Move over, Halloween. Step aside, Friday the 13th. If you want to talk about true, unkillable cinematic endurance, you have to talk about the Witchcraft franchise.
Launched in the glorious, neon-soaked direct-to-video boom of 1988, this enduring occult franchise has quietly spen four decades racking up sequels at a pace that puts mainstream studio slashers to shame. Now, the franchise is clawing its way back into the light for its astonishing eighteenth installment: Witchcraft: The Lanterne of Light.
And because no legendary genre revival is complete without an iconic screen presence. The production has officially recruited the hardest-working man in Hollywood: Oscar nominee Eric Roberts.
This Isn’t Your Video Rental Store’s Witchcraft
For decades, the Witchcraft name was synonymous with delightfully campy, low-budget late-night cable staples. Heavy on the supernatural melodrama, light on the existential dread. But the team behind The Lanterne of Light is staging a massive coup.
Director Carissa Pierson and writer/star Andrew Pierson (A Soldier’s Descent) are stripping away the camp in favor of a brutal, modern found-footage nightmare. The upcoming film completely overhauls the series’ mythology, steering it into deep, atmospheric psychological terror.
Witchcraft: The Lanterne of Light follows a paranormal investigation crew as they travel deep into the isolated forests of North Carolina. Their mission? To document the mythology surrounding a cursed artifact. Instead of a routine ghost hunt, they stumble onto the blood-soaked playground of the “Children of the Hollow.” It’s an ancient pegan cult carrying out a sadistic legacy of ritual sacrifice structured around the seven deadly sins.
Framed as a live television true-crime broadcast airing recovered tapes, the film plays out the terror in real-time, aiming for a claustrophobic, immersive dread heavily inspired by the raw realism of The Blair Witch Project and the psychological weight of Hereditary.
“This film isn’t just another sequel — it’s a descent into something far more disturbing and atmospheric,” director Carissa Pierson notes. “We wanted to create a horror experience that feels raw, immersive, and genuinely unsettling.”
An All-Star Genre Ensemble
Beyond the addition of Eric Roberts, The Lanterne of Light reads like a love letter to cult cinema history, assembling a fascinating puzzle of genre veterans and viral icons. Andrew Pierson returns as William Spanner, anchoring the franchise’s central, cursed bloodline.
Lisa Wilcox: Beloved by horror fans as the dream-mastering Alice Johnson from A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 & 5, Wilcox steps into the dark as Detective Garner—a woman already fundamentally broken by a career spent tracking ritualistic occult crimes.
Sandy Johnson: Best known to horror purists as Judith Myers—the fateful first victim in John Carpenter’s original 1978 Halloween.
Kato Kaelin: The infamous ’90s media icon brings an unsettling meta-layer to the film, playing the sensationalized late-night TV host who broadcasts the horrifying found footage to an unsuspecting live audience.
Kristina Lafser: The Last Sleepover star returns to the fold as Keli Jordan to help navigate the expanding, sin-soaked lore.
The Eric Roberts Effect: A Direct Legacy of Prominent Hits
The casting of Eric Roberts, who has over a mindblowing 837 credits to his name, adds immediate weight to the production. With an unmatched filmography that spans intense character dramas, massive studio blockbusters, and beloved B-movie madness, Roberts has proven time and again that he elevates every frame he steps into.
Production on Witchcraft: The Lanterne of Light is currently underway. For horror fans who grew up wandering the video store aisles looking for something they weren’t supposed to watch, this radical, star-studded rebirth might be the most ambitious chapter in the franchise’s unbreakable history.
