[Review] The Craft: Legacy Honors the Original with a 2020 Vision

Horror fans of a certain age look back at The Craft with fondness. It felt like a movie for the outsiders and compared to the glitzy teen horror trend, it presented a goth alternative that proudly proclaimed itself to be the weirdos.

That’s not to say that the film is without flaws.

Looking back on it with 2020 vision, the flaws and cracks are more easily observed and produce cringes rather than warm memories. A story about four women discovering their innate powers turned into women fighting over a male entity and devolve into cattiness and backstabbing. The story also failed Rachel True’s character Rochelle in regards to tokenism (her continued exclusion since release doesn’t help). All of this to say that while the original The Craft is beloved and a cult classic to this day, it wasn’t perfect in its representation and it still relied on the trope of powerful women tearing each other apart.

Now we’re 24 years removed from the original and The Craft is back with a PG-13 sequel entitled The Craft: Legacy. And while I wouldn’t call it particularly scary, it builds upon the original’s legacy in interesting ways. The end result is a very entertaining and empowering coming-of-age film about intersectional women coming into their own through the guise of magic.

A brief cold open introduces three of our main characters as they unsuccessfully attempt a spell. The Trio is Tabby (Lovie Simone) who represents Fire/South, Frankie (Gideon Adlon) who represents Air/East and Lourdes (Zoey Luna) who represents Earth/North. Unfortunately, because they’re missing their fourth, the spell fails. Luckily, we cut to a car dragging a U-Haul as Helen (Michelle Monaghan) and her daughter Lilly (Cailee Spaeny) are just pulling into town. 

Helen is a single mother who has been seeing a famous men’s self-help writer Adam (David Duchovny) and has decided to uproot her daughter to move into his very expensive home with his trio of boys Isaiah (Donald MacLean Jr), Jacob (Charles Vandervaart) and Abe (Julian Gray). Tension rises immediately as this newly blended family feels more like a biblical patriarchy than a normal family unit. Adam maintains a strict sense of order and discipline with his three (also biblically named) sons and begins to encore similar expectations on Lilly. The once feminine mother/daughter duo (who are introduced singing “Hand in My Pocket” by Alanis) are immediately under siege by testosterone-filled teenage boys who do a lot of scowling. Adam, meanwhile, is the kind of male self-help guru whose books are titled The Hallowed Masculine and his very expensive house is dotted with articles like “Man Up: How Adam Harrison is Getting to the Heart of the Crisis of Masculinity” celebrating his process.

At school, Lilly has the unfortunate experience of getting her period in class, in full view of the school’s resident bully Timmy (Nicholas Galitzine). He mercilessly points it out and it instantly becomes how Lilly is known around school. But it’s also how she meets the rest of the coven, as they rush to the bathroom to make sure she’s okay and Tabby offers Lilly her gym shorts to wear.

The next day, as Lilly is walking through the halls, Timmy sidles up and sexually harasses her until all four women imagine pushing him and, like magic, he is violently thrown away from Lilly. This act gets Lilly detention, puts her in the crossfire of her soon-to-be-step-father who lashes out about his “zero tolerance policy” towards violence but also exposes her to powers she didn’t realize she possessed. As the four witches become friends and begin to understand their latent powers, they slowly realize that magic can have a downside…and that outside forces covet what they can do.

The Craft: Legacy explores intersectional women coming of age and understanding their own feminine powers through the use of magic much in the same way that it was explored back in 1996. From a narrative structure, the sequel hits similar thematic beats of young women coming into their own and learning to use their powers.One key difference here is that the women aren’t reduced to a singular trait that they have to fight against. It’s a slightly more nuanced approach to teenage strife that feels refreshing and universal at the same time.

2020’s perspective brings new edge to the characters, as well, by presenting well-rounded characters. For example, Lourdes is a Latina trans woman but her outsider perspective is never tied to her trans identity. The Craft: Legacy never portrays her as troubled or burdened by her identity much in the same way that Tabby’s perspective as a Black woman recognizes that racism exists but isn’t defined solely by the characteristic. This core group of women feel authentic and the performances really sell that they are, in fact, friends. Their dynamic is probably the best part of the sequel (and yes, it is a sequel) and even though the film doesn’t really escalate in tension as much as I’d like, their interactions always made up for it.

Another way the film addresses the original’s fractured coven and women infighting is by making the conflict external. Like the original, as the young women come into their power, they begin to wield it with less restraint and it, like in the original, starts to backfire. Tabby, for instance, uses her fire magic to melt a painted slur on a locker and Frankie causes a mean girl to bang her head against the wall for shaming Lilly’s period mishap. But it slowly and quietly upsets the power struggle with the introduction of Timmy.

Timmy is kind of the original’s Chris stand-in; a bully who torments the girls and is ultimately hexed by them. Here, though, they magically assist him to be less of a douche and more of a decent human being. Overnight, he changes into a caricature of male wokeness who now talks about how much he loves Princess Nokia’s music because “I just love her politics,” calls out a kid snickering in class about consent and identifies himself as a cisgendered man. On the surface, this newfound wokeness comes across as eye-rollingly silly and verges into parody but the script by writer/director Zoe Lister-Jones smartly guts expectations with a very candid scene where he admits his inner fears and confessions in a game of truth and lies.  

This sequence hit home for me and it’s where I realized that Zoe was interested in exploring more than female empowerment in her story. By presenting the inner fears of this typical jock, the patterns of internalized homophobia and then contrasting his experience with the way men are conditioned to cut out what’s perceived as “weakness,” The Craft: Legacy explores modern masculinity in surprising ways. Without using buzzwords like patriarchy or toxic masculinity, The Craft: Legacy deftly explores the pressure men feel to live up to an ingrained and indoctrinated form of masculinity that is inherently toxic. 

Timmy’s journey aside, the narrative tips its hand a bit much as to who the real villain is and while Zoe’s script smartly fractures the group from outside forces rather than the original’s inner coven struggles, the reveals feel a bit rote. And while The Craft was never really a scary movie, it did dip into horror a lot more than the sequel…so fans looking for spooky scares will be disappointed. The Craft: Legacy is more interested in telling a coming-of-age story with supernatural elements than it is telling a horror story. It clips along at an easy pace, but the actual conflict doesn’t really present itself until far along in the runtime. Ironically, it’s when it does lean into the conflict, the connection to the original film, the horror aspects, and the revelations that it starts to fall apart.

But third act escalation and some very iffy broadcast television special effects aside, The Craft: Legacy honors its witchy legacy with a 2020 veneer of intersectionality.