Creator Kat Sandler on Yaga.’ With ‘Heated Rivalry’ Star Hudson Williams: ‘People Are Ready for a Witchy Wave’

On the heels of global sensation “Heated Rivalry,” Canadian streamer Crave is bringing witchy back with “Yaga,” writer and showrunner Kat Sandler’s horror mystery series in which the ancient lore of Baba Yaga haunts the search for a missing local in a small coastal town.

Greenlit in spring 2025, “Yaga” gained global buzz earlier this year with the news that “Heated Rivalry” star Hudson Williams would topline alongside Carrie-Anne Moss (“The Matrix”) and Noah Reid (“Schitt’s Creek”) and Clark Backo (“Letterkenny”).

The first two half-hour episodes premiere in the Toronto film festival’s Primetime program this week followed by the eight-part series’ global premiere in October.

Shot earlier this year over 32 days on location on Vancouver Island, the story follows a PI (Reid) who partners with a local detective (Backo) to investigate the disappearance of the heir to a major fishery (Williams). An enigmatic and alluring university professor (Moss) with a thing for younger men is among the local suspects, who begin to seem connected.

Sandler was read folk tales as a child and grew up watching the popular anti-heroes of early HBO dramas. She co-founded a theater company for people who don’t like theater and wrote, produced, and directed more than 20 plays that emulate TV with lots of sex, violence and snappy dialogue.

“Early on, I found it easier to write compelling, funny, complicated men,” she told Variety during an interview in Toronto a few days before the premiere. “As I grew older, I wanted to delve into the most complicated version of women. We don’t often get to watch women behaving badly in a way that we can enjoy and root for.”

Her fascination with Baba Yaga, a supernatural female character from Slavic folklore that usually is portrayed as a witchy crone, inspired her hit 2019 stage play “Yaga,” from which the series is adapted.

“A witch is someone regarded as a monster, someone society would prefer to be invisible,” she says. “But what if that woman could use her invisibility as a weapon and go after the real invisible monsters of society by following her own moral code?”

Sandler retained some of her play’s “beautiful witchy monologues,” she says, using Moss’s gently distinctive voice to carry them over the action.  

“Carrie-Anne Moss was the first person to sign on and is a big part of why we were able to make this show,” Sandler says. “It meant a lot to have someone who I looked up to portraying this symbol of female empowerment in a story about women and aging and sexuality.

Aside from the premiere, Sandler, who grew up in Toronto, is serving as a mentor for TIFF: The Market’s new Series Creators’ Lab, a four-day program for eight Canadian series-creator teams from under-represented communities, focusing on moving premium TV IP toward production and global distribution.

“Theater is the fastest way to get an idea in front of an audience,” she said. “It’s is a great way to discover who you are as an artist, what you’re like as a leader and how you want to run any room.

“The biggest thing I learned from theater is how to talk to an audience,” she continues. “Comedy and horror are a match, in that they can get at deeper issues that might be more challenging for audiences to digest.”

This summer in San Diego, at her first ever Comic-Con, Sandler presented a “Yaga” first-look clip, featuring Williams, and a panel to a receptive genre audience.

“Now that I’ve expanded the world of the play in this season, I want to go further,” she says. “I think people are ready for a witchy wave. We did vampires for so long, now the witches are due for a resurgence.”

“Yaga” is produced by Blink49 Studios and Front Street Media. Sphere Abacus has sold “Yaga” to AMC Global Media for AMC+ in the U.S., Sky in the UK and Ireland, Sky in New Zealand, HBO Max in Europe, and Foxtel Group in Australia. It is shopping the series as eight half-hours, as well as four hour-length episodes.