The Craft 1996

[7.3/10] If there’s a good mix for a Halloween movie, it’s a healthy dose of camp paired with something deeper going on under the hood. The Craft offers both. On one level, it’s an over-the-top movie about high school girls developing magic powers and using them for both petty revenge and outsized mayhem. But on another level, it’s a story about processing trauma and one’s status as a misfit, where empowerment helps to overcome both states but leads to its own set of problems.

The movie works on each, and while it’s not a homerun, it’s enough fun in its high school as hell hijinks and piercing enough in its reflections on family dysfunction and loss to rise above its 1990s tropiness. Don’t be fooled, this is a film that works better as a dark but goofy lark than as a serious examination of the issues it raises (via index and middle fingers), but those topics give The Craft just enough ballast to be more than the standard dose of cinematic teenage drama.

Part of what makes it work, beyond that balance between the absurd and the real, is that it’s a surprisingly tidy little fable. Young misfits wish that they had the power to better their lives and push past their slights and hardships. Against all odds, they get it, and use it to right what they view as the wrongs in their lives. But there’s a “Be careful what you wish for” edge to it all, as their fixes go too far. That leads to the turn, where only Sarah, our protagonist, realizes that, while the rest of her coven embraces the despotic power of their new magical energy, forcing a confrontation and reckoning.

In that, The Craft plays like a cinematic-length episode of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits. It’s as much an aesop’s fable on human nature and power’s effect on it as it is a traditional witch tale or high school drama. Despite the supernatural bent and the messy hangout vibe that suffuses the film in places, there’s an unexpected amount of clarity to the film’s progression, where the girls’ hurdles are set up and knocked down, only for dissension in the ranks to emerge when Sarah in particular worries about where those knock-downs might lead.

But it’s that hangout vibe that gives the movie its charm. Even if the story were weaker, the tone less bonkers, and the subject matter less heavy, I suspect The Craft would have still earned itself a cult following for the dynamic between its four core characters. Sarah, Nancy, Bonnie, and Rochelle are not your typical highschool girls, but they’re not your typical outcasts either. The film captures that thin line between bonding and commiseration on the one hand and rivalry and recrimination on the other that infects teenage friendships.

It’s fun when they stay in to watch movies together or use magic to change their hair and eye color, and the sense of being in their counter-cultural, eventual power fantasy “circle” is inviting. At the same time, they decry one another as “bitch” and “slut”, envy each other’s powers, and ultimately turn on one another. It’s exaggerated and heightened given the witchy backdrop of the movie, but there’s a grain of truth to their interactions that adds heft to their jibes and eventually skirmishes.

Fairuza Balk excels at both sides of it. To be frank, most of the performances in The Craft play as pretty standard for the teen movie genre. None of them sinks to the level of bad, and the four leads together are able to sell a sense of camaraderie and conflict that fuels the film. But individually, they tend to feel like generic figures from a CW drama.

Balk, on the other hand, stands out as Nancy, the product of messed up home life who envies Sarah’s connection to Mamon, the divine energy of the universe, and aims to claim it for herself, whatever the cost. Only Balk seems to understand the twin poles of the film, unrelenting camp and psychological horror. She plays the messed up kid with problems deeper than she knows and the axe-crazy sorceress desperate to hold onto her power with equal aplomb. Her take on Nancy is the acting highlight of the film, and the only one in The Craft that both conveys the layers of her psyche and goes for broke in the film’s more outsized scenes.

Those scenes show creativity in the production design and cinematography. Make no mistake, there’s a fair amount of nineties cheese here with explosions superimposed over certain frames and some less-than-convincing CGI. At the same time, though, there’s creative cinematography, like the choice to focus on pierced fingers or tip-toe floating that conveys more subtle eeriness. Even in the bigger scenes, an array of vermin or lightning strikes uses the film’s effects budget for all it’s worth. Little of this is subtle exactly, but just an act of walking on water or quick cuts when driving through red lights can help unnerve the audience and communicate that something is wrong here long before it all erupts into a supernatural throwdown.

That final confrontation picks at something. Nancy donning Sarah’s face to seduce her boyfriend in the guise of protecting her reveals a low-simmering envy and resentment of the comparatively charmed life her friend and rival has lived. Her efforts to blame Sarah for all the death in her life, to persuade her to make good on a prior suicide attempt, is dark stuff for such a loopy film, tweaking notions of survivor’s guilt and self-hatred that have stayed with Sarah from her mother’s death in childbirth. And yet, in the end, it's her mother’s strength that empowers Sarah and gives her the confidence and gumption to neutralize her confederate turned betrayer.

It’s a lot for a movie that spends ample time showing our heroes flirting with boys, navigating the usual high school drama, and doing magic-fueled makeovers. But it’s also what makes The Craft a little more than just another fantasy film focused on teenagers. There’s a weight to the ideas the movie grazes in its friendships, friction, and power-struggles. At the same time, though, it’s an unassumingly goofy, over the top outing that revels in its gleeful campiness, in tandem with its dark and serious elements, rather than in lieu of them.