Review: The Craft and The Craft Legacy

SPOILERS FOR BOTH MOVIES

If you were an adolescent girl who came of age in the nineties, then it’s safe to assume you went through a witch phase. I’m not entirely sure what it was about that specific decade that kickstarted such a heightened interest in witchcraft, but it gave us Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Charmed, Practical Magic and The Craft, as well as a range of paperbacks ranging in quality from L.J. Smith’s The Secret Circle to Cate Tiernan’s Sweep, Silver Ravenwolf’s Witches' Chillers to Isobel Bird’s Circle of Three. Even Hocus Pocus.

Okay, so a few of those were technically released in the very early noughts, but nearly all of these properties have had a long shelf-life. Most of them are now considered cult classics, and since then there have been two prequels to Practical Magic, a short-lived television adaptation of The Secret Circle, Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, a reboot to Charmed with a race-lifted cast, and again – even Hocus Pocus has a sequel coming out.

Then there’s what we’re here to talk about today: The Craft Legacy, the 2020 sequel to the original Craft film.

Released in 1996, The Craft is one of those rare examples of a cult classic that was reasonably well-received by critics and a box-office success at the time of its release. In fact, you could make a case for it being the source of the nineties witch-craze, particularly when it comes to the subgenre’s modern connotations with sisterhood and girl-power.

Of course, that subtext was always there to some extent, as it’s impossible to extract the subject of witchcraft from that of a. womankind, b. the wielding of power, and c. the societal fear of combining those two things: women with power. From the term “witch” naturally emerges themes of persecution and ostracization from society, particularly the subjugation of women at the hands of the patriarchy across the course of human history.

I’m not even going to try and delve into the centuries-long history behind the concepts of witches and magic, from the ancient (and mostly forgotten) rites that went hand-in-hand with religious belief, the terrible witch-hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries (exemplified by the “torches and pitchforks” mentality of the Salem Witch Trials), to the formation of modern Wicca as a recognized spiritual practice in modern times.

Though all falling under the umbrella of “witchcraft” to one extent or another, to people living in any of these time periods the term would have meant something profoundly different, with the New Age aesthetic of crystals and tarot cards existing a million miles away from the Puritan fanaticism of 1692 Salem, and neither one having anything to do with how the Ancient Mesopotamians went about their daily religious rituals.

They’re only connected by our awareness of otherness, of the unexplainable, of the concept of magic and the idea that some might be able to command mysterious, supernatural forces. In the longevity of witchcraft lies its variation – and with that the ability to apply broad interpretations to it. Take the term “witch” away, and is there any connection whatsoever between the green-hued Wicked Witch of the West and the beautiful, glamourous Halliwell sisters of Charmed?

A witch is an agent of Satan, or a misunderstood old lady lashed to a stake, or a wise and respected healer, or a modern single woman out to find a man. From the cruelty of patriarchal oppression and the hysteria of the witch hunts, to a post-feminist movement that encompasses a reclamation of power and a celebration of womanhood, witchcraft covers it all, with its roots in religious belief, early medicine, and the respect and understanding of nature. Modern witchcraft encompasses various paraphernalia sourced from thousands of different places and time periods.

Which brings us to The Craft, which manages to be a grab-bag of factual religious belief and fictional fairy tale, feminist power fantasy and conservative morality tract, respect for ancient traditions and random stuff that’s been completely made-up for this movie. But the power of the film lies – I think – in the central metaphor placed at its core, one that has gone on to provide the basis of so much witch-related media since its release: that the use of magic is analogous to sisterhood and self-empowerment.

Of course, in this case the “sisterhood” is obsessive, co-dependent, and eventually toxic. If you strip away all the magical trappings, The Craft is the tale of a social outcast who joins a cult, realizes she’s in way over her head, and desperately tries to find a means of escape. Is that an oversimplification? Sure, but the story is tied up with universal feelings of being an outsider, of searching for a place to belong, of wanting validation from your friends and vengeance against those that have wronged you...

This is perhaps the secret of the film’s status as a cult classic: that the dynamic it creates between its four leads is so compelling, so fraught, so tragic – and so relatable. There’s no use denying (as The Craft Legacy is so determined to) that women can be as horrific to each other as they can be loyal, supportive and nurturing – but horrific in a very specific way.

There is something intrinsically feminine in the coming together and tearing apart of Sarah, Nancy, Bonnie and Rochelle, as well as very true to life. We’ve all felt, to one extent or another, the emotions that are on display throughout the film: the awkwardness of being the new girl, the nightmare of rumours being spread about you, the sting of your crush turning out to be an asshole, the shifting power imbalances of a group dynamic, of the way you allow your friends to change who you are and how you behave, the terror and hopelessness of losing the strength, identity, protection and purpose that they gave you...

Feeling angry enough that it’s plausible the lights will flicker when you scream, melodramatic enough that you honestly believe “everything I touch turns to shit”, and suddenly gaining self-awareness regarding one’s body and the affect it has on others (as actress Rachel True points out: “Did you notice that the more power we got, the shorter our skirts got?”) are pretty standard beats of adolescence.

And when things turn violent, it’s no surprise that a physical attack from a male character comes in the form of a rape attempt, whilst the depiction of women turning on one of their own has a psychological cruelty to it that ultimately carries a much greater sense of betrayal, depravity and lasting emotional damage.

The camaraderie, the grandstanding, the power struggle, the emotions broiling under the surface – I’m not entirely convinced that the male writing/directing team of Andrew Fleming and Peter Filardi fully realized what they had with this material, but they somehow managed to tap into the endless heightened drama of the teenage girl experience in such a way that the witchcraft elements only served to accentuate that particular roller-coaster ride. The entire film runs on pure, raw emotion – the kind you only possess as a teenager, even without the magical powers as a metaphor.

