The Craft

Are they stereotypes or archetypes? What do the characters say about the way our culture models women with power?


This week I watched the 1996 film The Craft directed by Andrew Flemming. The Craft follows a teenage girl, Sarah, who befriends a group of girls at her new Catholic school. The girls practice witchcraft and Sarah joins their coven and use their powers to wreak havoc on whoever wrongs them, as well as to aid them in classic school girl needs (help with beauty, get the guy to love them, etc.). While the stereotypes of riding brooms, using caldrons, or wearing pointy hats did not translate into the film; a few did. The Craft did something that witchcraft had been lacking in media up until that point. In the 1960’s Bewitched had domesticated witches to being not much more than a housewife.

Before Bewitched witches were often depicted as grotesque, supernatural beings. I think The Craft did something important for the concept of witchcraft, in that they leveled the playing field. The Craft combines the domesticity that witches could have in the example of Bewitched while including the powerful, horrifying, overall “bad” elements that depicted witches in the 16th and 17th century. Personally, I feel that witches men are unjustly afraid of powerful women so they killed women who were confident or powerful or had the means to be powerful by claiming them as “witches”. Later, after the world agreed that was a bad move, men continued to belittle the idea of these powerful women (witches) by making them either intensely ugly (The Wizard of Oz) or knocking them down to be domestic housewives (Bewitched). I thoroughly enjoyed The Craft because it really had an overall sense of women taking back their power and using it to their advantage. Perhaps my inner feminist is just screaming because The Craft shows four incredible women kicking ass and taking names.

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