Official key art for Crave’s YAGA, Kat Sandler’s mystery series inspired by Baba Yaga folklore.
Photo credit: Crave / Bell Media
Baba Yaga's house stands on chicken legs in some of the folktales told about her. She travels through the forest in a mortar, propelling herself with a pestle and sweeping away her tracks. The people who reach her door may face demanding tasks, threats of being eaten or unexpected assistance. Canadian playwright Kat Sandler drew on this unpredictable figure for YAGA, an eight-episode Crave mystery thriller premiering October 23.
Baba Yaga appears across East Slavic storytelling traditions, particularly those associated with Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Folklorist Andreas Johns, whose 2004 study Baba Yaga: The Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale examines her roles, describes a character who sometimes harms the protagonist and sometimes helps. The same figure may be a villain, a difficult examiner or a source of aid, depending on the telling.
A witch who can threaten or help
The forest dwelling is one of Baba Yaga's best-known features. In many depictions, her hut stands on chicken legs and can move or turn, while human bones and skulls mark its boundary. Her mortar and pestle are ordinary grinding implements made magical: the mortar serves as a means of travel, and the pestle moves it along. A broom may erase the evidence of her passing. These details recur in collected tales, although individual versions use different combinations of them.
In Vasilissa the Fair, also translated as Vasilisa the Beautiful, a girl is sent into the forest to obtain fire from Baba Yaga. Her mother has died, leaving her a doll that comes to her aid. Baba Yaga threatens to eat the girl unless she completes an overwhelming amount of work, which the doll helps her accomplish. Eventually, the witch sends Vasilissa away with fire carried in a skull from her fence. The light proves deadly to the cruel stepfamily that sent her into the forest.
The story places Baba Yaga in a peculiar position. She endangers the heroine, makes demands that appear impossible and then gives her the very thing she was sent to obtain. In another tale, The Baba Yaga, a young visitor escapes with help from creatures and objects in the witch's household. Baba Yaga chases her in the flying mortar, but the girl evades her. Both stories appear in W. R. S. Ralston's 1873 English-language collection Russian Folk-Tales.
The differences are also evident in more recent scholarship. In Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Fairy Tales, published in 2013, translator and scholar Sibelan Forrester introduces tales in which Baba Yaga is a cannibal or an examiner of young people who arrive at her home. These collected stories give the witch different roles and no fixed set of rules governs every version.
Where the stories come from
An important source for English-language readers is the nineteenth-century collection assembled by Alexander Afanasyev, first published in instalments between 1855 and 1863. Ralston subsequently translated and discussed a selection of Russian tales, while modern scholarly editions and translations have returned to those collections and to other nineteenth-century sources. These books preserve versions of stories circulating at the time; they cannot establish a precise date when Baba Yaga first emerged.
Johns examines the figure within Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian traditions, which share elements of an East Slavic storytelling repertoire. The particular Vasilissa and Baba Yaga narratives described above come from Russian-language collected texts. Their details should not be taken as evidence that every Ukrainian or Belarusian version follows the same story. Assertions that Baba Yaga was originally a universally worshipped Slavic goddess also go beyond what these folktale records establish.
Why Kat Sandler chose Baba Yaga
Sandler has described her attraction to the folklore in notes reproduced by Winnipeg's Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. She cites the moving hut and the mortar and pestle alongside Baba Yaga's inconsistent behaviour and the fact that, unlike many fairy-tale witches, she has a name. “I love that no two Baba Yaga stories are the same,” Sandler wrote.
In a 2019 interview with She Does the City, Sandler connected the witch's shifting reputation with her interest in how older women are portrayed on stage. She wanted to write a powerful, sexually autonomous older female character who could make morally troubling decisions. In a separate 2020 interview with My Entertainment World, she discussed her interest in the freedom routinely given to male antiheroes and the difficulty of finding comparable female parts, particularly for older actors.
Her play Yaga, which Sandler wrote and directed at Toronto's Tarragon Theatre in 2019, brought that material into a contemporary murder mystery with elements of police procedural and noir. Sandler said she studied the structure of mysteries and thrillers while developing it, alongside her reading of folklore. Tarragon described the original production as a story involving an investigation, a university professor and ancient magic.
What the Crave series takes from the folklore
Crave calls its television YAGA a reimagining of the Baba Yaga myth. The story begins with private investigator Rapp, played by Noah Reid, arriving in the fictional coastal town of Whittock to investigate the disappearance of Henry Park, played by Hudson Williams. Local detective Carson (Clark Backo) and university professor Katherine (Carrie-Anne Moss) are among the people he encounters. Sandler is the series' writer, showrunner and an executive producer; Blink49 Studios and Front Street Pictures produced it in association with Bell Media.
Bell Media refers to ancient magic without specifying which, if any, familiar folktale motifs appear in the series. A hut on chicken legs, the flying mortar and Baba Yaga's roles in specific collected stories are part of the source tradition; how Sandler uses that material on television remains a question for the episodes themselves. The first two episodes arrive on Crave on Friday, October 23.