Heck, I had a Nancy in my life: mercurial, charismatic, unpredictable, cruel; someone who had a bizarre hold over me and my peers, was excellent at pitting us against each other, and who was eventually cut loose and left behind. She couldn’t levitate or cast spells, but my God, her power over us sure made it feel like she could...

***

Sarah Bailey has just moved from San Francesco to Los Angeles with her father and stepmother. She faces all the usual pressures of starting a new school, made worse by a troubled past that includes a deceased mother and at least one suicide attempt. She soon becomes aware of three other girls who are perceived as outcasts for one reason or another: Bonnie Harper (who bears strange burn scars over her body), Rochelle Zimmerman (apparently the only Black girl in the entire school) and Nancy Downs (essentially white trash, but with an intensity that’s palpable).

The trio are a tight-knit group, protecting each other from the world around them, and overtly hostile to anyone they consider a threat. As the opening scene demonstrates, they are also practicing witches, on the lookout for a fourth member of their coven. Having seen Sarah balance a pencil on its tip in class, Bonnie is convinced that she’s the one... but Sarah herself has yet to be convinced.

Unfortunately for her, she’s fallen for football player Chris Hooker, who seems friendly enough at first, but ends up spreading disgusting rumours about her after she declines to go home with him. Just like that, Sarah is an outcast too.

After joining up with Nancy, Bonnie and Rochelle, Sarah learns a bit more about them: that they worship a deity known as Manon, rather vaguely described as the embodiment of nature, and have made things happen with their combined willpower. Once Sarah is involved, the strange phenomena only intensifies: Bonnie’s scars begin to heal, Rochelle’s racist bully gets her just desserts, Nancy comes into a significant amount of money, and Sarah casts a love spell on Chris, who immediately becomes infatuated with her.  

***

Here’s the funny thing about this movie: it’s divided into two distinct halves, with the first half lauded for being an inspiring power-fantasy, in which four misfits find a way to dispense justice and fight back against their oppressors – even though it’s all just setup for the second half, which tracks the disintegration of their friendship and their “comeuppance” lesson which is one-part Be Careful What You Wish For and the other-part Power Corrupts Absolutely.

If you looked at the conversations surrounding this film, and the emphasis that the fanbase places on the empowering elements of its first half, it would be easy to forget that this story doesn’t have a happy ending. The girls’ friendship is broken, permanently. Relatively innocent people are dead. What appears to start out as a “bonds of sisterhood” movie ultimately veers hard into a surprisingly conservative “don’t meddle with things you don’t understand” moral, and the revenge fantasy it fosters in its first half becomes a trite “do unto others” social tract.

There is no external demon or monster metaphor that the girls must band together to defeat (contrast with Charmed’s Monsters of the Week or the abusive undead ex-boyfriend of Practical Magic), instead Nancy, Sarah, Bonnie and Rochelle tear themselves apart over who gets the boy, who gets to be in charge, and who is the backstabbing bitch that has to be taken down a notch. It’s not a celebration of women, but rather a cautionary tale about how power can turn on you, overwhelm you, and eventually try to destroy you.

It’s all somewhat alleviated by the fact that Sarah gets to keep her innate magical abilities, though in using them to send Bonnie and Rochelle a clear warning not to mess with her, you could make a case for the film buying into the Not Like The Other Girls mentality, with only the special one (with a magical bloodline heritage) allowed to wield her gift. That at least some of Nancy’s Green Eyed Monster tendencies toward Sarah are based on where the loathsome Chris’s affections are directed is another overlooked element in the “girl power!” misconception that surrounds the film.

So... why doesn’t this bother me? Like I said, however bitterly unfair it may seem that the power and strength of the female friendship is dissolved by the final credits, the distinctly feminine cruelty that’s on display here is all the more painful because it’s so true to life. Women can be awful to each other. There’s nothing in the depiction of how Nancy turns on Sarah that isn’t foreshadowed early and carefully, and nothing in the laid-out causes and motivations behind it that doesn’t ring completely true.

Right from the start there’s something of an alpha tug-of-war between them. Nancy is clearly the dominant one in the initial trio, and the last to fully accept Sarah into the coven. She’s prickly and skeptical of her, like a pit bull marking her territory or a feral cat that has scented something strange. Even in their very first conversation about Manon, Nancy’s enthusiasm about the subject is riddled with overt mockery at Sarah’s hesitancy over the situation (which isn’t surprising since she articulates his presence as if he’s a type of drug).

Later in the film, the dynamic takes on a darker tone. Nancy is clearly resentful when her cohorts start seeing the fruits of their spell-casting, and there are a lot of red flags thrown up when it comes to her state of mind (after Sarah divulges the details of her suicide attempt, Nancy diverts the conversation into a soft warning about the power of snakes; during a summoning ritual, Nancy cries: “hear me!” before she’s corrected into saying “hear us!”)

And that she’s jealous of Sarah is undeniable. Though it’s a matter of debate as to how cognizant she was of Sarah’s true abilities, the situation with Chris brings to the fore Nancy’s feelings of rage and inadequacy, especially once it’s revealed that she and he have a sexual history together.

It’s easy to piece together the off-screen fallout between them: we’ve seen in his initial dealings with Sarah that he has zero respect for women, and something similar clearly went down between him and Nancy (one of the first red flags that Chris throws up is that he calls Nancy “a massive slut”). What triggers her into the frenetic rage that ends with him being flung out a window is his accusation that she’s “jealous”, which of course, is exactly what she is.

