The Craft – Halloween lessons from 1996

This post is part of our Childhood Trauma: Halloween Movies month-long special. Expect more movies, all month long, selected through the highly scientific method of, “We do what we want.”

Sweeney: On days where we have nothing to post, I sometimes consider posting our  most recent email exchanges. I frantically sent Lor approximately a dozen consecutive emails about how I was tired and couldn’t think of ANY movies that I had already seen and were about Halloween and also were awful and WOE IS ME I DON’T WANT TO BLOG TODAY. #bloggerproblems

Lorraine: I was at dinner while I got this stream of emails, by the way. I didn’t want to be that rude girl reading her emails at dinner so instead I was that weird girl who was looking at something under the table and cracking up. Wins all around.

Sweeney: I trolled the internet and found an awesomely ridiculous list from Seventeen Magazine of the 17 Best Halloween Movies, which is obviously bullshit because it begins with an unreleased Victoria Justice movie. This is pointless build-up to tell you that this post is about The Craft, which is on that list. I haven’t seen it in years, but I vaguely recall loving the shit out of this movie when I was 11, which has about a 92% accuracy rate for predicting Things That Are Awful.

(If your bullshit meter is as effective as my Middle Schoolers Like Things That Are Awful Scale, you probably guessed that The Craft was chosen for being an awful Halloween-relevant movie that I own and could locate.)

This movie’s legitimacy is confirmed by its Wikipedia page, which tells us that, “The Craft is the 8th highest grossing movie since 1980 dealing with the genre of witches.” In other words, it is 2legit2quit.

The movie begins with three girls pulled from a Hot Topic ad (one of whom is Neve Campbell Julia from Party of Five/Sidney from Scream). We go from the ominous Hot Topic Trio doing witch things around some candles to rainy, grungy shots of LA, and the introduction of our heroine, who has just moved there from San Francisco. She’s got a dead mom, which is somehow significant to her witch-ness. Or could make her a candidate for Disney princess. A homeless man shows up and offers her a snake. It’s as random as it sounds.

Lor: Is this homeless man offering a young girl his snake a metaphor for something? You know what I’m saying.

Sweeney: A+

Her name is Sarah, but all you need to know is that she’s good, so I shall call her Glinda the Good Witch.

She goes to Catholic school, where Hot Topic Trio roams the school being creepy. Nancy, head witch, and one of those film characters who will never fail to give me the fucking creeps, no matter how much I snark this movie, has a NOOSE in her locker. WUT? This is pre-Columbine, where schools ignored shit like this. Anyway, Nancy is like a high school Bellatrix Lestrange.

Lor: A+

Sweeney: The popular jock boy in school is Skeet Ulrich, who was also in Scream. He was a murdery-murderer who takes Neve Campbell’s virginity before trying to kill her. Both of these movies were released in the same year. They were a creepy dream team in 1996.

Anyway, Glinda is floating her pencil with her mind in class. Neve Campbell sees this and wants to be her friend, but Nancy is a bitch. At lunch, Chris (Skeet Ulrich) hits on Glinda and warns her about the Hot Topic Trio. While not a murderer, he is definitely a huge douche in this movie. (And Neve Campbell is a bit of a doormat in both films)

After school the trio flags Glinda down and they become insta-friends. They warn her about Chris being a mega-douche. Neve Campbell creepily notices Glinda’s giant suicide-attempt scar, asks her about it, and notes that she, “Even did it the right way.” UH. GIRL. WHAT? It’s a running theme around here to have fictional characters miss glaringly obvious red flags, but this would be another such moment.

Nancy Lestrange interjects, “Rock and roll!” and throws her arm around Glinda so that they can skip off into the sunset. Or to the shady strip mall that has the witchcraft store. Whatever.

The witch craft store is sort of like a cross between the Master’s Yankee Candle lair and The Magic Box. Neve Campbell informs Glinda that the trio is totes into magic and tries to get her to buy shit, so she can be their friend.

Glinda tries to go into the back, but is stopped by the owner of the shop, who tells her that the area guarded by a piece of fabric is a total no go zone. The shop owner lady has these annoying lavender sheer peasant sleeves that I can’t stand. She knows that Glinda’s pretty ring came from her mom, which is creepy. She likes Glinda because she’s not a shoplifter like her friends. Peasant Sleeves is supposed to be good, but her wardrobe is unacceptable.

On the street, the homeless man from before appears, and knows Glinda, and its creepy. As she’s running away, he gets hit by a car. The girls flee, and somehow Neve Campbell decides that they made this happen because they all thought it.

