Kids These Days Don't Join Covens Anymore
Hi all, and welcome to the first week of the 2025 So Desensitized Spooky Season Spooktacular! Posts will be out on Mondays and Fridays all the way up until Halloween, and all about witches! We’re starting off strong here with The Craft (1996), then The Blair Witch Project (1999) on Friday! Happy reading and stay spooky!
[This post’s charity is less of a charity and more a cool small business that should be supported! During filming of The Craft, star Fairuza Balk bout an occult store in LA called Panpipes that is still operational as the oldest occult store in America, so go check it out! https://panpipes.com/home ]
If you ask the average person to list peak nineties horror movies, or even just the best nineties movies with no genre specification, The Craft is most likely going to be one of the movies they mention. It’s got everything - ‘90s goth fashion, Neve Campbell, Fairuza Balk, trad goth makeup (to a degree), a banger soundtrack, Skeet Ulrich…the list goes on. But, while The Craft may, on the outside, seem like just a typical black babydoll dress teenage witch romp, anyone who has watched it and paid attention could tell you that there’s much more to it than that.
First, the characters. Your typical high school misfits, the “bitches of Eastwick” as a classmate calls them early on. However, it is pretty much immediately made clear that these are not typical girls, even for misfits. The protagonist, Sarah Bailey (Robin Tunney), has moved to Los Angeles following a suicide attempt that made her parents decide it was time for a change. Rochelle, played by Rachel True, seems to be the only Black student in the school, and is constantly bullied. Neve Campbell’s character, Bonnie, is covered in burn scars so bad she has to wear jackets all through the summer so that no one can see them, and undergoes constant treatment to have them removed. Nancy, played by Fairuza Balk, is stuck living in a run-down home that may or may not be a trailer, with her abusive father. And, of course, they’re witches.
Upon her arrival, the other three convince Sarah to join their coven, because it doesn’t work if you don’t have four witches, one for every corner. And she does, looking for friendship, and belonging. None of these girls really mean to do anyone any harm - they just want the control over their own lives that they have never been afforded. But, as expected they do end up doing harm. A lot of it. To themselves, to each other, and to the other kids at their school. While on the surface, The Craft seems like a crazy teen witch movie, it’s really about the corrupting force of power. It looks the watcher straight in the eyes and reminds them that all power corrupts, no matter who you were when you first came into it. And all the girls in the coven exemplify this in their own ways.
In a pivotal scene in the movie, they all go into the woods to pray to the fictional god Manon to get their powers and finally do what they want to do. Rochelle wishes to not hate those who hate her, Sarah wishes for love, and Bonnie wishes for beauty as though she’s not Neve Campbell. As they go, they all sip from a chalice of wine and blood. Until Nancy. Nancy wishes for power, all the power of Manon, and then drains the whole glass, literally getting drunk on power. And all of them do get what they want. Just, as is always the case, it’s not quite what they meant.
Sarah’s crush, Chris, becomes obsessed with her after a later spell, stalking her, waiting outside her house, obeying her every whim like a dog. Bonnie’s scars go away, and with them, all her personality, as she falls into the trap of popularity and the illusion of control. Lizzy, the girl who bullied Rochelle for her skin and hair, begins losing her hair in horrible amounts all of a sudden. And Nancy, in a moment of anger, kills her father with her powers, leaving her and her mother an insane amount of life insurance money. As the other girls begin to get scared of their own powers, Nancy doubles down, asking for more gifts for them, more power, more magic. And so the coven starts eating itself. Nancy kills Chris at a party after pretending to be Sarah. Sarah quits the coven and the others threaten to kill her. One of Nancy’s pleas ends in several whales beached on the shore. And all of this culminates in a horrifying battle at Sarah’s house, filled with hallucinations and screaming. The final scene of the film is of Nancy strapped to a bed in a mental hospital, scratches covering her face, laughing hysterically about flying. Bonnie and Rochelle are still friends, but seem to have lost their powers. Only Sarah is left, shunned, and more powerful than any of them ever were. It’s really very bleak.
But what does any of that mean? Is this movie really just about the dangers of female friendships and pitting women against each other? I don’t think so. What it’s really about is the dangers of power. Every girl but Sarah entered that first circle with some kind of ingenuity. Bonnie entered out of vanity, Rochelle out of anger, Nancy out of powerlust, and, arguably, all of them out of fear. Those who are afraid are those who want power. They think it will change something, make them better, get them out of whatever situation they’re in. And, probably it will. Which is why it’s so dangerous.