That Nancy becomes a green-eyed monster over a boy would in any other story completely enrage me. On paper, it’s everything I hate about misogynistic female-centric movies: that women are always pitted against each other, that they squabble over the affections of an indifferent male, that they can’t help but be catty and bitchy with each other (this was the entire dynamic between Isabella and Kate over on the BBC’s Robin Hood, played completely straight with no self-awareness whatsoever) and yet in this context... it works.

Firstly because as adult viewers we can see what these teenage girls cannot (and the obvious inference the film is making): that this douchebag is absolutely not worth it, and secondly because he’s just a device in the shaping of the real issue: the power dynamics between Sarah and Nancy. He’s just the symbolic bone they’re fighting over, and whereas Sarah feels guilt and shame over brainwashing him, Nancy clearly doesn’t give a shit that she chucks him out a two-storey window.  

No trope is bad if it’s handled well, and this is. By the time the group has fractured, Nancy is full-on projecting her own self-loathing onto Sarah. Telling her to kill herself, insisting that she’s weak and pathetic, throwing all her insecurities into her face – it’s a riveting depiction of a deeply messed-up psychology, one in which Nancy is simultaneously projecting and trying to destroy the one person that she knows is a threat to her own power.

And after seeing what her life was like before magic changed it, how can we blame her – either for the crazed power-trip or her deadly attempts to cling to it?

It’s a character study that doesn’t care about the implications of what it’s presenting to its female audience, one that plays into a lot of damaging and unpleasant tropes – and yet because it’s uninhibited enough to just follow the character to her natural conclusion, however tragic, we end up with a story that’s satisfying despite (or perhaps because of) the subversion of its initial girl-power angle.

Basically, it’s just nice to watch a film that’s focused on being a story without getting distracted or preoccupied by how an audience is going to react to it. I can’t help but feel that if The Craft was made today, it would involve Bonnie and Rochelle coming to their senses and standing with Sarah against Nancy, salvaging the remnants of their friendship. Sarah would have realized that Chris was a complete asshole who didn’t deserve any of her tears and wasn’t (as she put it) “a good guy underneath it all” (no he wasn’t, honey) or else they would have tried to humanize him in an attempt to justify his general shittiness. 

And they certainly would have concocted a kinder ending for Nancy, one that didn’t go into full “crazy bitch is so crazy that she has to be strapped to a bed” mode.

And in doing all that, they would have ended up with a weaker, less engaging story. Precisely like how the sequel, in trying to right some of these perceived wrongs of the original, manages to do. But we’ll get to that in due course...

***

Despite my love for it, The Craft is not a perfect film by any means. There are plenty of issues with its pacing, tone, the midpoint genre-shift into horror, and the characterization (or lack thereof) of Rochelle and Bonnie in the third act.

The shift from the girls’ “us against the world” solidarity to “we’re gonna turn on the weak link and devour her” has all the subtlety of a beaten-up car screeching in agony when you force it to change gears, and it’s not even clear exactly why or how Sarah gets cold feet over the whole thing. Is it when she sees Nancy walking on water? When the sharks wash up on the beach? This seems to spook her enough to be the turning point for her, though the two scenes that follow – Sarah voicing her concerns in the car and Sarah being assaulted by Chris – feel like they’re in the wrong order.

Surely the attempted sexual assault should have been what spurs Sarah to try and pull the break on the whole situation, but instead it feels like it’s the scene at the beach – though it’s unclear why all this happens, why Sarah is uneasy about it, and it’s mostly down to the soundtrack (which ain’t subtle) to inform the audience that we’re heading into the horror half of the tale.

Neither is it clear why Bonnie and Rochelle turn on Sarah the way they do. A deleted scene depicts Sarah trying to coax them into helping her do a binding spell on their cohort, only for Nancy to discover what they’re up to and pull rank, threatening to return Bonnie’s scars and pulling the race card with Rochelle.

Presumably this was meant to be a bridge between the car scene and the assault scene, but it’s still uncertain where it was meant to be placed in the original narrative, and doesn’t really get into the mindset of the girls. As it stands, Bonnie and Rochelle go from decent enough people to cackling, mindless minions for no reason at all. They’re completely dropped in the third act, with no closure to their arcs whatsoever.

It’s a shame, because their betrayal of Sarah is the one that really hurts; that they would be so weak and/or browbeaten as to side with Nancy over her, especially after establishing what seemed like genuine bonds of friendship. Even their last scene, in which they bitchily whisper to each other about how Sarah “probably doesn’t have any powers either”, makes it clear that this friendship is well and truly over.

***

But the film’s biggest bedbug (and the one that’s aged the least well) is that idea that the girls using magic to solve their problems is meant to be bad; that it’s ultimately a cautionary tale of not meddling in forces they don’t understand; that drawing on power to win petty victories at high school is completely out of line.

But looking at what the girls actually do in the film, and who they do it to... I mean, it’s impossibly easy to build a compelling defense of what they get up to. That the takeaway is meant to be that “what you put out will come back to you times three” makes little sense when the worst they can be accused of doing is fighting back. They’re being punished for what exactly?

After losing her scars, Bonnie apparently becomes self-centred and narcissistic, something that’s not only understandable (as she says herself: “I spent a big chunk of my life being a monster, now that I'm not, I'm having a good time”) but is only really dramatized in a single scene in which she makes a somewhat vulgar comment at a passer-by, telling him he has a nice ass. Oh the horror.

Nancy’s case is a little more ambiguous, as it involves the death of her stepfather so that she and her mother receive his life insurance, and yet the guy was clearly an abusive drunk, who hits his wife and tries to look under Nancy’s dressing gown. His death allows them to move out of a trailer park and into a decent apartment, so it’s difficult to summon up much sympathy for his (magically induced?) fatal heart attack.

