'The Craft' Reboot Adds Cailee Spaeny To Its Coven

Blumhouse's reboot of The Craft has found the first of its four witches. Cailee Spaeny, who appeared in Bad Times at the El Royale, Pacific Rim: Uprising and more, will play the lead character in the new take on the '90s witch flick. Zoe Lister-Jones is writing and directing the new Craft, which will follow a similar plot as the original movie, but update details for the modern era.

THR reports that Cailee Spaeny is ready to cast a spell or two as she becomes the first t join The Craft reboot cast. Spaeny will play "Hannah, a high school outcast who falls into a friendship with three other young women and begins experimenting with witchcraft. They unleash a power that at first seems to solve problems in their lives but slowly consumes them with unforeseen costs."

This is very similar to the plot of the original film, where a new student named Sarah (played by Robin Tunney) strikes up a friendship with three witches (Fairuza Balk, Neve Campbell, Rachel True). All the girls possess powers, but Sarah ends up being the most powerful of all. Eventually, all that witchcraft backfires, and the girls turn against each other.

Spaeny's credits include supporting turns in Pacific Rim: Uprising and Bad Times at the El Royale. She also played the young Lynn Cheney in Vice, and on the complete opposite end of the political spectrum, the young Ruth Bader Ginsburg in On the Basis of Sex.

Columbia and Blumhouse are financing the Craft reboot, finally realizing a project Hollywood has been attempting to get off the ground for some time now. In 2015, Honeymoon director Leigh Janiak was hired to write and direct a reboot that never happened. Janiak has since moved on to another teen-centric horror project: the Fear Street trilogy, adapted from the books by R.L. Stine. Now, actress and filmmaker Zoe Lister- Jones, who made her feature directorial debut with 2017's Band Aid, is in charge of writing and directing The Craft.

The original The Craft, directed by Andrew Fleming, was a surprise hit, taking in $55.7 million on a modest $15 million budget. It's gone on to amass a large following of fans (like me) willing to overlook some of its cheesy flaws for its overall mood and aesthetic. The Craft reboot is likely to begin filming in July, which means we'll probably learn the names of Spaeny's fellow witches very soon.