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Freeform released a new trailer for Coven Academy on Thursday, two weeks out from the series premiere. It lands on Freeform on October 1 at 8 p.m. ET/PT, and the complete season arrives the next day on Disney+, Hulu and Freeform On Demand.
The pitch is a boarding school for witches in New Orleans, which is not a sentence that has ever needed much explaining. Disney’s own logline promises a place where “power is currency, secrets are lethal, and attraction is a liability.” What makes it worth a horror reader’s attention is further down the call sheet.
The trailer is cut, per Bloody Disgusting, to Olivia Rodrigo’s “Brutal,” and it spends most of its running time on Briar, played by Malina Pauli Weissman, working out what she can do and who she wants. Nobody is pretending this is Hereditary. It is a teen supernatural drama with a love triangle in it, and it is being sold as one.
Devon Sawa Is Teaching Now
Devon Sawa is billed as a special guest star, playing a warlock professor named Mr. Cole. He joined the production in February.
Horror knows exactly who he is. He was Anton Tobias in Idle Hands in 1999 and Alex Browning in Final Destination the year after, which means he is the reason a generation cannot sit on an airplane without doing the math. He then spent the entire run of Chucky coming back as somebody new every season, from the Wheeler twins to Father Bryce to the Collins household, a bit the show turned into a running joke and then a main-cast credit. Most recently he was Zeke Hobbs in 2025’s Heart Eyes. Putting him at the front of a classroom full of teenage warlocks is the single most legible casting decision on this show.
He Is Not the Only One Who Survived a Premonition
Here is the detail nobody has bothered with. Keegan Connor Tracy, who recurs as Tamora, played Kat Jennings in Final Destination 2. So Coven Academy has quietly assembled two survivors from two different Final Destination openings and dropped them into the same Disney witch show.
Tracy’s genre résumé is deeper than that one credit suggests. She was Miss Watson, Norman’s teacher, across nine episodes of Bates Motel, and she logged time on Supernatural, Battlestar Galactica and both Dead Rising films. She has also played the Blue Fairy on Once Upon a Time for thirty-six episodes, so she arrives at a magic school extremely well prepared.
Who Made It
Tim Federle created the series and executive produces with Todd Slavkin and Darren Swimmer, who ran Smallville and later took over Shadowhunters, plus Amanda Row and Bronwyn North-Reist. Chorus Boy Productions produces in association with Disney Kids & Family.
Alongside Weissman, the students are Malachi Barton as Jake, Jordan Leftwich as Sasha, Ora Duplass as Tegan and Louis Thresher as Ollie, a newly turned vampire. Tiffani Thiessen runs the school as Miss Graves. Swayam Bhatia, Brendon Tremblay, BJ Harrison and Nathaniel Logan McIntyre recur.
Where It Fits in October
Coven Academy premieres October 1 on Freeform, with the full season on Disney+, Hulu and Freeform On Demand the following day. That puts it at the very front of a month that is already stacked past the point of reason, and it is arriving on a service better known for our Hulu horror shelf than for teen witches. Whether that helps or buries it is the interesting question. Sawa, at least, has never had trouble being the thing people remember.