As for Sarah, she puts a love spell on Chris that renders him a mindless lovestruck puppy, humiliating him in front of his friends, stripping away his consent, and eventually turning him against her when he tries to date-rape her in his car. This is the standard progression of any “love spell gone awry” story (Buffy the Vampire Slayer did one, as did the first season of Charmed: the enchanted person eventually turns violent) so no surprises there, though it’s played much darker in this context.

And sure, even though Nancy murdering Chris was a bad thing (I suppose) there’s absolutely no moment in which we’re given a reason to care about this guy. He’s horrible from start to finish. He spreads nasty rumours about Sarah because she refuses to sleep with him and clearly treated Nancy like a disposable sex object. Good riddance.

But the most egregious example is Rochelle pushing back against Laura Lizzie, a racist blonde girl who bullies her relentlessly – up to and including full-blown racial slurs.

Rochelle and Sarah cast a spell against her, during which Rochelle asks: “what do you think will happen to her?” Sarah replies (and this part is important): “if she leaves you alone, nothing will happen to her.” But because bullies are incapable of leaving their prey alone, it’s only a matter of time before Laura starts to lose her hair.

As it happens, I’m 100% behind this karmic retribution. It’s completely what she deserves. I don’t feel a grain of sympathy. If I had the ability to take away the hair of racist people everywhere, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second.

Yet incredibly, there’s a scene in which Rochelle comes across Laura in the high school showers, her hair now coming out in large clumps (she moans: “what did I do to deserve this?” – are you kidding, bitch??) and Rochelle clearly has a moment of pity and guilt.

Even stranger, when Laura is next seen, she makes what seems like a genuinely remorseful gesture of apology towards Rochelle. So as far as I’m concerned, this particular spell did exactly what it was meant to: punished a racist bully and made her rethink her life. Happy ending! Rochelle has no reason whatsoever to feel bad.

So the lesson that the film is trying to impart is... what exactly? That Rochelle should have just sat back and endured racial abuse? That that’s a better course of action than taking matters into your own hands and defending yourself? And what makes it even weirder is her slide with Bonnie into antagonism towards Sarah. She can feel bad about what she did to a racist bully, but not the friend that helped her dispense justice in the first place?

Apparently so, as Sarah defends herself against Rochelle and Bonnie in the third act by making them see the “consequences” of their former spells: Bonnie sees her face covered in burn scars, and Rochelle sees that most of her hair has fallen out. Granted, this was a delaying tactic by Sarah, an illusion that she creates and not a direct consequence of their spell-casting, but there’s still an ugly suggestion at play: that this is the natural outcome of their actions and decision-making – and of course, they certainly think that’s the reason behind it, as they comment on the threefold law while staring at their reflections in horror.

That the threefold law is used to advocate a passive response to misogyny and racism is not something I can get behind. It’s a tedious finger-wagging moral lesson that doesn’t provide any third option as to how these girls could have better dealt with racism, painful scarring, abject poverty and a lowlife creep.

This particular aspect of the film hasn’t aged well, and it’s something that was clearly on the mind of Zoe Lister-Jones when she wrote/directed The Craft Legacy...

Which brings us to the long-awaited sequel (and yes, despite first glances, it is a sequel) to the original film.

Lily Schechner moves to a small New England town so that she and her mother Helen (Michelle Monaghan!) can move in with the latter’s new boyfriend Adam Harrison (David Duchovny!) and his three sons Jacob, Isaiah and Abe (don’t worry, you don’t have to remember their names). Her first day at school is fairly mortifying: her period leaks through her jeans and is pointed out to the entire class by Timmy, the school jerkass.

Still, three girls lend her assistance in the matter: Frankie, Tabby and Lourdes, who are practicing witches and grow particularly interested in Lily after she telekinetically throws Timmy into a row of lockers. Realizing that she’s their fourth, they invite her to join their coven and soon the quartet are playing all the greatest hits of the original: casting spells, sharing clothes and doing “light as a feather, stiff as a board.”

But while all the witchcraft shenanigans are going on, Lily is missing some of the red flags at home: namely that her would-be stepfather is a bit of a creep. He writes books with titles like “The Hallowed Masculine” and leads all-male bonding sessions that stress power and leadership. When a spell on Timmy leads him to become more sensitive and self-aware, the nurturing positive-energy-vibes of our adolescent witches start to clash with the alpha-male posturing of the bros.

Well, kinda. There are about fifty subplots at work in this film, and none of them are given much of a chance to expand organically, leading to a cluttered and half-baked final product. I will give the film credit for one thing, and that’s – despite borrowing several images and motifs from the original – it doesn’t repeat itself.

Some of the bigger thematic conceits in the film (the ethical implications of putting someone under a spell, the nature of female friendship and its relationship to magic) are presented in such a way that it’s clear some thought has been put into updating them for a contemporary audience, but any attempt to course-correct the more questionable elements in the original are either handled badly, completely ignored, or wrapped up in a painfully earnest attempt to apply a “woke” veneer to the proceedings.

Let’s be clear here: in the purest sense of the word, being woke is a good thing. Much like the terms “politically correct” and “progressive,” it is a neutral term used to mean a specific thing (dictionary definition: “avoiding language and actions that insult, exclude or harm people who are already experiencing disadvantage and discrimination”) but one that has been seized by bad-faith news pundits and twisted into a phrase that implies over-the-top censorship and bleeding-heart hand-wringing.

Or something. The pushback mostly comes from aging right-wing boomers who are annoyed that nobody finds their racist jokes funny anymore.

