Pat Devin, witchcraft consultant on The Craft

Pat Devin, a Dianic priestess of the Covenant of the Goddess, was hired as the witchcraft consultant on The Craft (1996) after an occult shop owner connected her to a Sony publicist. She read the script and met director Andrew Fleming and producer Ginny Nugent.

Good for

A rare, documented case of a subculture being consulted about its own screen representation — and of a consultant designing against the film's likely effect on its audience.

What she contributed

• The invocation and the calling of the corners. Devin proposed that the girls perform a real initiation and each call a quarter for an element. Her assignment was Sarah as Earth, Rochelle as Water, Bonnie as Fire, Nancy as Air. The art department reversed Nancy and Sarah.
• Manon is a fake. She invented the deity rather than use a real one, because she "didn't want hordes of teenagers running down to the beach or out to the woods invoking anybody real" (Manon was invented so nobody could call him).
• A structural note. She argued that if the coven was going to threaten Sarah with death for leaving, the film needed an initiation in which the girls actually bound themselves to each other first — a dramaturgical fix, not a religious one.

She regretted losing the original script's closing scene, in which Sarah reads to children in a forest clearing.

Use with care

Devin's account is her own, given in interviews years later, and the two secondary sources here (SlashFilm and The Wild Hunt) both report it rather than quote a primary document. The practitioners The Wild Hunt surveyed at twenty-five years disagreed about the result: Christopher Penczak, "I spent many years after explaining to people that the magick in the movie was not really what any of us did as Witches"; Lilith Dorsey, "For Black witches like myself it was one of the first times we saw a witch that looked like us."