There's a specific kind of dread The Craft manufactures that Heathers and Mean Girls never quite reach — not the dread of social humiliation but of power actually arriving and not being what you wanted. Andrew Fleming and co-writer Peter Filardi understood something that most high-school films don't: teenage cruelty is already supernatural. The movie just takes that premise literally. Fairuza Balk's Nancy is the engine. She's not a villain the film disapproves of — she's a force the film genuinely respects, right up until it has to contain her. That ambivalence is what gives The Craft its edge. The audience is rooting for Nancy's rage well past the point where they should have switched allegiances, and Fleming knows it. The film makes you complicit in the revenge fantasies before pulling the rug. The practical effects hold up in ways that CGI from the same era rarely does. The hair-loss sequence in the pool changing room is still brutal — tactile and humiliating in a way that feels designed to make the audience wince on Rochelle's behalf while also being unable to look away. The Magritte mirror moment the Guardian reviewer flags is genuinely startling: a single visual gag that lands harder than most dedicated horror films manage in ninety minutes. What the 30th anniversary rerelease reveals is how much The Craft was doing under the surface that felt invisible in 1996. Rochelle's subplot — a Black teenager magically retaliating against a racist classmate — is handled with more directness than most prestige films manage today. The burn scars on Bonnie's back and their magical erasure carry real weight about bodies and self-image. These weren't accidents. Fleming was working with material that the broader 90s teen comedy cycle (Clueless, 10 Things I Hate About You) couldn't touch because it required the genre cover that horror provides. The film's weakness is its third act, where the power-struggle resolution between Nancy and Sarah defaults to a more conventional good-witch-versus-bad-witch structure that the first two acts had been too smart to need. Neve Campbell, excellent in the early scenes, gets sidelined as the film narrows onto Robin Tunney. The ending earns its outcome but not its mechanics. Still: the Craft isn't remembered for its ending. It's remembered for the walk-on-water beach scene, for Nancy's face in the mirror, for the feeling that four girls briefly had access to something real. That feeling doesn't expire.