But that’s in real life. When storytellers become overly concerned with being woke – that is, in becoming preoccupied with how a text is going to be received, in parsing through the layers of the real or imagined implications it might carry, in avoiding anything that might be deemed “problematic”, in box-checking buzzwords and sanding off any sharp (and potentially offensive) edges, instead of just trusting the emotional narrative beats of the story, it leads to... well, a bad story. 

Stories shouldn't exist in a contextual void, but neither should passion and drama be dilated into something trite and overly safe – as on some bizarre occasions, it actually makes things worse.

My go-to example of this phenomena is the character of Princess Jasmine in Disney’s live-action Aladdin. The animated Jasmine might not be the protagonist of the film, but she has agency, narrative importance, and a vivid personality. The live-action version “fixes” this by giving their Jasmine a feminist power ballad about how she won’t go speechless, which is sung entirely within her own imagination, leads to an outburst in the throne room that achieves nothing, and ends with her being immediately silenced after Jafar casts a spell on her.

She's given a few lines of dialogue about how she wants to become a girl-boss and the next Sultan, even though she never interacts with any of her people or demonstrates leadership or administrative skills in any capacity. She is given a handmaiden, because on a superficial level Disney knows that female friendships are important (ignoring the fact that animated Jasmine is motivated by her profound loneliness) but they don’t pass the Bechdel Test and said handmaiden eventually quits to get married.

It’s like... in trying to fix problems that never actually existed in the first place, they somehow made this character worse in their attempts to better her. How is that even possible?

It’s a question that can also be applied to The Craft Legacy. Having pinpointed the fact that the original quartet of girls eventually turn on one another as a big problem that has to be rectified, the sequel decides that the real enemy of adolescent girls is the demonic underbelly of the patriarchy and that their protagonists must stick together in order to defeat it...

On paper, that premise is fine. Good, even. I can easily see how toxic masculinity and white patriarchy is the natural thematic enemy of women and witchcraft, and that a film which pits these two forces against each other has a lot of promise (heck, on a superficial level, that’s what I wanted the Star Wars sequels to be).

But of course, that’s not the point of the original. The horror and tragedy of The Craft is that the girls tear themselves apart on their own. Her own desire for power, her own bad choices, are what lead Nancy to that hospital bed. Men – refreshingly – have nothing to do with their story and development (and don’t talk to me about Chris, I’ll do that myself in just a second).

But this sequel contains a line of dialogue spoken by the villain, in which he says: “that’s the thing about girls with power – they’re always too weak not to use it against each other.” It’s impossible not to read that as a direct dig at the original film’s quartet of girls, and a mentality that’s rejected by the new coven when they pull a Changed My Mind Kid and work together to defeat said villain.

(The context is that they’ve already cast a binding spell over Lily’s power, making her vulnerable to attack, only to reverse the spell when they realize her situation, which again seems to be a critique of Sarah using the same spell on Nancy in the original, even though by that point she was the major threat).

And again, that’s not the point of the first film. Even taking into account the questionable “do unto others” lesson, I can appreciate the reality that women – especially teenage girls – are capable of destruction: upon themselves, upon each other, and upon the world. The Craft Legacy is terrified of this possibility, and doesn’t go within a million miles of the idea that its protagonists could have darkness or cruelty or madness within them.

As a result, they’re boring characters in a toothless, bloodless story that has nothing to say beyond bland girl-power platitudes. It's not enough to throw in current talking-points when you don't bother to make them an intrinsic part of the narrative.

(At one point a female bully takes a verbal swipe at them, and their only rejoinder is to sarcastically point out that it’s: “super cool to shame other girls.” First of all, bullies don’t give a fuck about the political implications of their bullying. That’s why they’re bullies. Second of all, I much preferred it when the last film just made the bitch’s hair fall out).

Then there’s the more substantial charge that’s been levelled at the original film since its release, regarding the treatment of Rochelle. The justified criticism is that her arc is based solely on her race, and that she’s the least-developed of the four leads (and the way Rachel True has been left out of the film's publicity in the years since has been widely discussed and documented).

There’s real ground for critique here, from the fact that Rochelle is the only protagonist whose family never appears on-screen, to the weird idea that she’s meant to feel bad that a racist’s hair falls out, to the lack of understandable motivation she gets in the third act.

The sequel had plenty opportunity to right this wrong, and... they don’t. In fact, they make it worse. This next generation of witches include a Black girl and a Latino trans-girl, but – incredibly – they get less development than Rochelle. Even put together they get less development than Rochelle. How is that even possible?

In playing a game of “two truths and a lie,” Tabby states: “I wish I had more Black friends”, a comment that’s never elaborated on and goes nowhere, and Lourdes has only a few throwaway lines regarding her transition. They are as one-dimensional as they are bland, and ultimately exist only to support the white protagonist. We never see their parents or get a sense of their lives at home. I honestly had to look up their names to write this review.

It’s a gob-smacking oversight for a film that clearly thinks it’s “improving” the content and tone of the original. Rochelle’s storyline, as flawed and incomplete as it is, ultimately has more to say about the treatment of Black women and the symbolic importance of Black hair than anything in The Craft Legacy.

And then of course, there’s the sequel’s treatment of their Chris Hooker analogy. In what is clearly the most blatant spin on the content of the original film, the Legacy girls are faced with a male jock called Timmy whose bullying of them is awash in misogyny and homophobic comments. They retaliate by breaking into his room and casting a spell to make him a better person, and soon enough he’s sticking up for them in class, voicing woke talking points (they literally refer to him as “woke Timmy”) and generally becoming Mr Sensitive.

