16 Fantastic Films About Witchcraft (Before Harry Potter)

13. The Craft

Sarah, a troubled teen, has just moved into LA with her family. At school, she makes friends with some girls who are rumoured to be witches - Bonnie, Nancy and Rochelle. Sarah is also attracted to the popular Chris. The three girls worship a god called 'Manon' and they believe Sarah, who has demonstrated psychic phenomena from the beginning, will complete their coven. The girls all do spells which turn out well. For example, Rochelle puts a revenge spell on a hateful racist girl called Laura Lizzie and Sarah puts a love spell on Chris. Nancy gets a little greedy and encourages the girls to do an 'Invocation of the Spirit' spell which makes everything go wrong - Nancy loses empathy for others, Bonnie becomes a narcissist, Chris tries to rape Sarah. Nancy kills him via a spell. Sarah tries to change Nancy's behaviour with a binding spell but it doesn't work and the coven turn on Sarah. They give her nightmarish dreams and hallucinations and generally try ruining her life. Luckily Sarah is nothing but resilient and she successfully repels the psychic attack and turns the tables on her attackers. A sleeper hit and a cult favourite, The Craft has done very well in the home DVD market. It is a lot darker than the average teen movie, and its take on witchcraft raised many eyes in the Pagan/Wicca community. Real life witches do not practice black magic (negative magic that will hurt people) because of the adage they have - if you put something out there, you will receive it back threefold. Therefore most real life witches pursue a white magic career. And for dabbling in black magic, the girls were punished. It is an interesting little film and the acting is very good from the four female leads. It is a film that doesn't require a lot of thought but a lot of suspension of disbelief. Still it's a fantasy film so I shouldn't nitpick.