[Pride 2021] Recognizing Queerness and Self in The Craft: Legacy (2020)

I purchased a digital copy of The Craft: Legacy (2020) last year to get me through my first ever Halloween without company. As a kid I needed the comfort that company brought. I was terrified of anything resembling scary or uncanny. I couldn’t even walk down the store aisles dressed for Halloween without closing my eyes in panic. I used to cry when “Hey There Delilah” by the Plain White T’s came on because I associated it with a single gnarly scene from an episode of Cold Case. My anxiety manifests in a fear of nearly everything, and especially in a fear of other people. As I got older, I learned that horror actually helps with that—the fear can be channeled and the response becomes familiar. If I can manage the terror provided by movies, I can manage the terror response my own body and brain collude to pique in daily goings-on. 

I became obsessed with horror. And with that came an inevitable love of Halloween, something I came to cherish sharing with family and friends not for comfort but for the bonding it provided. Whether we sat around and marathoned movies, went trick-or-treating, or got a little sloppier than intended at small parties, the holiday became an important one for the way I relate to the people I love. 

And so, alone for the first time, half a bottle of $3.50 Brut and one of several annual viewings of Rocky Horror into the night I decided, why not. I should treat myself. I should let myself watch something that looks like it will bring me joy. Something that might speak to the teenager I used to be; queer, with a complicated relationship to growing up. Something that recalled the softest memories of living with my friends, of holding a chosen family dear to my heart and giving each other home—memories tinted with all of the magic, sparkles, and brightness which I seem to recall being mocked upon the release of this trailer. 

Boy, did this movie ever deliver.

The Craft: Legacy holds this most striking element of queerness in every piece of it. It is queer in ethos, style, text, and messaging. It has so much to say about collectivism, difference as power, stylistic choices and self-expression, friendship, etc…and that isn’t even addressing the actual, non-problematically, canonically queer characters and its explicit discussions of queerness and intersectionality. 

I am in awe of how easily it all played out. We see casual acceptance in every scene. Near the beginning we get frank discussion of period pains, loud and clear, in the cafeteria. We have immediate acceptance of Lily (Cailee Spaeny) into the group after sharing trauma, which is certainly (perhaps unfortunately?) in line with my experience of queer friendships. Each of our four main characters have individual fashion and their individual expression of self, their feelings, and their internal wishes is explored through their external aesthetic choices. None of them meld together. None of them are the same. The queerness involved in keeping one’s individuality and singular identity even when enmeshed in group dynamics this intimate is notable. 

And when Timmy (Nicholas Galitzine) opens up (albeit under a spell that has apparently let his inner wishes manifest as actual behavior), I was really floored. It’s eerie how similar my experience coming out to some friends as bisexual…in a room with a few new college friends, feeling like I might really belong, during a game of Two Truths and a Lie in which I could never convincingly lie, with that same incredibly nervous energy cascading off of me in waves and suffocating the room.

Of course, I didn’t have that same lead-in period of high school homophobia—internalized bits and pieces, sure, but not quite so intense. But here he was, being allowed to recognize himself and be given space to let out his tears and open his feelings. He wasn’t pressured at any moment to release further information and was provided support (without pushing) of a group ready to listen to anything he had to say. It was as recognizable as finally finding a strong group of queer adult friends, of finding people who would understand and feel with me, who would never push each other but always support one another. 

Then, of course, there is the overarching message of the film: “That’s what my mom always says. Your difference is your power.” Differences are to be celebrated. To be venerated. Cherished. And by contrast, the main villain’s patriarchal crowing of power equaling order, where the order of patriarchy and toxic expressions of masculinity is the anti-queer; a villain that stands against all of the actual power that comes with claiming one’s self and allowing their identity, wishes, and loves to be shameless and open. 

This film is so fucking queer that I didn’t know how to handle it.

I finished my bottle of wine and I cried. In a movie that isn’t horribly painful, I couldn’t keep my queer, sappy, sensitive self from crying my way through it. 

I think I’ve finally had time to process why.

I think that this film feels so significant simply because it makes queerness an explicit conversation and a clear goal. It’s so nice to not have to dig through subtext. Don’t get me wrong: I love dissecting subtext and finding meaning in unrelated subjects and situations. This draws me (a writer, a theatre artist, a film/media scholar) to my favorite art: the metaphor, the indirect-directness of placing and finding message and meaning in something seemingly completely unrelated. It’s why I love horror, a genre that for me finds greatness in using this sort of underbelly, often obfuscated symbolism and allegory to appeal to the outsider in everyone, to give home to outsiders like me and my community. 

But you know what? It’s nice to not have to do that work sometimes. Sometimes, I just want to be handed queerness in plain, easy, clear, and nonchalant terms. I want to be shown characters that are allowed to share their queerness, and indulge in the audacious, radical, loving, fucking weird shared space that shared identity and shared rage and backlash towards oppression creates. I want to see them be allowed this more than I feel is permissible in my life, to live through their experience and become freer for having absorbed it.

Even in horror, I want to see that my people have a place, have a right to exist, and sometimes, I want to see that they have it easier than a lot of us do. 

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