It’s during that game of “two truths and a lie” that he reveals he’s bisexual, in a scene that’s so poignant and heart-breakingly performed by actor Nicholas Galitzine that he immediately steals the movie out from under the girls. In one fell swoop, he feels like the main character with the most profound development and interesting backstory.

He dies off-screen a few scenes later.

Clearly it’s meant to demonstrate that “bullies are people too” and that they’re “made, not born” in a way that was never afforded to Chris. Furthermore, there’s the kernel of an interesting moral conundrum at work here: is it right to force someone to become a better person? Does the spell the girls place on him make him a different guy, or just reveal his true self? Is it okay to magically help someone without their consent? It’s a genuinely interesting scenario.

(Likewise, demonstrating that a closeted teenage boy can be just as harmed by toxic masculinity as girls are, is the one example of the film actually integrating its talking-points into the actual story).

But it's a scenario that the film isn’t remotely interested in exploring, and with Timmy’s death, rendered moot almost as quickly as it’s introduced. After Lily fears her spell-work on Timmy is what led to his supposed suicide, the girls bind their powers out of remorse, feeling that they’re responsible for having taken away his agency and therefore causing his death.

But then it turns out to be not their fault in any way, shape or form – David Duchovny murdered him because he wasn’t his idea of what a man should be. Moving on!

Again, it’s infuriating because it feels like a repudiation of the original film, whilst completely missing the point of what the original film was actually doing (and doing so in a far cleverer and more nuanced way).

On the surface, sure – what Sarah and Nancy did to Chris was terrible. The former put a love spell on him, and the latter gave him the magical equivalent of date-rape drugs before throwing him out a window. What the sequel does with their Chris is certainly kinder: Lily doesn’t want him to fall in love with her, just to make him a nicer person, and the girls are remorseful while believing that their magic is responsible for his death.

But here’s the rub: after making Timmy such a poignant and developed character, by humanizing him to the point where he overshadows the girls in the way he’s struggling against the expectations placed upon him, by exploring his sexuality and revealing that his boorish behaviour was a front to hide his insecurities... they kill him off-screen. It’s so abrupt that it’s jarring, and almost feels like they realized he’d suddenly become more interesting than the ostensible leads and had to remove him, pronto.

In contrast to this, Chris isn’t that important. The cleverest idea surrounding Chris is that we the audience can see what Sarah and Nancy – two hormone-ridden teenage girls – cannot: that this loathsome douchebag ain’t worth their time. Within the context of the story, he’s not a character but a narrative device, and after his death he disappears from the story. There are no grieving parents, no memorial service, and barely a passing mention of him.

We don’t feel anything at his death because on a Doylist level he exists merely to explore the (far more interesting) psychology and motivations and dynamic between Sarah and Nancy. He’s less a character than he is a tool to supplement the story of the girls.

The sequel’s treatment of Timmy might be kinder and more insightful, but it only serves to make the story about him and not the female protagonists. In trying to turn what was originally just a storytelling device into a fully-fledged character, they disrupt the focus and flow of the story – and to add insult to injury, Timmy’s murder is solved when his spirit communicates the details of his death to the coven through the use of an oujia board. For a story so hell-bent on celebrating girl-power, they’re not even given the dignity of figuring things out for themselves.

***

So as a sequel to The Craft, it’s bad. But as a standalone film, it’s also bad.

Instead of the slow build-up to increasingly overt manifestations of power that the first film worked with (first the balanced pencil, then the butterflies, then the miraculous wish-granting) the likes of Lily, Frankie, Tabby and Lourde are immediately freezing time, talking telepathically, and applying magical glitter make-up. In the original film, “light as a feather, stiff as a board” is given the space and time it needs to play out suspensefully – here it’s just part of a throwaway montage.

The original film also treated its magical elements as something to be respected; an actual religion that the girls followed with the (the admittedly made-up) Manon as a deity they worshiped with veneration and respect. Here the wielding of magic is treated as a fun game to be played with at sleepovers, with the girls squealing, hand-flapping and pulling stupid faces at each other every time they do something magical. It plays out with all the weight and reverence of a prolonged Charmed episode, or The Babysitter’s Club Super Special: The Babysitters Learn Witchcraft!

There was something in the idea of David Duchovny being the embodiment of toxic masculinity and the secret villain of the piece, but we get virtually nothing on the actual situation. Was... he a warlock? Born or self-made? Did he deliberately seduce Helen because he sensed power in her daughter? How did he murder Timmy?

The way in which his evil is foreshadowed and ousted is bizarre – a series of weird dreams followed by a badly rendered shapeshift. Plus Helen has no reaction whatsoever to the fact that she was being manipulated by a guy who was attempting to kill her child the whole time. Or was she under a spell for the duration of the film? It’s just weird.

In fact, the whole film is filled with all sorts of weird moments that go nowhere. After Lily bleeds through her jeans, she finds them cleaned and folded on her bed, and asks her mother if she did it, something Helen denies. So... who cleaned them then? Why was this mystery important enough to warrant a whole scene about it?

Even if you manage to tell Duchovny’s sons apart (I sure couldn’t) there are a ton of questions left unanswered. Did they know their father was a warlock? Are they warlocks themselves? An early scene in which Lily has a seemingly genuine conversation with the youngest goes absolutely nowhere, and neither does another in which the middle one is revealed to be a sleepwalker. It provides a Jump Scare and is never revisited again.

And then... the coup de grace. Thanks to spoilers, I knew going in that Fairuza Balk would turn up, but I had no idea in what capacity. Due to the single screen-shot I’d seen of her, I was toying with the possibility that she would be the film’s Chessmaster, pulling the strings of the girls and manipulating them into doing more and more morally dubious things until she was finally outed as the Big Bad. But no, that would have been way too cool.