Lor: WTF? They were really all standing there thinking, “WELL I HOPE YOU GET RUN OVER BY A CAR!”

Sweeney: YEP! Awesome main characters, yeah?

Also this is somehow a good thing? They tell her about their really awesome witch-god-guy whose name I couldn’t understand well enough to write, even though they said it a dozen times.

They go off on their creepy little tangent about all the shit you can do with witch craft and if you’re super powerful you can invoke the spirit and make all your problems go away. THIS — not “invoking the spirit” but “making all your problems go away” — is a the thing that sets of the DANGER WILL ROBINSON alert in Glinda’s head.

Lor: The same alert that has been playing in all our heads since the Snake o’ Homeless Man.

Sweeney: The important part is before that, when Neve Campbell points out that they have always needed a fourth and Glinda is that fourth, so now they can be magical. It’s a thing.

Glinda ditches them to hang out on some rooftop with Chris. They make out, but when he invites her over, she declines. The next day he tells everyone that they had sex, and the trio is all, “We told you so,” which makes them friends again? He affirms his douche status by loudly insisting he doesn’t want to go out with her again.

We also meet the school’s resident Hot Mean Girl, played by Ben Stiller’s Wife! She laughs at Glinda from afar and taunts Rochelle (the third member of the trio, and the film’s lone black girl) in swim class. I’m glad I went to public school, because as an unpopular, self-conscious teenager, swim class would have made me cry.

Lor: In middle school PE we had swim-two-weeks. It was during that poorly supervised swim-two-weeks that I nearly drowned and was fished out of the water by an ESOL kid who kept yelling at me in Spanish, all without adult notice. Moral of the story: swim class is evil.

Sweeney: Ben Stiller’s Wife is not only mean, but racist. She says something about finding a pubic hair in her brush, and the punchline is it being one of Rochelle’s hairs. Just to make sure we get  the point, when Rochelle outright asks her why she’s a bitch, BSW answers, “Because I don’t like negroids.” WTF, 1996?

Lor: Oh, also, racism is evil.

Sweeney: Neve Campbell’s cloistered personality is explained by her burn-mark-covered body. She has a wicked painful surgery to have the marks removed. Meanwhile, Glinda is having horrifying suicide nightmares, and Nancy Lestrange has a really fucked up home life. She lives in a trailer and her mother and stepfather suck, which is supposed to explain why she’s a psychopath, I guess.

The next day, the now-quartet skips out in the middle of school to go stand in the park and perform a creepy ritual with knives. They all say ultra!poignant!things! about their respective Childhood Truamas (shit parents, dead parents, racism, and uhh, scars). Actually, Rochelle’s is kind of great. Something about wanting the strength to  not hate people who hate her, including racist assholes.

All sorts of magical happenings begin, thanks to the weird knife ritual. Chris becomes Glinda’s lapdog. He stares at her in class, promises to tell everyone he lied, and begs to sit next to her in mass. That last part made me giggle. This is also one of the early hints of Nancy Lestrange’s jealousy of Glinda’s powers.

That night at witch slumber party they play “light as a feather, stiff as a board” — a game I only know about because of this movie. It’s super legit when witches do it.

Lor: I’ve never heard of this game, so I had to Google-search it at work, obvs. And: WEIRD. Apparently I’ve never heard of this game because it’s creepy ass hit.

Sweeney: Then we get a montage of the girls becoming besties and life becoming great with witch powers.

At the next witch slumber party, they cast a spell on Ben Stiller’s Wife and try to get rid of Neve’s scars, because that surgery did not work. The next day at school, Ben Stiller’s Wife gets out of the pool and takes off her shower cap, and half of her hair along with it. Her scalp looks creepy as fuck. The swim instructor looks up from this drama long enough to see Rochelle do a perfect dive. Neve goes back to the hospital and the doctors are astonished by how perfect her skin now looks.

Neve shows up to school late, less covered up, and full of sass. The boys suddenly notice her, because of the aforementioned wardrobe and attitude changes. Glinda laughs at poor balding Ben Stiller’s Wife, who now has to wear a hat. Unfortunately, Nancy’s spell is not working and she’s pissy about it. Glinda asks Rochelle, the highlight of this film, what Nancy’s spell is:

I don’t know, I think she doesn’t want to be white trash anymore or something. I told her, like, “You’re white, honey. Just deal with it.”

LOL.

That night, however, Nancy Lestrange throws a temper tantrum that causes an electrical fire and Asshole Stepfather to have a fatal heart attack. It turns out that he has awesome life insurance from his employer. White Trash Cure, found! Only one person and like two kitchen appliances had to die!

