The Craft (1996)

The Craft arrives from 1996, a year when a studio could still sell teen witchcraft as a mood rather than a message. Andrew Fleming assembles four outcasts at a Los Angeles parochial school and lets them want things: beauty, power, revenge, a boy. The casting of Rachel True prompted a rewrite that made Rochelle black and gave her a racism subplot, a genuine act of inclusion by the standards of the decade. It is also, by True's own later account, a truncated one. Her family life and much of her material were cut, leaving the character's arc to resolve around a bald classmate and a curse. The gesture counts. The follow-through is thinner than the gesture.

The film's center of gravity is female friendship and female rage, and the reviews of the day noticed. Critics found a feminist message under the camp, and Fairuza Balk's Nancy remains a portrait of anger that refuses to apologize for itself. This is empowerment rendered as appetite, not as a platform. The girls pursue what they want and the wanting curdles. Nothing here is framed through the vocabulary that later decades would bring to such material, which keeps the picture from reading as a tract.

The last act does climb a pulpit. The karmic accounting arrives with storm effects and stern warnings about power abused, and at least one major critic called it a heavy-handed sermon. It is a sermon, though it preaches about hubris and consequence instead of any current event, which dates it as moralizing of an older, gentler strain. Elsewhere the ledger is clean: no romantic subtext between the quartet, no environmental anxiety, no economic indictment, no meditation on bodies as they are, no interest in how minds differ. What remains is a moody, mean-spirited, occasionally rousing piece of nineties commodity horror about four girls who get exactly what they ask for. We classify it accordingly, and we do so without pleasure.