Pop Culture Rewind: The Craft

Editorial Assistant Vanessa Bland, conjures the dark magic of The Craft (1996), tapping into the film’s spellbinding legacy and the rebellious cultural zeitgeist that made it iconic

I was sixteen when The Craft hit screens—roughly the same age as the girls it portrayed. I didn’t see it at the movies; I thought it looked like a film about try-hard teenage goths, and I was busy reading books on astral projection and ghosts. But my close friend did see it, and suddenly she became possessed—not by spirits, but by style, and attitude. She dressed like the characters, painted her nails black, wore chokers, bought witchy trinkets, and swore some spells actually worked. I watched, skeptical, while the boys in our year whispered about avoiding her for fear of curses.

The year The Craft arrived, the zeitgeist had already been going darker: Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails were mainstream, anti-Christian sentiment was louder, the Port Arthur massacre shook the nation, and Home & Away killed off Shane. Maybe it’s just my memory playing tricks—Spice Girls’ “Wannabe" was also topping the charts—but the cultural mood felt urgent, edgy, and a little dangerous. New Age curiosities had been around for a while: zodiac necklaces, moon-and-star bedspreads, tarot cards in the local shops. But The Craft took it to the next level. Witchcraft was no longer just decoration; it was performance, power, and rebellion.

At school, my friend wasn’t alone. Other girls whispered about spells, and swapped rituals. The boys were terrified, unsure if the black-clad girls by the lockers might be plotting a curse on the next soccer match. The film tapped into something quintessentially teenage: the thrill of control in a world that rarely gives power to girls. It was goth, it was dangerous, and for those of us who were impressionable, it was intoxicating.

Looking back, the shock value might seem quaint now. Dark rituals and stormy classrooms are tame compared to today’s horror themes. Yet the cultural footprint at my school—obsessions, fashion, whispered threats—was real. The Craft captured a generation teetering on the edge of adulthood, a moment when dressing like a witch could feel revolutionary, and being feared could be exhilarating.

I didn’t join the coven. I didn’t buy the necklaces or journals. But I watched, fascinated. The movie gave permission to a corner of adolescence often ignored; the girls who were misunderstood, experimenting with power, identity, and aesthetics all at once. Hexes may have been imaginary, but the spell it cast over teen girls was real—a little dark, a little thrilling, and impossible to ignore.

And maybe that’s why, nearly thirty years later, the film still feels electric. The black clothes, the whispered spells, the sense that girls could be dangerous—it tapped into something enduring, a reminder that adolescence is a time of fascination, obsession, and the occasional black nail polish rebellion.

by Vanessa Bland