InsaneJournal

Really, really belated.

It’s definitely one of the more misunderstood movies of its era. Serious occult practitioners deride it as inaccurate and contributing to a whole generation of “twitches” (teenage girls with a flawed view of the occult who get most of their information from this movie, “Charmed” and Silver Ravenwolf books). Religious conservatives hated the occult aspect, period (in spite of the fact that the filmmakers adhered strictly to the MPAA guidelines for a PG13 rating, they were still forced to rate it R because it showed teen girls using witchcraft) . And of course, tons of people who never even bothered to watch the movie jeer at it because it was about teenage girls, aimed at teenage girls, and popular with teenage girls, so we all know those are always stupid, right? Far from being a terrible movie for teenage girls, it's one every teen girl should probably watch and not just because it has at least two women, who talk to each other about something other than a man.

Not that “The Craft” is a stunning work of immortal genius but it was incredibly influential on a lot of future film and tv in the same genre, the show “Charmed” even took a song from the Craft soundtrack as their themesong. Buffy (the tv show) premiered a year after “The Craft” was released in theaters (and even though Buffy is a superior show to “Charmed” and superior to “The Craft” it still rips this movie off a couple of times). And of course, if you’re talking about influence, Libba Bray’s Gemma Doyle Trilogy/AGATB is clearly inspired by the movie. Some of the differences include the ending, the period and country and the part where they go to a Catholic school. But the personality makeup of the group is nearly the same. Bonnie has a chronic illness that will probably kill her, Sarah is the new girl who turns out to have more power than all the others combined, causes power struggles, has a dead mother and clueless father and is pursued by snake imagery. Fairuza Balk, “Nancy” might as well be a white trash Felicity with cheap black hair dye and a lot more murderous psychosis. She even brings some lesbian undertones to a couple of scenes (for example, staring longingly at the back of Bonnie’s head). The other big difference is that Felicity *is* the sort of blonde, rich, popular bully these girls would absolutely hate. So there’s a different twist. But the plot follows a lot of the same paths, even if they end up in different places and there's a lot of similar symbolism and similar moments, including the dark doings happening in a bright sunny atmosphere, the private school and the shallow juxtaposition of Christian symbolism and "subversive" alternate beliefs.

But what’s really weird is that the whole message of the movie seems to be exactly the opposite of what both twitches and religious conservatives *and* Serious Grownup Witches are under the impression the message is.

A reviewer when the movie came out called the summoning scene on the beach a “pep rally for the Prince of Darkness”, demonstrating clearly that this particular reviewer had paid no attention to the entire conversation earlier in the movie about how the force they were summoning was not the Devil (too bad I didn’t watch the movie when it first came out, because I actually believed the reviewer). Throughout the entire movie, the characters keep insisting that magic is neither good nor bad, it’s what you do with it, as also demonstrated by the way Nancy turns evil when she takes the force into herself and Sarah draws on the exact same force to defeat Nancy.

I got the impression “The Craft” was actually strongly discouraging the use of witchcraft, after all, witchcraft brings nothing but trouble for everyone in the story. It’s not comedy or romance, it’s horror and it seems weird that anyone who actually sat down and watched it would have trouble grasping that these girls are not supposed to be role models. At the end, they all lose their powers except Sarah, who has mostly chosen not to use hers anymore. They’ve also abandoned the Goth look, they’re probably even wearing bras again.

As Threeoranges pointed out in the comments to my thoughts on The Covenant, this is a movie that also addresses the issue of bullying among teen girls. Sarah’s new friends are unpopular misfits who get so angry about the way they’re being treated that they turn into bullies themselves, eventually turning on Sarah too. When she tries to stop them from continuing their cruel tricks on their classmates, they band together to attempt to murder her. You could think of it as a bloodier, goth, “Mean Girls” but more importantly, it was a Big Honking Warning. Teenagers have always been like this, of course, girls especially live in this partially secret world where they do horrifying things to each other but it all takes on a lot more significance if you were a teenager in the US in the 90s. And maybe if boys were encouraged to take girls entertainment seriously, some people could’ve learned something from this movie about how violent revenge against school bullies will never do anything but make you into the bully instead. Or if, you know, anyone had cottoned on to that message in the movie instead of going "Aaah! Witchcraft! Teen girls using witchcraft and expressing their need to control their own lives!"

