The Craft (1996)

Every instinct I have is telling me to call this a "fun movie about teenage witches", but it is absolutely not. There is very little about this movie that is fun, unless you really enjoy teenage girls tormenting each other relentlessly. In fact, this has all of the things that worry me in a movie: active racism, rape and vivid self harm imagery. I'm torn, because it genuinely is a pretty interesting movie and I love teenage witches. The Craft: it's complicated.

The cast of this movie is amazing. It's a veritable who's who of people-who-were-in-90s-high-school-movies! From Skeet Ulrich to Neve Campbell and Robin Tunney and Breckin Meyer who apparently spent a solid twenty years playing high school boys, there's no denying that everyone in this was having fun and almost solidly kicking it out of the park. There are definitely some stunted performances, and most of the time I chalked that up to the high school setting, but everyone is either playing it cool or hamming it up and that makes for most of the urge to call this movie a good time. 

I don't need to tell you the plot. I already told you it was about teenage witches, so you should be able to immediately work it out: they get greedy with magic, things go bad. Tunney plays the main character who brings all of her witch energy to town from San Francisco and after some social missteps, joins the local high school coven. As you do. United, their power magnifies. Witches. 

There are so many hijinks in The Craft, and I was very much into that. What I was not into? We really have to talk about all of that stuff I mentioned. We have to talk about the - thankfully explicitly villainous - character played by a young Christine Taylor who outright says "I don't like negroids" to Rachel True's character Rochelle, the only named black character in the movie. You guys. We get that she's a villain. We understood with her comments about Rochelle's hair and her heckling at Rochelle's diving. We might not have needed the line "I don't like negroids". I know it was 1996, but it wasn't the fifties. And then to think that later on her character is supposed to become somewhat sympathetic because the coven's actions against her go to far? The spell they place causes her character to lose her hair and it's played like some big emotional torture. I understand the value of hair to an individual, but I'm not exactly concerned about the vanity of a character with supernatural alopecia when she's played as an active horrible venomous racist. Nah. 

I watch a lot of horror movies, so I'm used to encountering troubling content warning-free. I brace myself constantly for sexual violence and self-harm, two personal hot bed issues. I can handle them, but I know when they'll hit me harder than usual. There's a reason I am careful as to when I watch episodes of The Handmaid's Tale (review to come). The Craft just goes for it, all out. I am here for the addressing of mental health issues, but not really keen on them being played for drama. A lot of the handling of Tunney's character's history of self harm was a little questionable to me, particularly when other character's used it as tools to harass her. I know the difference between cruelty of character and cruelty of media, but there's a real danger to having any characters yell those kind of devaluing comments at a character who explicitly struggles with self-harm. The attempted rape was handled with comparative ease, feeling authentically upsetting and horrifying but not played for the sake of it. It made sense as the logical outcomes of the magic-gone-wrong.

A lot of The Craft just reminded me that teenagers are cruel and that witch movies are hit-and-miss and that, oh my god, special effects were still bad in the 90s. I'm glad that a lot of the genuinely awful things about the movie were balanced by some satisfying plot arcs and plenty of over-the-top silliness. The entire end sequence made next to no logical sense and bar the re-introduction of the self-harm plot, it was so much fun.

Rating: 5/10 - Tread carefully. The 90s air of everything took a bit of the edge off, enough to make the movie average out to an okay experience for just doing your thing and watching an okay movie, but there's definitely some ugly bits lurking.