The Craft turns on its own coven

The datum

The Craft has two halves that want different things, and the join is visible.

The first hour builds four specifically unhappy girls, gives them each a wish, and takes their friendship seriously. It is the part audiences quote, re-enact and remember (The Craft — light as a feather).

The second hour converts three of them into antagonists, strips their power, and returns Sarah — the one with the house, the father and the inherited gift — to a corrected normality. Bonnie and Rochelle are left with their original problems restored. Nancy is institutionalised.

Contemporary reviewers noticed the seam without much sympathy for the first half. Stephen Holden's New York Times review of 3 May 1996 is reported to praise the opening as a celebration of adolescent nonconformity and to fault the closing stretch as a sermon about karma. That review is paywalled and this wiki has not read it, so the characterisation is recorded here second-hand and should be replaced with the words when someone can get at them.

Why the seam matters

Because the film's moral arithmetic does not survive inspection. It treats four wishes as equivalent errors when they are not: three are about the self, and Nancy's is about escaping a trailer and a dangerous man (Nancy is the only poor one). The girl with the least gets punished most, and the girl with the most keeps her power on the grounds that she was born with it.

The racial dimension runs the same way. Rochelle's storyline — added after Rachel True was cast, replacing a bulimia plot (Rachel True on playing Rochelle (2021)) — is the only one in which the wish is a response to someone else's cruelty rather than to a private lack. It is also the one the ending resolves least (Rochelle plays the spell wrong on purpose).

The teen-film pattern underneath

The shape is a 1990s Formula: outsider arrives, is adopted by a group, is corrupted by it, must renounce it to be restored. It is the same skeleton as a dozen films of the decade, and it is fundamentally conservative — the group is the danger and the correction is a return to the individual. The Craft inherits that skeleton and puts a story about female anger and class inside it, and the two do not fit.

Why it belongs on the bench

It is a clean teaching case for Values: a film whose stated moral and whose actual sympathies point in opposite directions, where students can be asked which one the filming supports. And it is why the reappraisal happened at all — audiences did not reinterpret the film so much as decide to believe its first half over its second (The Craft got better as it got older).

Films noted here that this context touches: The Craft (1996).