Tags
andrew fleming, breckin meyer, Christine Taylor, Fairuza Balk, Neve Campbell, rachel true, Robin Tunney, Skeet Ulrich, the craft, witch, witchcraft
There are films you watch… and there are films that possess you at the exact wrong (or right) moment in your life.
For many of us stumbling through adolescence in the ‘90s — awkward, angry, desperate to belong — The Craft didn’t just land. It latched on.
Thirty years later, it still hums with that same dangerous energy — a neon-lit spell cast somewhere between locker room humiliation and full-blown occult wish fulfilment.
And for a generation of cinephiles-in-the-making, it warped the brain in all the best ways.
Teen Angst as Occult Ritual
Watching The Craft now feels like rifling through a diary you don’t remember writing — every page soaked in hormones, rage, insecurity, and the intoxicating allure of power.
This is high school as battleground. Identity as ritual. Pain as currency.
Director Andrew Fleming taps into something primal here: the idea that adolescence itself is a kind of witchcraft. You’re changing, mutating, testing the edges of who you are — and the world is either going to bend… or break you.
So why not bend it first?
The Coven That Defined a Generation
Let’s not pretend this film works without its coven — because it absolutely lives and dies on the chemistry and chaos of its four leads.
Robin Tunney’s Sarah is the audience surrogate — wide-eyed, searching, the gateway into something darker. But she’s also the film’s quiet centre, grounding the chaos with vulnerability.
Then there’s Fairuza Balk — and let’s be honest, this is her film. As Nancy, she doesn’t just chew the scenery; she devours it whole and spits out something feral. It’s one of the great unhinged performances of ‘90s horror, equal parts tragic and terrifying.
Neve Campbell brings a simmering fragility, her Bonnie caught between empowerment and self-erasure, while Rachel True delivers one of the film’s most quietly devastating arcs — her Rochelle navigating race, beauty, and revenge in ways that still sting today.
Together, they aren’t just characters.
They’re archetypes.
They’re avatars.
They’re every outsider who ever wanted to flip the script.
Power, Consequence, and the Illusion of Control
Here’s where The Craft gets under your skin.
For all its gothic posturing and spell-casting theatrics, this isn’t a film about magic — not really. It’s about power. Who has it. Who doesn’t. And what happens when the powerless suddenly get a taste.
The film doesn’t shy away from the consequences. Wishes curdle. Revenge mutates. Empowerment slips into obsession.
And Nancy — glorious, tragic Nancy — becomes the embodiment of that descent. A warning wrapped in eyeliner and chaos.
Aesthetic as Identity
The film’s visual language is pure ‘90s alt-culture: Catholic school uniforms weaponised into rebellion, bedrooms turned into shrines, candles and chaos layered over suburban decay.
It’s stylised, sure — but it’s also aspirational.
You didn’t just watch The Craft.
You wanted to be it.
Or at the very least, steal its wardrobe and soundtrack.
To revisit The Craft now is to recognise how unhinged it really is — tonally volatile, narratively messy, occasionally absurd… and all the better for it.
This is horror in spirit: raw, emotional, excessive, and completely uninterested in playing it safe. It swings big, sometimes misses, but when it hits — it hits like a lightning bolt to the adolescent psyche.
It doesn’t ask for subtlety.
It demands feeling.
Legacy of the Weird
Thirty years on, The Craft endures not because it’s perfect, but because it’s formative.
It spoke to the misfits. The angry. The invisible.
It handed them power — even if only for 100 minutes — and said:
“You’re not crazy. The world is.”
And maybe that’s why it still resonates. Because beneath the spells and spectacle, it understands something essential:
Growing up is its own kind of horror story.
The Prognosis:
A messy, magnetic, deeply formative slice of ‘90s horror that turns teenage alienation into something mythic, dangerous, and unforgettable.
We are still the weirdos, mister.
- Saul Muerte
Surgeons of Horror 