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The Craft isn’t about finding power despite being a teenage girl but because of it.

Practicing witchcraft is communal, and female friendship—even when it’s volatile—is important.

The unity of the women is the source of their power and when that disappears, their coven dissolves. The Craft came out way back in 1996, but you wouldn’t know it from its pervasive place in the zeitgeist. He’s looking at me, isn’t he?” when a crush is near.

It’s no coincidence that their first act of magic together is killing a man who tries to harm Sarah. Of course, this type of power is known to corrupt. Bonnie wants her full-body scars to disappear so she can be “beautiful inside and out” and relishes the effect that her new powers-enhanced looks have on the boys around her (because apparently they hadn’t noticed she was Neve Campbell). The Craft allows viewers to imagine having control over—and taking revenge on—a restrictive, male-dominated world. The enduring appeal of The Craft, and the idea of the teen witch more generally, can be attributed to a fantasy of supreme female agency. By having supernatural strength, these characters can defy a social structure that equates female adolescence with weakness and vulnerability.

As they become more powerful and men around them begin dying, Sarah tries to leave the circle, much to the anger of the coven.

The teen witch rejects every tenant of the good adolescent girl: sweet, fragile, subservient, and malleable. There are no performances by Britney Spears on the show (though Stevie Nicks does make a cameo).

We are the weirdos, mister. Much like the Bitches Of Eastwick, the young witches in Coven are stylish, power-hungry, and unafraid to seek bloody revenge on the abusive men around them. It’s about being able to embrace your true weirdo self—and magic the hell out of anyone who says otherwise.

It’s too easy to say that The Craft has endured—and it has endured, you only need to look at the prevalence of “the craft” tag on Rookie and Teen Vogue—simply because its ’90s goth-inspired aesthetic is cool. "The Craft: Legacy," the follow-up to the 1996 teen cult horror film "The Craft," will hit premium video on demand at midnight Oct. 28. Jealousy and greed eventually destabilize the coven’s balance of power and dissolve their bonds.
Despite casting powerful spells and realizing their divine clout, Sarah and Bonnie still sit at the back of class and whisper, “Is he looking? “You don’t even exist to me,” she snarls, admonishing him for treating all women like “whores,” and then she kills him.

Nancy also best embodies the fury inside teenage girls.

This casting decision made The Crucible especially relevant to a young audience, for whom Ryder represented the coolest version of themselves, another young woman who “got it” (echoed in Tavi Gevinson’s casting in the 2016 stage production of the play as Mary Warren, a meeker character than Abigail Williams but a similarly troubled teen nonetheless). The film adaptation of The Crucible—Arthur Miller’s allegorical play about the Salem witch trials of the late 17th century—released in late 1996, starred Gen-X poster girl Winona Ryder as the ruthless Abigail Williams. The New York Times film review at the time questioned why a remake was necessary; with McCarthyism dead, what relevance did this story have in 1996? In The Craft, the witches’ collective powers are a way to silence those who demean and subjugate them—whether it’s the men who threaten their safety, peers who judge them, or beauty ideals that restrict them.

Going against the grain of gender expectations is already difficult, which is why the idea of having superpowers to assist you is so attractive.

The three girls practice pagan rituals in their spare time but need a fourth to invoke the spirit of a deity called Manon. 1996 was the year of the teen witch: Sabrina, The Teenage Witch debuted on ABC in September, and Nicholas Hytner’s film adaptation of The Crucible was released a few months later. For these characters, to identify as a teen witch is to identify with a version of themselves who’s in control and can effect change.

This world of witchcraft is a long way from 17th-century Salem, but the two share the same tensions. Last year, there was even talk of a TV reboot. Teen witches in popular culture offer an amplification of the adolescent experience but with more control over its scarier aspects. It suggests there’s an unknowable mystery and dormant threat inside teenage girls that the rest of the world can’t possibly comprehend. Eschewing black cloaks and broomsticks for low-rise jeans and halter tops, these new twenty- and thirtysomething avatars of witchcraft populated films and TV shows like Practical Magic and Charmed. Sarah wants influence over Chris (Skeet Ulrich, the classic diabolical love interest of ’90s teen films), who dumps her when she won’t have sex with him on their first date and then tells the entire school they did it anyway.
It’s about being able to harness agency that is not traditionally available to you, to dismantle the perceived “natural” order.

(Please see “We are the weirdos, mister.”) No one needs a reboot of The Craft because the original is so good, but the idea of one is certainly intriguing.

In The Craft, when the listless and lonely Sarah (Robin Tunney) moves to L.A. and starts at a new school, she gravitates toward the so-called “Bitches Of Eastwick”: Nancy (Fairuza Balk), Bonnie (Neve Campbell), and Rochelle (Rachel True), outsiders who are bullied by their classmates. They don’t want to escape their identities as teenage girls; they want to escape the idea that this should limit them in any way.

You might not have supernatural powers, but you can still form a community with like-minded girls who similarly refuse the restrictions that society places on them as young women, even if you don’t relate to the paganism of practicing Wiccans.

It challenges a society that both limits the power of young women and perceives them to be naturally limited.

The societies of both eras tells these girls that they should be beautiful but not enjoy it; they should be content and easily controlled; and they should accept their lot in life and settle into the accepted social order accordingly. But Rookie, in particular, understands that “teen witch” is also a powerful social identifier (if The Craft were made today, the girls probably would have just found their fourth online). The Craft came out way back in 1996, but you wouldn’t know it from its pervasive place in the zeitgeist. Then for a few years (with the exception of young adult fiction and children’s shows like The Worst Witch), the teen witch seemed largely absent from films and TV shows geared toward adolescents. More recently, in July 2015, Fox’s supernatural drama Salem, which proposes a fiction in which the trials were merely the backdrop to a real witch war, was renewed for a third season. When the girls are warned by a bus driver about the “weirdos” in the world waiting to harm them, Nancy famously replies with a smile, “We are the weirdos, mister.” To be a teen witch is to revel in nonconformity and dismiss the idea that by virtue of your age and gender, you are the most vulnerable person in society. She frequently has to devise elaborate lies to hide her paranormal abilities, which are restrained by adults who tell her that they know better; it’s just another kind of societal surveillance to observe. When Chris realizes that it’s Nancy and proclaims his total disinterest, she becomes enraged.

Twenty years later, Andrew Fleming’s film about four “weirdo” teenage witches discovering their powers in a world that denies them autonomy still resonates, finding avid fandom with communities (or covens) of like-minded teens on Tumblr.