Men Ruin Everything, Including 'The Craft: Legacy'

By T. Bloom

This isn’t a formal bit of film reviewing! I’m writing it for free. It currently costs big bucks to rent The Craft: Legacy online, so it would seem extra punitive to roll out a review as part of JUDGEMENT’s paid content. So, please consider this post just a catalog of my consecutive and cumulative reactions to the film, jotted down before, during, and after watching it. There are spoilers! These are basically road flares, steering you away from unseen wreckage.

I love The Craft, which came out the year before I graduated high school. I will never turn down an opportunity to rewatch it, and long ago embraced the parts that are cheesy or off-putting. (This, I imagine, is how many of my oldest friends feel about me.)

So I was never NOT gonna watch this “sequel,” and I was even open to allowing for drastic revisions on the core purpose of the original, due to The Times and the way they are perpetually A-Changin’.

The new film’s trailer gave douche chills (an unfortunate term I have carefully chosen for its deadly accuracy) to many The Craft acolytes, but I was among those desperate to keep an open mind. Yes, digital glitter and Harry-Potter-esque magickal stunts belong nowhere near a movie about “real life” witchcraft, especially one that boasts having “three different occult consultants” on set. But we also know how trailers can suck, and be terribly misleading! And again, as one who is entering their Crone years, I have to do my best to peer at this film through the eyes of a Maiden, with her needs and sensibilities in mind. Because it’s not for me: it was made for all the up-and-coming glitter witches out there.

Or was it? Because from the opening scene, everything related to the production feels leaden and clumsy, like a ‘90s Nickelodeon movie trying to sell you on the world-changing impact of “kid power.” There’s even an Alex Mack quality to the special effects.

In the filmmakers’ haste to create a vehicle that’s empowering to young women, they forgot to amass a mantle of any real philosophical power for these young performers and characters to take on. Which, it’s worth pointing out, is the very essence of witchcraft in the first place! And is something that the original movie, in its bastardized way, somehow managed to accomplish, which is why all of the young actresses who starred in it are still frequently asked about it, decades later. There was power in it, magickal or otherwise, that seemed real.

So from the opening scene when one of the girls (I won’t assign blame) says to the others, “Y’all witches ready?” you already get this uncanny sense of youth culture being exploited to sell something. But then it turns out they were given nothing to sell: no insights into the actual tradition of witchcraft, no horror, no romance, no unique insights into teen suffering, virtually no drama at all. There’s hardly even a moral lesson, except the too-often-repeated mom mantra “Your difference is your power.”

But hold on a second, I promised to post my consecutive reactions, as jotted down in a little red notebook while viewing. Don’t worry, there aren’t many of them! And I refuse to think too hard about any of it, unless someone’s paying me.

The movie’s most tragic and ironic flaw is that the story revolves around men. The heroine and her mom have moved in with mom’s new beau, played by David Duchovny — the most famous person in the cast, who has more lines than some of the girls in the coven. And David has three sons, all of whom are characters in this film, and the sons have male friends who are also characters. Early on I thought, “Wow, they sure are introducing a lot of guys. Am I expected to remember all these names?” Disappointingly, yes.

Dave’s character is a kind of Jordan Peterson-esque “male empowerment” counselor of some repute, which it turns out features as the main plot of this film, since he is also the leader of some kind of secret fraternal society with magickal aspirations of its own.

This should have been a separate movie, which I could have opted not to see! Especially since it’s territory recently covered by Black Christmas, also a Blumhouse release, which I must say suffered many of the same problems as The Craft: Legacy.

One of the established grievances of the original The Craft is that the character played by Rachel True — the coven’s only Black member — was given short shrift onscreen compared to her counterparts. The other girls all got wisps of backstory; we saw their homes, their parents, and these insights into their lives helped illustrate why they might reach (or overreach) for power. But the home life of True’s character was never shown, apparently some of her scenes were cut from the film. Despite a memorable performance as one of the film’s four leads, True has revealed how she was frequently snubbed offscreen as well, throughout the promotion of the film.

This is an avowed part of The Craft lore by now, and the “sequel” appears willing to repay that debt by upping the ante in terms of diversity, including a young trans witch in the foursome as well as a Black witch.

But can you even believe this shit? The Craft: Legacy entirely skips the part where we see any of these characters in their respective homes, enduring their own unique torments. We never meet their parents, or hear about what their life is like. We barely get to know them individually at all.

But you know who we do get to know? The male character Timmy, a bully whom they bewitch as a form of revenge, awakening his “highest self.” We get to view his home life, his bedroom. We get to hear newly-woke Timmy’s secrets, when he opens up to the girls about having hooked up with another boy — a tearful moment in which he tells the girls… wait for it… “It’s hard for dudes.”

No, really. “It’s hard for dudes.” This line is presented with zero irony. In the ‘90s, an earnest moment like this would have been followed with a zap of that infamous Gen X snark, reminding the audience to save their sympathy for those whose needs aren’t already over-represented.

But here we are in 2020, watching the successor to a flawed feminist revenge movie — a followup that cedes even less screen time to its minority protagonists than the original, but still finds out plenty of room to showcase male pain, reminding young women that “It’s hard for dudes.” Which then derails the story entirely to set up a showdown between the coven and this mystical male order — as if anyone had ever watched the original and asked “…But what are the men up to??”

Give me a fucking break. Honestly, the filmmakers should be ashamed of themselves for selling girls a story that pretends to be about sisterhood and inclusivity, but still yielding this much space to the awesome power of patriarchy and the unmet needs of masculinity.

