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.
