CRITIC ESSAY
THE CRAFT 1996
57%
Directed by Andrew Fleming
Written by Peter Filardi and Andrew Fleming
Starring Robin Tunney, Fairuza Balk, Neve Campbell, Rachel True, Skeet Ulrich, Christine Taylor, Breckin Meyer
The nineties’ teen movies were movies of very specific teens. More expressly: of very specific teen girls. Rich, pouty, selfish, draped in barely-there designer clothes, and parented from a distance by fifty-somethings with shared perma-tans and martini habits. If these teen girls were burdened by anything, it was their overwhelming popularity and abundance of hair. Clueless, released into cinemas in the autumn of 1995, exemplified this more than any other film of the ilk and of the era. But just seven months later came a movie that completely upended cinematic teen tropes. And more than just simply toying with the form, it tangled with the specific type of teen girl in movies that nineties audiences had come to know. That film was The Craft.
The blonde narcissists of The Craft aren’t the lead characters; they’re the enemies of the four girls at the heart of the film. And our protagonists are more than just teenage girls; they’re witches: a name, an identity historically given to women who exist outside of society’s rules and norms. Here it’s a title reclaimed by Nancy (Fairuza Balk), Bonnie (Neve Campbell), Rochelle (Rachel True), and Sarah (Robin Tunney).
What draws them together initially is their status as outsiders, as freaks (“we are the weirdos, mister,” says Nancy to a friendly bus driver). And these outsiders aren’t desperate to be inside, to be the same. The slow-motion scene in which they walk through the school—which would, in any other movie, signpost a successful mediocre makeover—is instead sending a clear message: we’re not like you and we love it. It’s blatant, splashy, unrepentant. Their difference worn with a snarl and an arched eyebrow.
The friendship between the four girls is authentic and relatable—the warmth, insecurity, and volatility flows between them fast and all at once. They pass around liquor, smoke cigarettes, trade barbed comments. They reveal everything to each other. “When things were worst for me was before I tried to kill myself,” confesses Sarah to Nancy. “I used to hallucinate things. I’d close my eyes and just see snakes and bugs everywhere.” It’s information that Nancy ultimately uses against Sarah in the movie’s finale.
The film is as ferociously honest in its depiction of the dying days of female friendships as it is in capturing the hazy, yellow days of their birth. These aren’t perfect girls trying to score perfect grades and keep the perfect quarterback boyfriend. The Craft shows the racism, poverty, abuse, body issues, and mental illness that they battle through. They’re imperfect girls trying in so many respects just to simply survive: survive themselves, each other, and the rest of the world. Not least, the men of their world.
We see the rampant misogyny that boxes them in tight, that brutalizes them. A misogyny that fuels young, white, privileged men, shown by fellow student Mitt (Breckin Meyer), who calls Sarah “that snail trail.” The film precisely tracks how this toxicity brews and boils into slut-shaming, gas-lighting, and sexual assault.
The response to this—a revolutionary one, in fact—is a reclamation of female power by any and all means necessary. “Exorcise your rights” stated the trailer. It’s a declaration of intent furthered by the opening seconds of the film: Nancy, Bonnie, and Rochelle, in a circle, surrounded by Wiccan paraphernalia, chanting “Now is the time, now is the hour, ours is the magic, ours is the power.”
When the four finally summon Manon, the creator of the universe, it’s a mighty and potent scene. And it makes one thing very clear: women, who are for their entire lives set up as competition and as adversaries, are actually more powerful together than apart. They can achieve significant things, great things, because they’re doing it without men, not in spite of it.
More controversially, The Craft presents a case for selfish power. Not for the greater good, but for an individual. To redress the balance—their balance. When Nancy attacks sexist jock Chris (Skeet Ulrich), she screams: “The only way you know how to treat women is to treat them like whores, when you’re the whore and that’s gonna stop.” She is screaming for every woman who’s been lied about, had their reputations smeared and set alight. Every woman who said no when all he chose to hear was yes. For while the four girls take revenge, it’s a revenge based—at least initially—in fairness and justice.
And yes, they get justice through magic, but a magic turbo-charged and given meaning and shape by rage. One that is articulated with clarity and intent. That comes from a specific place and has a precise, linear consequence. It’s justifiable and meaningful rage, but it’s not pretty or apologetic. When Nancy finally takes her revenge on Chris, the scene is one of horror, of ugliness: her head thrown back, neck bared in anger, as she shouts maniacally.
The Craft is not, admittedly, note-perfect; someone has to pay for the bloodshed and the loss of life, and that’s Nancy, who ends up strapped to a bed in a psychiatric ward rambling about her “powers.” But as the film ends, Sarah is still full of power, arguably more than she ever has been. More in control of it. Of her life. Still proud and defiant in her difference. And without a designer skirt or vodka martini in sight.
Rotten Tomatoes’ Critics Consensus The Craft’s campy magic often overrides the feminist message at its story’s core, but its appealing cast and postmodern perspective still cast a sporadic spell.