Lor: If it had been three kitchen appliances, the price would’ve been too steep.

Sweeney: Life continues to get better: Neve has a complete personality transformation, cat-calling every hot guy they pass and Nancy moves into a swanky apartment with her mom, who apparently mourned for all of .2 seconds. In order to properly transition into Shit Is Scary territory (you know, because the dead guy apparently didn’t trigger that) we have to start upping the magic.

The slumber party has been relocated to the swanky apartment, and now they are doing “glamours.” Or, rather, Glinda is; she’s changing eye and hair colors and shit, and it’s all lolzy and swell. But in the next scene we see that Chris has escalated to waiting outside Glinda’s window while she sleeps, which, in 1996, was still considered stalking and unattractive. Ahem.

Lor: Ye olde golden days.

Sweeney: The next day they go back to the magic store to get supplies and ask for advice on undoing the spell. Peasant Sleeves waxes philosophical about magic. You can’t undo spells; they have to run their course. True magic is neither black nor white. The important! plot! thing! that we zoom in on her face for is the declaration that whatever you put out there comes back times three.

Nancy Lestrange finds a book she wants and manages to get even creepier. Glinda is sharing memories from her suicidal days, and Nancy responds (like a true Slytherin) by telling her that she should respect the serpent’s power. They go to the beach to do an intense ritual, praising their respective compass directions. Have I mentioned that Glinda is actually the witch of the north?

Lor: Maybe the snake really is symbolic in this movie, but apparently not representative of penis. Sorry.

Sweeney: As the only deaths in this movie are men, I’m going to say no, the subtext is not respecting the power of the penis.

It gets stormy and their mason jars full of bugs break. They do this really annoying spinning camera thing, and eventually Nancy is struck by lightning, before we fade to black. The next morning they wake up and Nancy is walking on water in a black trench coat.

When she gets to shore she’s babbling about how he blessed her, and she can “feel him running through [her] veins,” and other creepy nonsense. A bunch of dead sharks inexplicably wash up on shore. I have no idea why the sharks had to die. Nancy starts shouting about how it is her gift, while Neve and Rochelle are all, “Whateverrr” and Glinda is all, “Wait, shit just got real and creepy.”

They are taking a joyride in Nancy’s fancy car, and Glinda is trying to tell them that shit is not cool. Neve and Rochelle just giggle in the back seat, while Glinda and Nancy argue about whether or not they are going too far. Once again, Nancy demonstrates the fact that she is threatened by Glinda, and responds to this by running red lights. These things are somehow related.

The next day at school, Rochelle sees Ben Stiller’s Wife sobbing in the school shower with her hair falling out, and she develops a tiny bit of remorse. She turns left to look into the mirror, but her reflection also turns left. It’s turning away from her; she’s turning away from herself. It’s very deep.

Glinda finally relents and goes on a date with Stalker!Chris. He’s all sorts of creepy and when she tries to run away into the woods (didn’t we just talk about this, kids? Don’t do it. The woods are bad. The end.) he follows her. She trips and he pins her and tries to rape her, but she gets away and runs to Rochelle’s house. Nancy is also there and full of crazyfaced rage.

Nancy goes to the big house party going on that night (big house parties happen in abundance in fictional teen universe, only interrupted by occasional lavish school-sponsored dances) and manages to get Stalker!Chris alone in a bedroom, drunk. She tries to seduce him as herself, but it doesn’t work. He pushes her off of him and onto the floor, which sparks a mini-tantrum. She calms herself down and performs a glamour to make herself look like Glinda, and comes onto him again. He doesn’t question the fact that he just watched her turn into someone else either because of the booze or the magic. I’ve spent enough time recapping Sunnydale to not spend a lot of time questioning this.

The other three arrive at the party and Glinda walks in on Nancy and Chris having sex. Nancy turns back to herself, mid-fuck; Chris freaks out. Nancy and Glinda argue, and Nancy is mostly amused until Chris interjects that she’s just jealous. Nancy throws another temper tantrum that results another person dead, when Chris falls out the window. He also dies in Scream. Sorry, Skeet Ulrich.

Lor: Is he still doing stuff? He should be. In 2012, douches, stalkers and murder-y murders have a better chance of survival, and are often even leading men.

Sweeney: Good point. Someone should alert his management.

Glinda tries to put a spell on Nancy to bind her from doing harm against other people or herself. The trio comes to her in her nightmares and then harasses her at school the next day, because they know she wants out and tried to put that spell on Nancy. They imply that they might kill her next. Neve and Rochelle make creepy comments as they leave the bathroom (as the girl’s room is the ideal site for teenage harassment) about how Glinda is sleeping.