Instead, Lily learns during the course of the film that she was adopted, and in the very final scene she makes her way to a mental hospital where she finally meets her biological mother: Nancy. Fairuza Balk gets one line (“can I help you?”) and is on screen for exactly one second. The second directly before the credits roll.

Wow. Just wow. We don’t learn how she got pregnant, why she gave up her child, or what she’s been doing in the interim (according to Word of God she was raped, which somehow makes me more furious than any of the other mealy-mouthed drivel that the rest of this movie dishes up, but that tidbit isn't in the film itself, so I can’t really comment). And I mean, it’s not like fans of the original film might be remotely interested in how all that went down, right? All that build-up, for absolutely nothing.

***

It comes to this: it’s not that I disagree with any of the issues that The Craft Legacy touches upon, no matter how fleetingly. Yes, toxic masculinity is bad. So is slut-shaming, transphobia and taking away someone’s consent. I too wish that Tabby had more Black friends.

But unfortunately, box-checking the issue-of-the-day doesn’t make for a good story. It’s superficial to the point of insulting. The pain and messiness of the broken female friendship in The Craft is more real and therefore more valuable than The Craft Legacy’s empty screed on girl power. The sequel decides that because the original ended with Sarah’s friends turning on her, its message was that female friendship is doomed to fail.

Not that losing your friends is a thing that happens, that it hurts like hell, but that – like Sarah – you will survive it. Which frankly, is a far likelier scenario that a real teenage girl will have to face than “your potential stepfather is a warlock who runs a masculinity crisis cult.”

And honestly, what holds more horror: that your mum’s boyfriend will turn out to be a predator, or that your friends will? That feminine betrayal is a thousand times more harrowing than anything David Duchovny does, the loss of the safety and sanctuary of female friendship infinitely more heart-breaking, and that’s precisely where the tragedy of The Craft stems from. 

But hey, who am I do say what does and doesn’t have value? Perhaps there’s someone out there who prefers the superficial rah-rah girl-power and obligatory diversity of the sequel to the problematic-ridden but honest material of the first. Not everyone wants to be confronted with the realities of life in their entertainment. (I'm honestly not trying to be facetious here; some viewers may prefer Legacy, and that's okay).

But to me it highlights an important lesson: it’s not the content of the story, it’s whether or not said story is told well. Technically one of these movies is about how the desire for power destroys a female friendship, while the other is that female friendship is the only power that can destroy evil. On paper, it’s obvious which one sounds better.

But that is to ignore the context and quality of each film. The Craft had a lot of seemingly problematic elements, but doesn’t grow preoccupied with anything other than how the story should play out. The Craft Legacy softens its edges, makes everything more palatable, and is a bad story as a result. It’s a PSA disguised as a movie, and this is never more apparent than in each film’s use of the iconic line: “we are the weirdoes, mister.”

In the original, a concerned bus driver utters a warning to the girls as they disembark out in the middle of nowhere: “you girls watch out for those weirdoes.” Nancy turns around with a contemptuously snort, peers at him over her sunglasses, and says: “we are the weirdos, mister.” It’s so many things at once: a proud declaration of their freakish nature, an unsettling look at how Nancy sees herself, an amusing way of unnerving a paternalistic busybody, and an unremarked-upon feminist statement. They’re the ones predators should look out for, as Chris and Laura will eventually discover for themselves.

In the sequel, the line comes after David Duchovny has been outed as the villain, who advances on the girls with the implicit threat: “you girls oughta be careful in the woods at night; a lotta weirdos out here,” to which Tabby replies: “we are the weirdos, mister” (in this context the emphasis should be on the “we” instead of the “are”, but since it’s just a meaningless echo of the first movie, it doesn’t happen).

One is a fun yet unsettling line replete with layers of meaning, the other is a bland comeback to an easy setup. Thanks, I hate it.

Miscellaneous Observations:

So I’ve always found it somewhat amusing that though followers of other organized religions may take offense if they’re misrepresented on-screen, there are never any serious outcries from Wiccan communities when fictional witches are portrayed as having actual mystical powers (like telekinesis or mind-reading) even when they’re shown as using relatively accurate depictions of modern witchcraft practices. Just an observation.

Also amusing is that in watching the original film, the girls still feel older than me, despite me not having attended high school for many years now, whereas those of The Craft Legacy look like actual, literal children. It’s funny because technically they’re all meant to be the same age at the time of their respective stories, though I suppose the original cast were playing considerably younger than they were in real life.

One thing that became crystal-clear within the first three seconds of the sequel, is that a Craft movie without that sweet sweet nineties grunge aesthetic, is no Craft movie at all.

What was up with the homeless guy with the snake? He comes to Sarah’s house with said snake, and then stalks her later on the street, shouting that he had a dream about her, before he’s unceremoniously killed off. You could argue it’s deliberately ambiguous, and like Chris he serves a specific purpose – to unsettle Sarah, which is more than I can say for the random stuff in Legacy – but I have this half-baked theory that he’s another former devotee of Manon who likewise abused his power and was cut loose after becoming too much of a wildcard.

There are some great bit characters throughout The Craft: Nancy’s flighty mother, the P.E. teacher who notices Rochelle’s improved diving, the lawyer who gives a nonplussed shrug when Nancy and her mother start celebrating their financial windfall, and the nurse at the end with her sardonic: "I gave ya somethin' honey.... but, it ain't da powuh!"

