film ·watched 1 September 2026

The Craft (1996)

Four girls at a Catholic school in Los Angeles form a coven, get everything they asked for, and discover that the film has a moral. The teen movie the 1990s kept trying to make about female anger.

mise-en-scene
editing
audio
character
iconography
teen-film
occult-horror
1990s
new-line

Directed by Andrew Fleming; written by Peter Filardi and Fleming; Columbia Pictures, 1996. Made for about US$15 million, it took US$55.6 million worldwide — a surprise hit on mixed reviews. Sarah Bailey (Robin Tunney) arrives at a Los Angeles Catholic school and completes the coven that Nancy Downs (Fairuza Balk), Bonnie Harper (Neve Campbell) and Rochelle Zimmerman (Rachel True) have been failing to make work. They invoke a deity called Manon, each gets what she wanted, and the second half takes it all back.

Eighty-five actresses auditioned, among them Angelina Jolie, Scarlett Johansson and Alicia Silverstone. Rachel True and Fairuza Balk were cast first.

This is the hub note. Everything Craft-related links from here.

Why it is in the journal

Because it is the wiki's first film with no book behind it, and because its two halves argue with each other. The first hour is about power arriving; the second is about a film losing its nerve and punishing three of the four girls for wanting it (The Craft turns on its own coven).

Scenes

The Craft — light as a feather — the sleepover levitation. Suspense built from a chant, a rhythm and four faces, with no effect in the shot at all.
The Craft — Nancy's turn — the invocation, the trailer, and Fairuza Balk taking the film off its leash.

What it demonstrates

Codes

Mise en scène carries the whole class argument — the uniforms that flatten four very different homes into one frame, Nancy's trailer against Sarah's house (Nancy is the only poor one). Editing and Audio do the levitation entirely between them (The chant is a metronome, not a spell). Iconography is a genre inheritance being assembled on screen: candles, chalk, the calling of the corners, a snake — much of it designed by a practising witch (Manon was invented so nobody could call him). Acting is where the film's reputation actually lives, and one performance in particular.

Conventions

A Formula the 1990s used repeatedly — outsider arrives, is adopted, is corrupted, must renounce — laid over an occult-horror frame. Character is where it is strongest and weakest at once: four distinct girls, three of whom the ending needs to be wrong. Themes of power, class, race and belonging are all raised in the first hour and only one of them gets an answer.

Contexts

Values in a film that hands a Black character a racism storyline written after she was cast (Rochelle plays the spell wrong on purpose); Commerce in a modestly budgeted hit that outlived its reviews (The Craft got better as it got older); and Control — of a different kind from the ratings board — in a studio taking advice from a Dianic priestess about how to depict a living religion.

A note on sources

Every other film here is built on books from the Reel shelf. The shelf has nothing on The Craft — the nine hits for "the craft" across sixty-odd books are all citations of The Craft of the Screenwriter. So this film is sourced from reviews and interviews instead, which are listed separately on the sources page and cited by URL and date rather than by page. It is a weaker evidentiary base than the rest of the wiki and should be read as such.

Sources for this film

Ebert — The Craft review (1996) for the contemporary verdict; Rachel True on playing Rochelle (2021) for the casting and the rewrite; Pat Devin, witchcraft consultant on The Craft for the ritual design; The history of "light as a feather, stiff as a board" for the game.

Stephen Holden reviewed it for the New York Times on the day of release, praising the first half and faulting the second. That review sits behind a paywall this wiki could not read, so it is recorded here as a lead rather than quoted.

Go on, then

context The Craft turns on its own coven The first hour is about four girls getting power. The second is about taking it back from three of them. The film never reconciles the two.
scene The Craft — light as a feather Four girls, a chant, and a body that rises. The best sequence in the film contains no special effect at all — only rhythm, faces and a cut.
scene Alice — the prologue Ninety seconds of counterfeit 1940s Hollywood, built at real 1940s expense, existing to be destroyed by one cut.
scene Mean Streets — Tony's bar Charlie walks into a room lit like hell in slow motion; later Johnny Boy walks in on the downbeat of 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' with a girl on each arm. Two entrances, one room, and the camera's opinion of both.
idea Nancy is the only poor one Three of the four girls want something about themselves changed. Nancy wants out of a trailer. The film punishes her hardest.
scene The Craft — Nancy's turn Fairuza Balk gets everything she asked for and the film changes its mind about her. The best performance in it, in service of the argument it loses.