As much as people make fun of this movie and the tons of silly twitches it attracted to the occult, I had some high school friends who’s lives were saved by witchcraft, which they got into through this movie. And yeah, those stupid Silver Ravenwolf books too. It doesn’t matter if I thought that was silly, and even they recognize that as pretty silly now, it’s better than the alternative.

So what ARE some of the Real Grownup Witches complaints?

1) The girls insistence that they need four people in the coven.

Real occult practitioners have insisted that you don’t need a specific number of witches to form a coven or to “raise power”. And they’re right, there is absolutely no consensus on how many people a coven needs. Conventional folk wisdom says three, scholars of medieval witchcraft used to claim medieval witches liked to have thirteen but really, whatever number you need is the number you need. But it is, however, nice to have an idea of how many people you want in your group and to control the level of quality you have you probably do want to be extremely selective. Having four people to represent the four elements is perfectly logical, not the least because it makes a ritual go more smoothly. It won’t necessarily give you more *power* but you can bet it’ll prevent fights over who does what and when that will confuse or hold up a ritual. You can be free to concentrate on the working itself, which should make raising power so much easier. Three to four is the perfect number, it’s enough to provide intimacy and trust and “rapport”, but also prevents the boredom that could result from working alone or with only one other person. The more people you have the more unmanageable it all becomes.

I also think that they really wanted a fourth girl to lend a feeling of legitimacy to their coven. Because if it’s just them, they’re just those weird girls but if a new person, a stranger, says “I’m a witch too” that means they didn’t make it up, it’s not just in their heads.

2) The movie ignores the “what goes around comes around” standard rule of Wicca.

Except it, you know, doesn’t. Everyone keeps telling them “don’t do that, because if you do it will backfire” , they ignore all sensible advice from more experienced witches and every spell they do comes back to them. Sarah’s spell to get revenge on a boy who lied about her makes him so besotted with her than he tries to rape her. Rochelle’s spell to make a bully lose all her hair doesn’t really backfire on Rochelle but it does go way further than she planned and leaves her horrified at what she’s done. Nancy kills her stepfather and thinks that the gigantic life insurance settlement her mother gets will fix everything but it turns out that you can never really escape being white trash and then she kinda….loses her mind and ends up in a padded cell, so…I’d say the Rule of Three is more than fulfilled here. Not that they were actually required to do so, because no where in the entire movie do they ever state that they are Wiccans.

3) They didn’t do their research.

Well- they did as much research as anyone ever does on these things. It was a lot more respectful than most movies or tv shows dealing with witchcraft prior to that. Somewhere I used to have a link to an interview with the woman who served as the technical consultant , but she claims the information she gave them didn’t ultimately sink in. But when it comes to magic, facts are awesome things to have but ritual doesn’t require facts, it only requires what *works*. And this is a fantasy story, so *of course* the characters are able to do things that most people could never manage in real life!

And actually, a lot of the stuff they did seemed straight out of your basic Basic Wicca book. Yeah, those books are often inaccurate or at least garbled and watered down but the writers obviously *thought* they’d done the best research they could.

What’s usually behind that curtain at the back in occult shops is the area where they do psychic readings. That’s really it. Sometimes it’s not even that, sometimes it’s just the office.

And they totally missed their chance to put up one of those amusing signs a lot of occult shops have, warning people about the Rede. You know, “try to steal from me and the universe will get you for it”. Because what kind of idiot tries to steal from a shop where the owner and half the customers are either psychic or have the ability to put curses on you? I know the owner of this particular shop just kinda lets them steal because she’s supposed to be seen as the wise, patient example of a truly mature witch but in reality, she’s also a small business owner in a niche market where establishing and maintaining a foothold is extremely difficult and if she makes a habit of just letting teenagers come in and steal from her very expensive stock, how long is she gonna really be in business? I mean, before one of those kids learns magic and blows up her store? Oh wait, most occult shop owners are terrible business people and instead of just letting the kids steal, they hire the young witches, who then hang around the shop goofing off with each other and ignoring the customers to the point of blocking displays during Midnight Madness and screwing up people’s discounts, among other things.