In Glinda’s panic she goes to the Peasant Sleeves and explains the situation. Peasant Sleeves lets her behind that impenetrable curtain and talks about Glinda’s strength and reveals that Glinda’s mother was a witch, though offers no actual indication of how she knows this and Glinda asks absolutely no questions about it. OK COOL. Sure.

Peasant Sleeves tells Glinda to “invoke the spirit.” That’s what Nancy was doing with the lightning and the dead sharks, so Glinda’s like, “Uh, no.” Peasant Sleeves says it’s the only way. They start, but ominous winds commence, and Glinda’s all, “I GOTTA GO.” I’m not sure why leaving Peasant Sleeves struck her as a wise idea, since that’s her only ally, but whatever.

At home, her dad and stepmother are MIA. She gets a phone call from Nancy saying that they flew back to San Francisco, and then the TV flickers on with news that the plane crashed with no survivors. Then the house lights flicker off, so Glinda goes out side, to find whole bunch of snakes slithering around. Back inside, she can see that the snakes are covering the house and quickly making their way inside. Then there are bugs in the sink. WHY, MOVIE? I didn’t need to see that.

She sits in the shower and panics. Then the scariest thing of all happens, when Nancy appears, telling her to go ahead kill herself already, before turning on the shower and running off. Glinda leaves the bathroom, and the creepy crawlies are all gone. Downstairs, she finds the trio in her living room.

They start hovering and Nancy shouts things at her about how she’ll kill herself tonight because she has every reason to. Rochelle asks what we’re all thinking: “Why doesn’t she use magic on us?” Nancy takes the low blow of reminding Glinda that she not only killed Chris, but killed her mom as she was coming out of her. They start chanting. A note confessing to Chris’s murder appears, and Nancy slits Glinda’s wrists.

Lor: I am disturbed. Please take my silence as such.

Sweeney: Noted.

Glinda runs back upstairs and sobs. Nancy sends Rochelle upstairs. Rochelle wants to back out, but Nancy threatens to kill her, so Neve goes upstairs with her. Glinda is mumbling a spell about “making them see” and then the pair pass a mirror: Neve’s burns are back and now on her face; Rochelle is losing her hair like Ben Stiller’s Wife. They run out of the house.

Glinda’s hearing her dead mother’s voice and that makes her all-powerful and shit. Her wrists heal instantly and the mirrors suddenly have clouds, kind of like Sabrina’s did in the intro to Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

Nancy’s still there, though her Bellatrix Lestrange starts to crack, as she realizes that Glinda is all-powerful. Suddenly Glinda appears in a mirror, and is all ominous and creepy, as bugs appear all over Nancy and her fingers turn into snakes. She collapses on the floor and it is seriously gross.

Glinda tries the bind again. It’s working, but Nancy gets one last magical gust of wind, and one last psycho killer outburst. It looks like she kills Glinder with a dresser, but when the dresser is pulled away, it’s just Glinda’s clothes. Nancy is about to stab the clothes, when Glinda reappears and kicks Nancy through the window. Glinda then successfully performs the bind on the unconscious Nancy.

Next scene is in the day time. Parents aren’t dead; it was a glamour on the TV? Neve and Rochelle come to apologize for trying to kill her. They ask if she still has powers, because they don’t. When they ask if she ever wants to hang out, she tells them to hold their breath until she calls. They walk away, muttering shit about her under their breath. Glinda beckons a storm that somehow knocks them both over, because standing in storms is hard. “Be careful – you don’t want to end up like Nancy.”

Cut to Nancy, belted to a bed in a mental institution while shouting that she is flying. Roll credits.

I’m not sure what we learned here, Traumateers. Do Halloween movies teach you things? Be careful what you wish for? Except not really, because Glinda seems fine and dandy by the end. Don’t be a Hot Topic kid? Neve and Rochelle kind of got punished just for listening to crazy Nancy.

Lor: Also, it doesn’t matter if you go along with the crazy for a good 85% of the movie, if you show trepidation and are good on the inside, then you will survive and also get to keep your awesome powers.

Sweeney: Yep!

General rule of high school movies is that the douchey guy who spreads fake rumors about girls always gets his karmic punishment. (Contrary to the real world where girls have to deal with it, rather than waiting for zany circumstance to punish him and also make him fall in love with them. They should probably start by not wanting the douchey guy to fall in love with them.) As consequences for the douchey popular guy go, death is pretty severe. Ultimate Halloween Slumber Party movie, I guess.