The Craft: Legacy (2020)

The Craft: Legacy arrives twenty-four years after its predecessor, which in the Blumhouse economy is less a reunion than an audit. Zoe Lister-Jones takes the director's chair and assembles a coven with evident care: a Black lead in Lovie Simone, a trans performer in Zoey Luna, and a quartet that reads as a deliberate demographic inventory of contemporary teenhood. This is casting as statement, executed with a straight face and a fair amount of craft. The film wants credit for the assembly, and it earns a portion of it.

The picture's progressive instincts run through the body as well as the cast. An early classroom scene stages Lily's first period as public humiliation, a moment of menstrual frankness that teen horror rarely permits itself. Timmy, the schoolyard antagonist, is later revealed as bisexual, having slept with another boy, before a love spell and a death sentence complicate his arc considerably. Lister-Jones has described the project as being about young women coming into their power, and the coven's elemental showdown against a patriarchal villain delivers that thesis through genre plumbing. Race exists here as a fact of casting, not a subject of inquiry. There is no environmental sermon, no indictment of capital, no neurodivergent character, and no attempt to rewrite the historical record.

The messaging stays inside the machinery, which keeps the sermonizing to a minimum. We get instead a teenage soap opera with a Ouija board, some levitation, and a third act that burns its villain alive with commendable efficiency. The result is earnest, occasionally clumsy, and never quite scary. It is the sort of film that believes in its own benevolence and asks us to believe in it too. I have seen worse. I have also seen the original.