idea ·The Craft (1996)

Manon was invented so nobody could call him

The Craft's deity is fake by design. The witchcraft consultant refused to put a real one in a film teenagers would copy.

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Pat Devin, the Dianic priestess hired to design the film's rituals, invented Manon rather than use an existing deity. Her reason, as reported, was that she "didn't want hordes of teenagers running down to the beach or out to the woods invoking anybody real" (Pat Devin, witchcraft consultant on The Craft).

Everything around Manon is otherwise built from real practice — the initiation, the calling of the corners, the elemental assignments (Sarah Earth, Rochelle Water, Bonnie Fire, Nancy Air, though the art department swapped Nancy and Sarah). The authenticity is the point, and the one deliberate falsehood sits at the centre of it.

Why keep this. It is a consultant designing against her own film's likely effect on its audience — an anticipated-reception decision made at the Iconography level, before release, by someone with no stake in the box office. That is unusual enough to be worth a note.

It also complicates any reading of the film as simply exploitative of Wicca. The practitioners surveyed twenty-five years on split on the result: Christopher Penczak spent years "explaining to people that the magick in the movie was not really what any of us did as Witches", while Lilith Dorsey recorded that "for Black witches like myself it was one of the first times we saw a witch that looked like us."

Compare The Production Code and Psycho — constraint imposed from outside — against this, which is constraint volunteered from inside. See Control.

Go on, then

film 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.
idea The $85,000 backdrop The Alice prologue set cost $85,000 of a $1.8M budget and shot for one day — five per cent of the film spent on announcing what the film is about.
idea Killing the protagonist at minute 47 Psycho spends its first act building a protagonist by the book, then murders her at the mid-point of act two.
idea Schrader and Scorsese disagree about the ending Ritual suicide or tabloid item? The writer and the director give incompatible accounts of the same scene, and the film supports both.
idea The money dies with Marion The $40,000 sinks into the swamp wrapped in newspaper, and no surviving character ever learns it was there.
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.