There is a version of the 1990s that gets sold back to us in amber: Britpop swagger, bucket hats, lad comedies, and a general sense that everything was looser and more fun. That version is not wrong, exactly, but it leaves things out. One of the things it leaves out is The Craft, a film that arrived in 1996 and reminded anyone paying attention that the decade had a genuinely dark underbelly, and that teenage girls in particular were carrying anxieties that mainstream pop culture was too cheerful to look at directly. The film is back in UK and Irish cinemas from 9 October, rereleased for its 30th anniversary, and it lands with a kind of stubborn relevance that its peers from the same era cannot always claim.
The Chrysalis Cracks
The high-school film had been refining itself for a long time before The Craft arrived. The 1980s gave us the social cartography of those films, the jocks and the nerds and the prom queens, and the early 1990s polished the format into something glossier and funnier. Films like Clueless and 10 Things I Hate About You are genuinely good, but they operate in a world where the worst thing that can really happen is social embarrassment. The Craft, co-written and directed by Andrew Fleming, used that same scaffolding of cliques and new kids and high-school hierarchies, and then set fire to it.
The comparison The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw reaches for is instructive: he puts it alongside Heathers and Mean Girls, films that understand how vicious the social architecture of adolescence can actually be. But The Craft goes somewhere those films do not. Where Heathers uses black comedy as its weapon and Mean Girls uses satire, The Craft reaches for something older and stranger: the supernatural. The horror element is not decoration. It is the point. It is what happens when you take the rage and pain that high-school comedies usually defuse with a punchline and instead let it grow.
The Coven and Its Power
Robin Tunney plays Sarah, the new girl arrived in Los Angeles from San Francisco, carrying depression, a buried guilt about the death of her mother in childbirth, and a quiet resentment of her stepmother. These are not dramatic contrivances. They are the kind of weight that teenagers actually carry, and the film does not flinch from them. What it does, instead of resolving them through friendship or a makeover or a prom, is alchemise them into something darker. Sarah, it turns out, has genuine power, a supernatural ability that exceeds anything the three girls who recruit her can manage.
That trio is where The Craft earns its cult status. Nancy, played by Fairuza Balk with magnificent commitment, leads the group with the energy of someone who has decided that the world owes her something and she is going to collect. Rochelle is played by Rachel True, and Bonnie by Neve Campbell, who that same year was becoming a fixture of a different kind of horror entirely as the Scream franchise began its run. The clique goes by the nickname "the bitches of Eastwick," and they are devoted to witchcraft as both a spiritual practice and a form of survival. The film understands that for teenage girls on the margins, power of any kind is not a luxury. It is a necessity.
What the Craft Actually Does to People
The specifics of what the four girls unleash are where the film becomes genuinely memorable. A girl named Laura, having made a racist remark to Rochelle in a swimming pool changing room, finds her hair falling out in a sequence described as brutally explicit. It is revenge fantasy as body horror, and it is hard to imagine a more efficient distillation of what it feels like to want someone to physically suffer for their casual cruelty. The scene does not ask you to feel guilty about enjoying it.
Then there is Chris, the sexist creep played by Scream regular Skeet Ulrich, who spreads malicious rumours about Sarah and finds himself magically compelled into humiliating submission. Nancy walks on water after a ceremony on the beach, dead sharks appearing on the sand around her as a kind of dark tribute. Bonnie's burn scars are healed after the group call on a higher power. These are not random flourishes. Each act of magic corresponds to a specific wound, a specific injustice, a specific point of pain in one of the girls' lives. The film is, underneath all the black lipstick, a film about the relationship between suffering and power.
The 90s Fearlessness Nobody Talks About
The Guardian review makes an observation that deserves more attention than it will probably get: that The Craft has "a kind of 90s fearlessness that went with not knowing, or perhaps not caring, about the sensitivities surrounding young people's anxieties." That is a complicated compliment. It is not saying the film was irresponsible. It is saying that it engaged with depression, grief, racism, sexual coercion, and the desperate search for belonging without first building a careful framework of content warnings and resolution arcs. It trusted the audience, particularly its teenage audience, to handle it.
That trust is something [the 1990s carried in its culture more broadly](/uprise/culture/remembering-oasiss-historic-knebworth-shows-of-96-it-was-at). It was a decade that had not yet fully developed the institutional anxiety about young people that would come to define how culture was packaged in the years after. The result, in The Craft's case, is a film that feels genuinely alive rather than managed. It does not resolve neatly. Nancy does not learn a lesson and rejoin society. The power struggle between her and the more wholesome Sarah is messy and frightening, as it should be.
The Cast, the Craft, and What Gets Remembered
It is worth dwelling on the ensemble for a moment, because The Craft assembled a group of women who were all, in their different ways, on the edge of something bigger. Neve Campbell is the most obvious example: that same year, Scream turned her into one of the defining figures of 1990s horror. Fairuza Balk's Nancy is one of those performances that lodges in the memory permanently, all coiled intensity and theatrical menace. Robin Tunney anchors the film with a quieter register that keeps it from tipping into camp. Rachel True's Rochelle gets one of the film's most pointed story threads, one that connects supernatural revenge to the very mundane reality of racist bullying.
The review also mentions Breckin Meyer in an early, unsympathetic role, which is worth noting simply because it is genuinely surprising. Meyer was the kind of easy-going presence that 1990s comedies relied on for warmth, and the fact that The Craft used him against type is a small signal of the film's confidence in its own vision.
Thirty Years On, Still Sharp
What makes a 30th anniversary rerelease worth the screen time is not nostalgia alone. It is whether the film still functions as a film, whether it still does what it was built to do. The Craft does. The Magritte mirror sequence that the review singles out as genuinely chilling has not been defused by time. The dynamic between the four leads still crackles. And the central tension, between a girl who wants to use her power for survival and one who wants to use it for domination, is not a tension that the last three decades have made irrelevant.
If anything, the 30th anniversary context makes the film more interesting rather than less. We live in a moment that is, rightly, far more attentive to teenage mental health, to how schools handle racism and sexual harassment, to how young women navigate institutions that were not designed with them in mind. The Craft was made in a moment before that conversation had reached its current level of sophistication, and yet it was already dramatising those exact problems with more honesty than most. It did not have the framework. It had the instinct. Sometimes that is the better tool.
The 1990s gave us a lot of cultural artefacts that look thinner on reinspection than they once did. The Craft is not one of them. Thirty years later, it still has claws.