickly. A producer's assistant on Europa Report, she next wrote and directed last year's excellent indie horror Honeymoon, starring Rose Leslie and Harry Treadaway. She's also just directed the seventh episode of MTV's Scream. The Craft will be her first studio feature gig; she reportedly impressed Sony's execs with a pitch about it being a tale of female empowerment.
Columbia Pictures' The Craft, should you have missed it 19 years ago, revolved around a quartet of teenage girls (Fairuza Balk, Neve Campbell, Robin Tunney and Rachel True) dabbling with witchcraft and predictably getting in over their heads. It was not at all bad, and could feasibly have spawned sequels at the time, had not the TV series Charmed come along a couple of years later to somewhat steal its thunder. Charmed's opening credits theme - Love Spit Love's alt-rock cover of The Smiths' How Soon Is Now - even came from The Craft's soundtrack.
Sony are also, of course, scheming some sort of Marvel-type, multi-film connected-universe revival of **Ghostbusters, while moving ahead with a mash-up of the Jump Street and Men In Black franchises. It's not inconceivable that The Craft could, in the back of someone's mind, be on course to fit somewhere in that complex system, although that's pure speculation on our part. It's early days for the wicca chicks at the moment, with no cast in place or start date so far.