The thing that is so important to keep in mind while viewing this movie through a feminist lens, as it should be viewed, is that all of these girls are scared. That is why they’re doing this, searching for this power, and Nancy is the most scared of them all. She lives in a home that is not safe for her or her mother. It’s reasonable that she’d do whatever she could to get out of there, at whatever expense. What really makes this movie so terrifying is how drastically the characters change. With power they become shallow, willing to sacrifice their sisters for anything. What started as a dynamic, clever group of girls becomes toxic, twisting around and eating itself and being pitted against itself for no reason. Sure, there are plenty of things that could be called the reason, but really, power corrupts. And it corrupts to the point of making those who wield it unrecognizable as the people they once were.
A really interesting facet of this is Chris Hooker, played by Skeet Ulrich. A popular boy at their school, and Sarah’s crush, he has a love spell put on him, making him stalk Sarah, harass her, and follow her around school like a dog. On the surface, he could seem like the man getting in the way of this female friendship, this coven, but he’s a bit more than that. Just before the climax of the film, he is killed by Nancy at a party, where she makes herself look like Sarah to get him upstairs to hurt Sarah, then kill him. Chris is nothing more than a prop to her. He’s an example of what power can do when its user is pushed too far. He was never meant to be a person, just a pretty idol to look at from across the green. They were never meant to really interact, as evidenced by how extreme the spell makes his emotions. It’s an exaggeration of love, not the real thing. This incident is a breaking point for the coven. Sarah has already left, and now this line that Nancy has crossed just shows that the other girls are so under her spell, as it were, that they would literally let her get away with murder. It shows that Nancy has broken completely under this power, that she went into it with impure intentions and now can’t escape it, can’t get back to anything near who she used to be. She’s forgotten her fear, she’s forgotten herself, she’s forgotten that she got what she wanted, she’s forgotten that she’s even a person. She just wants to inflict pain, to feel that power coursing through her and believe that it’s hers, even as it eats her alive. Just as it eats Bonnie and Rochelle down to shallow, mean husks of what they once were. And so all of them buckle under this power, except for Sarah.
There are a lot of potential reasons that Sarah didn’t fall to the power and the fear the way the others did. Maybe it was because she really did enter that first circle with ‘perfect love and perfect trust’ in her heart where the others did not. Maybe it was because she never actually wanted that much power anyway, just friends, where those friends wanted her to add to their power. Maybe it was because she’d already been close to death and so had a connection to another world that the others didn’t. Probably, it’s a combination of those things. But whatever it is, that doesn’t mean the power didn’t change her.
At the end of the movie, Sarah stands in her driveway, talking to Bonnie and Rochelle, who have come to sort of apologize for making her hallucinate the death of her father, and mockingly ask if she might want to conjure the corners sometime. After she declines, they walk away muttering about how she probably doesn’t even have her powers anymore, and she creates a strong wind that makes them turn around. She warns them that they don’t want to end up like Nancy. Nancy, who is cut to in a hospital bed, crying and laughing at the same time. Nancy, who got so drunk on the power she had to make a better life for herself and her mother that she ruined it. Nancy, who still looks like she’d eat you alive and smile the whole time. Nancy, who was the most scared of all of them.
The Craft is about female friendships being places to belong as you are, just as much as they are violent, biting creatures, yes. It might even kind of be about pitting young women against each other in futile power struggles that they should really be helping each other through. But it’s mostly about power, and how it corrupts indiscriminately. Power doesn’t care who you are, or what spells you did, or how you entered the circle, or how you got the fourth member of your coven to join. It cares that it has you now. And it’s not letting go until your black babydoll dress has been torn to shreds, your maroon lipstick smeared, and every relationship you had essentially destroyed. Power is the great isolator, an abuser worse than Nancy’s father. So, as you watch The Craft this October, as you should, remember what to look for. Remember that it is scary, remember that it is a tragedy, and remember that real friends aren’t only friends with you because they needed you for something. And if you have any friends that you think might try to kill you if you stopped doing what they want, maybe reconsider that friendship.
Thanks for reading, all! Hope you enjoyed, and that I conveyed my point at least a little. Friday, October 10th, is The Blair Witch Project, and I hope all of you read it! Happy reading, and stay spooky! 🔮🐈⬛🔪🩸