And Brenda Strong! I totally forgot she was in this (best known to genre-television watchers as Lillian Luthor on Supergirl and Mary Lynette in Desperate Housewives). You have to feel for that doctor – after her experimental treatment “cured” Bonnie, she probably wasted her entire career trying to duplicate results that were actually achieved by magic.

I watched the film with Andrew Fleming’s director’s commentary, and there are some interesting insights about how each of the girls are connected to a specific element and that nature often impinges upon many of the shots. He also gets a funny dig in at Charmed when he points out that Aaron Spelling swiped the use of “How Soon is Now” for that show’s theme song.

In hindsight, there’s also some fascinating subtext in the first ceremony performed by the girls, when they ask Manon for things that they clearly have no intention of following through on: Rochelle asks to not hate those that hate her, Sarah asks to love herself more, and Bonnie asks to feel as beautiful on the outside as she does on the inside. Those are very noble and selfless goals... and clearly not something they’re remotely interested in observing. The first chance they get, they start moving the goalposts on those particular wishes.

And for the longest time I thought that Nancy asked for “money” as opposed to “all the power Manon”. To be honest, I like my initial interpretation: it’s a base desire to receive an influx of wealth that leads directly to what she receives from Manon (her stepfather’s life insurance) which is not only the only wish that results in someone’s death, but which clearly doesn’t make her very happy even after she’s relocated to a flashy apartment.

Speaking of, what kind of deity is Manon anyway? Obviously not an omniscient one, as he gifts Nancy with supernatural powers and then rips them away from her after judging that she’s misused them. And why would he beach all those sharks? What are they for? What was Nancy meant to do with them? A little foresight would have gone a long way here, Manon.

The film never really gets into the nitty-gritty of how exactly all this works – did Manon give each girl their abilities? Was Sarah’s power hers all along? Did Nancy sense Sarah was the stronger one, which lead to her hostility?

It doesn’t really matter when focusing on the human drama, though from a storytelling perspective it’s a bit of a cheat that Sarah is a “natural witch” who inherited her gifts from her mother, and in an earlier version of the script it’s made explicit that the other girls are unconsciously leeching off her innate abilities. That’s not the case in the final cut, though it’s clear that their powers are heightened considerably once Sarah joins the coven, and that her power is stronger than theirs.

Another deleted scene has Sarah cast a spell to heal Bonnie’s scarring, which would have been a deliberate contrast to Nancy attempting the same thing by the fireplace – and also explains Bonnie’s dialogue in the scene outside the school in which she explicitly credits Sarah for her miraculous recovery.

As such, there’s a certain irony that Sarah is the least interesting of the quartet, partly because she’s the audience surrogate (which requires a certain amount of projectable-upon blandness) and partly because Robin Tunney is a fairly guarded actress. Not a bad actress, but the others burst with a vitality and passion that she simply doesn’t have.

Not helping is that Sarah’s backstory is largely withheld. We know her mother died in childbirth and she once tried to kill herself, but none of this is dramatized beyond a brief flashback to her slitting her wrists, in stark contrast to the raw on-screen depictions of what her cohorts face: Bonnie’s painful medical treatment, the horrific racism Rochelle has to deal with, the grim reality of Nancy’s abusive white trash family...

And of course, she’s up against Fairuza Balk, who steals the film right out from under everybody. She had no chance! Tunney is the protagonist, but Balk is inarguably the star.

Once more for posterity...

I believe it was a possibility at one stage, but The Craft would have made a fantastic television series. With an extended runtime we could have seen more of the power-play between Sarah and Nancy, each trying to win the others to her side, more information on Sarah’s deceased mother and what it meant that she was a natural witch, a greater understanding of Bonnie and Rochelle, and plenty of other opportunities for more in-depth subplots and episodic stories.

In proof that female writers are not always the answer to writing accurate depictions of female problems (see also, Black Widow’s baffling treatment of how the Red Room choses to send its teenage agents into premature menopause by performing hysterectomies instead of using simpler and just as effective birth control procedures) one of the earliest scenes in The Craft Legacy has Lily start her period and bleed through her jeans onto the floor, leading to inevitable mockery and disgust by her classmates.

Um... am I seriously meant to believe that she started her period and didn’t notice? That it was heavy enough to drip onto the floor without her realizing? That a flow that heavy didn’t result in terrible cramps days before it started? If it had been her first period, maybe I could have gone with it, but a subsequent conversation with her mother pretty much confirms it wasn’t.

Menstruation just does not work this way, guys. I can’t help but feel the scene is there because the film considers itself daring enough to approach this taboo subject – even if it does it in the dumbest way possible.

At another point, Lily gets in trouble with David Duchovny because she defends herself from Timmy by telekinetically sending him flying against some lockers. Given that Duchovny isn’t meant to know she’s into magic (and Lily doesn’t even know it herself at this point) it’s baffling that she doesn’t do what any half-witted teenage girl would do in this moment, and leverage Duchovny’s toxic masculinity against him, pointing out that she weighs less than a pound and clearly doesn’t have the body strength to send a much bigger guy flying across the hall.

***

One of the two films, one is a beautiful lie, in which girls are supportive, mums are cool, and friendship is forever. The second is the ugly truth, in which teenage girls can be just as destructive and monstrous as their male counterparts – though that said, the original Craft, both now and at the time of its release, was very much received as a case of Do Not Do This Cool Thing.

Interest in witchcraft peaked after the release of this film, with fans attracted to the wild highs those girls had together and not the fact that its promise of power and female solidarity was eventually subverted, deconstructed, and ultimately torn apart. Yet it has left a permanent impression in the cultural zeitgeist, which is more than we can say for the sequel, which has already been memory-holed by fandom at large despite only coming out last year. I’m going to gather up my lessons learned, and carry on...