I wanted to turn it off right then, but at this point I’d already endured all of the windup toward some kind of cliched supernatural horror movie catharsis, and felt owed my due. Reader, there is none! There are no scares. There is no catharsis. There’s not even any witchcraft!

To that point, some of the original film’s most iconic moments related to the young witches’ exploration of their growing power — a series of scenes which also helped reveal their dynamic as a clique (and later, as partners in crime). You know, explaining what a “glamour” is, or playing “light as a feather, stiff as a board.” Basically expanding upon the witchy lore from teen slumber parties by asking: what if this shit really worked?

But they don’t even get the slumber party stuff right in this movie. I promise you’ll die a little when you watch the girls reading a message spelled out by a Ouija board, noting how the letters are indicated by the point of its planchette, instead of being framed by its ocular opening. Had no one on-set ever actually played with one? (Yes, I know there are historical forms of the oracle that utilize a solid planchette with no viewing hole, but if you’ve got one, why not use it?)

In the new version, all those scenes are compressed into a kind of training montage. And despite the supposed intervention of actual witchcraft specialists, the girls’ powers hew so closely to lore about the Four Elements (which are presented in even more simplistic and superficial terms than you’d get from Wikipedia) that at times this feels like a Captain Planet movie, especially in the final battle with the girls glowing in the color of their respective Elemental auras. The Fire girl throws a fireball! The Earth girl makes an earthquake happen! With a little imagination, the woke version of Timmy could have joined the squad as “Heart,” and Duchovny could have played Captain Planet himself, whom the Planeteers have to rise up and defeat in a twist ending when it’s revealed that Cap’s mission has been corrupted by secret liberal industrialist aims.

See? I just wrote a better movie in one sentence.

But the most bewildering instance of The Craft: Legacy misunderstanding its own mission in order to keep up with The Times is when the movie recreates the famous “binding spell” scene from the original. Except these witches, realizing they’ve caused unintended harm with their magick, bind themselves. It smacks very much of speaking to “cancel culture,” like these witches are woke enough to realize they’re the problem, so they preemptively self-cancel to demonstrate social responsibility.

Who the fuck writes a fantasy about teen witch empowerment in which the girls conclude on their own that they have too much power, and voluntarily renounce it? And yes, they do un-renounce almost immediately afterward, to help save their exiled sister when she falls into the clutches of a powerful warlock. So what lesson, if any, was learned?

The original film’s witchcraft was mostly bogus, but it did gesture broadly toward the mysteries that could be explored via your local occult bookshop, ideally with the input of an educated elder, and inspired a sense of reverence for historical traditions and the fruits of dedicated practice, of radical self-knowledge. Nancy (played by Fairuza Balk) was presented as the ultimate example of what not to do. Her hubris and lack of introspection as a damaged teen were exhilarating to behold, in a way that reminded all “good” kids of why we envied as well as feared the “bad” kids, but these were ultimately (and rightly) her undoing. More than any of the other girls, Nancy needed help, but also couldn’t bring herself to accept any. There was real meat there for a troubled kid to sink their fangs into.

This version isn’t even finished enough to hold side by side with the original. I mean that literally: it feels incomplete, with important scenes and details missing, and the included scenes running on pointlessly for way too long. All this snake foreshadowing, and then nothing happens with snakes! David Duchovny wants to steal the protagonist’s powers… but why, since it’s revealed that he already has powers of his own? WTF does he need hers for?? Even the aims and origins of his little phallus cult, which hogs up so much screen time, go completely unexamined. And what do the witches learn as a result of this painfully stupid showdown, and how does it change them individually, or as a coven?

It’s never revealed. Nobody cares.

Honestly, after a few seasons of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina — a show which I appreciated but didn’t particularly enjoy — this feels charmless, artless, and surprisingly out of step with the times. One of these high-school aged girls considers herself “a Twilight stan,” and pines for Robert Pattinson. When was this written??

The closest thing I can compare The Craft: Legacy to is 1999’s The Rage: Carrie 2 — another sequel nobody asked for, which dangerously retreads the original subject matter, even bringing back a beloved cast member. But The Rage is an edgier and more entertaining movie by leaps and bounds, with actual blood and grit and charm. So, it’s possible to get almost everything wrong and still do better than this, I swear.

The young actresses in The Craft: Legacy really do their best, and are responsible for the film’s few moments of true levity, but are weighed down by the pressure to contribute Girl Power as a form of raw energy that filmmakers can gin into a cheaply-manufactured product. There’s a vampiric quality to pointing a camera at young women and directing them to act like their young, authentically powerful selves (including their affirmed Blackness and/or transness) and slurping up all that youthful exuberance, only to puke it out into the world in an unrefined form that invites waves of negative criticism and unfair comparison.

These girls have to show their faces and receive that judgment, while the filmmakers get to stay hidden. Girls, you deserved so much better!

And so did Fairuza Balk, by the way, who shows up in a much-foreshadowed final scene. These few seconds are so anticlimactic and clumsily filmed. Light Fairuza right! She’s paid her dues, and then some. Is one clear shot of her face asking too much?

I’m honestly still mad about this movie, especially since I put so much effort into keeping an open mind for the sake of connecting with Kids These Days. Hello, you kids! If you’re out there, and you’re reading this, please know there are true forms of empowerment that scratch so much deeper than the surface, which can transform you in unimaginable ways. You may never be able to conjure a CGI fireball at your fingertips, or physically shapeshift into your fursona, but you actually can embody radical change. You can operate beyond the constraints of the physical world, beyond gender, beyond economic status, beyond everything crafted to suppress and exploit the energy of the young.

Fair warning, though: to get there, you will probably have to read a book. We, the Crones, will be happy to recommend some good ones… and none of them will emphasize how hard it is for dudes.

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