The High School Power Dynamics of ‘The Craft’
The Craft is one of those films, alongside Scream, The Blair Witch Project and a handful of others, that will forever be marked among the Mount Rushmore of ’90s horror movies — and for good reason. It is a witty, fun, crowd pleasing film. It’s a horror movie that is regularly watched by people who don’t watch horror movies because, even though it was written and directed by men, it very much became a teen girl rage anthem, and it did that very quickly after its release. The Craft exists at a perfect crossroads between wish fulfillment and an honest depiction of teenage friendships, how thin they are and how quickly they can take a turn for the worst. Your close-knit circle of best friends one week might become a pack of hyenas circling you the next, and it happens so quickly, you don’t even know what caused it. The Craft, naturally, deals with that on a much greater, deadlier scale, given that this group of friends also happens to be a makeshift coven of witches.
The Craft follows Sarah, a girl who moves to Los Angeles and struggles to make friends at her new Catholic high school. Sarah has always been able to do things she could not explain, little things like predicting the weather or making a pencil stand on its point. But three outcasts recognize her power for what it is. These girls (Nancy, Rochelle, and Bonnie) are labeled witches by their peers, but their peers are right. They’re not simply Wiccans, they do spells, real magic, and they want Sarah to be their fourth. The story has a primal simplicity as each girl uses magic to get what they want, right the wrongs in their lives, and ultimately pay the price for it.
The movie works because of that simplicity, because it keeps the focus centered entirely on the characters. The Craft very earnestly builds, deconstructs, and then demolishes the relationships between the four girls. It does for teen girls and witches what The Lost Boys did for teen boys and vampires, but with an even tighter focus on the characters and their relationships with one another.
From the beginning, Nancy has her guard up around Sarah, and that never really goes away. Sarah is the new girl who threatens the balance of the group, and she’s all about preaching balance. But it’s clear that what Nancy’s really afraid of is being overlooked, even forgotten. Of course Sarah’s a threat to Nancy’s role as “leader” of their little makeshift coven, but I think that comes from the fear of being a face in the crowd among her own friends. Ever character motivation in The Craft is explicitly and efficiently established and that’s particularly true of Nancy. Her “villain” arc over the course of the film reads like a classic hunger for power, and in many ways it is. But that’s because she feels completely powerless.
There’s a bit of Only Child Syndrome to Nancy’s relationship with Sarah, which feels at times much more like a competitive sibling rivalry than an actual friendship. Nancy’s both jealous of and immediately threatened by the reveal that Sarah is a natural witch. While the other girls are learning spells to bend reality to their will as much or as little as they can, Sarah’s been doing it her whole life, often without even realizing that she’s doing it. That power does not come naturally to Nancy, and she is intimidated by it. She wants that power for herself. She wants to be Sarah .
That’s made especially clear in Nancy’s first major villain moment, when she confronts Sarah’s stalker, Chris, who nearly assaulted Sarah, and whom she had sex with once upon a time. She turns into Sarah, takes on her appearance and pretends to be her in order to get close to him, to have him, and it’s deeply disturbing given what she knows he did, and that she’s basically answering an assault with an assault. But it has nothing to do with him.
In fact, there’s a deeply sapphic undertone to it, which again is not perfect given the predatory nature of the scene, but fascinating nonetheless. She wants to be in Sarah’s skin, to experience the world as Sarah, experience sex as Sarah, to have what she has and feel what Sarah feels. To know Sarah’s body, as intimately as she can. And that goes beyond the physical, because Sarah is in general a much more even-tempered, in-control, and in some ways “complete” person, which are all the things that Nancy wants to be.
Nothing is more illuminating for the characterization of the individual girls than the spell they perform to take some control over their own lives. In a way, this is simply high school survival, a counter-attack on the things that have forced them into their little back corner of the classroom in the first place. For Bonnie and Rochelle, these things are much more external.
Bonnie’s insecurity and shyness stem from the fact that most of her body is covered in burn scars. Eliminating those scars turns her into a much more outgoing and free-spirited person. Rochelle, meanwhile, is dealing with intense racism from a rich white girl clique led by a full-blown white supremacist. Honestly, Rochelle causing her racist bully’s hair to fall out feels pretty justified, and it doesn’t change her personality or go to her head, it just makes her feel guilty for disfiguring someone who hates her. Hers is a bit of an outlier in that regard.
For both Sarah and Nancy, that spell highlights something internal. Sarah performs a love spell to make Chris want her, and it goes badly immediately, he wants her every single second, to the point that he nearly assaults her. She does this because she misses those first few days of school where the popular boy liked her and wanted her, and she wants that feeling back, while also being humiliated by his rejection and wanting to get even. That’s fascinating to me. Sarah is our protagonist, but out of all the things they wish to change in their lives in that one spell, Sarah’s is the most outwardly screwed up.
That’s the key to The Craft. We have a clearly marked hero and villain, in a general sense. But no character is entirely good and no character is entirely evil. They fluctuate, they change, they are teenagers with deep-rooted insecurities that inform almost every single decision they make. Once Nancy has power, almost godlike power to the point that she’s actually walking on waters, the other girls turn on Sarah in an instant.
That’s high school. You go where the power is because you don’t want to feel, or even look, powerless. Sarah did it herself. The trauma driving both Sarah and Nancy is deeply internalized, in a way it isn’t for Bonnie and Rochelle. Nancy’s home life is disastrous, she lives in a trailer, she’s yelled at and belittled and barely even gets a moment to think by herself. Sarah made an attempt on her life after her mother died, and that deeply personal trauma is something that Nancy exploits toward the end of the movie. It might be exaggerated, befitting a horror movie, but take the magic out of it and that still happens. Something you confided in a close friend in high school, no matter how personal, becomes a weapon the moment they turn on you.
But that betrayal only works because the girls were actually friends. There are so many excellent moments, particularly the “light as a feather, stiff as a board” scene, that are just devoted to the girls hanging out and being teenagers together. Even if they’re doing magic, they’re laughing, they’re teasing each other and cracking jokes. It just earnestly feels like a bunch of high school girls hanging out.
It goes deeper than that, too. There’s a little moment most people don’t even notice, which might be my favorite moment of the whole movie, where Nancy is tending to Bonnie’s scars, and Bonnie’s muttering to herself, and there’s such an intense pain and heartache in Nancy’s eyes in that moment, which has nothing to do with herself. It’s the moment for me that completely establishes who Nancy is as a character. As much as she hungers to be all-powerful because her entire life is a mess, as much as she wants to control everything, she loves these girls. She absolutely loves them. But she would rather kill them than have them abandon her, and that informs every decision she makes in the third act.
The Craft is high school. It is messy. It can be fun, funny and simply a great time one moment and it can be downright cruel the next and you never really know from moment-to-moment which one you’re going to get. It’s an incredibly teenage and incredibly human story about vulnerability, insecurity, anxiety and all of the things you would change about yourself and the world around you in those years of your life you feel the most powerless. The film is an icon of its era, and there’s a reason it has remained so beloved for this long. It’s magic.
