All these years you thought you knew which character was the real antagonist
of "The Craft," but by the end of this video, you’ll never see the movie the same way again.
"The Craft" wastes no time in introducing us to its principal characters.
The film opens on three young witches — Nancy, Rochelle, and Bonnie — performing a
pagan ceremony. After a flashy opening credits sequence, we meet protagonist Sarah Bailey,
a San Francisco transplant who's recently moved to Los Angeles with her father.
Sarah's first day in her new LA home takes a frightening turn when a strange man holding a
huge snake walks right through her front door and presents it to her as some kind of twisted
housewarming present. This doesn't seem to leave Sarah too traumatized to start at her new Catholic
school the following day — despite the fact that she's yet to be fitted for a uniform.
Elsewhere at school, Bonnie's astrological readings predict the arrival of a newcomer,
whom she interprets as being the fourth member she and her friends
need to complete their circle — a sentiment that Nancy wholeheartedly disagrees with.
When Bonnie sees Sarah performing telekinesis with a pencil in French class, she knows exactly who
her reading was referring to. Despite Bonnie's eagerness to induct Sarah into their coven,
Nancy scares Sarah away with a wordless glare when she asks the trio if she can join their lab group.
Sitting alone at lunch, Sarah is joined by popular jock Chris Hooker, who welcomes her to the school.
When she points out the girls that snubbed her in biology, Chris calls them an offensive name
and warns Sarah to stay away because they're infamous for being witches. Even though Sarah
is initially doubtful, she finds herself intrigued by both Chris and the girls.
After school, Sarah is watching Chris at football practice when she's approached by Nancy, Rochelle,
and Bonnie. Noticing Sarah's interest in the team captain, Nancy gives her a stern warning.
"He spreads disease. I speak from personal experience."
Sarah isn't sure what to think, but when the girls invite her to go shopping with them,
she finds herself compelled to join. On their walk to the local occult store,
Nancy notices scars on Sarah's wrists. Sarah confesses that her family's relocation was
spurred by an attempt she made on her own life back in San Francisco.
The responses from the girls are… less than compassionate, to say the least.
"You even did it the right way." "Yeah."
"Punk rock!"
The occult shop — run by the enigmatic proprietor Lirio — is filled with all
kinds of esoteric iconography. Just as Sarah is about to open the curtain to a hidden backroom,
Lirio stops her and gives her a quick reading. The
shop owner recognizes that Sarah's ring previously belonged to her late mother
and tells the girl she has natural powers, but Sarah takes this with a grain of salt.
On their way home, the same man who'd accosted Sarah with a snake sees and chases her again,
only to be run over by a passing car. Collecting their thoughts after the accident,
the group comes to the conclusion that their individual wishes for the man to
stop willed the passing car into hitting him. When Nancy starts explaining Manon — the deity
the girls worship — Sarah knows for sure that her new friends aren't playing around.
"If God and the devil were playing football… Manon would be the stadium that they played on."
Sarah admits that magical things seem to happen to her all the time, but
she gets frightened by Nancy's intensity and excuses herself.
After her whirlwind evening with St. Benedict's resident witches,
Sarah tries to take her mind off things by agreeing to go out with Chris Hooker. They
have a good time, but when she refuses to go back to his house, Chris decides to spread a
vile rumor around school that they'd actually hooked up — and that it hadn't gone well.
She tries to confront Chris in the hallway but only ends up getting humiliated even further.
In the meantime, Sarah's new friends are all dealing with personal problems of their own.
As one of the only Black students at St. Benedict's, Rochelle has to put up with
constant tormenting from a racist bully named Laura and her gaggle of followers. Bonnie has
burn scars all over her shoulders and back from a childhood accident and is
undergoing extremely painful experimental gene therapy to try and remove them. Nancy
lives in a run-down trailer with her alcoholic mother Grace and her abusive stepfather Ray.
The next day, the three invite Sarah on a field trip, which she accepts,
and the group takes a bus out to the desolate woods.
Deep in the woods, Sarah, Rochelle, Nancy, and Bonnie begin a ceremony that officially
establishes their circle; they hold each other at knifepoint while reciting an incantation.
"How do you enter?" "With perfect love and perfect trust."
The four witches then pierce their index fingers and mix their blood with wine,
performing their first group spell. They each drink in turn, asking Manon for what their hearts
desire. Rochelle wants revenge on Laura, Sarah wants Chris to return her affections, and Bonnie
wants to be beautiful on the outside as well as in. Nancy, however, dreams a little bit bigger.
"...and I take into myself… all the power of Manon."
Within a matter of hours, Sarah's love spell on Chris begins working,
and she manipulates his new obsession to humiliate him in retaliation.
The coven decides to further test their abilities by playing "light as a feather, stiff as a
board" — the result of which undoubtedly confirms the presence of supernatural intervention.
The next day, when Laura bullies Rochelle, her signature blonde coif immediately starts falling
out. Then, at her next doctor's appointment, Bonnie's scars melt off her body with impossible
ease, leaving the doctor speechless. The magic is working… for everyone but Nancy, that is.
Frustrated by Manon's lack of intervention until now, Nancy returns to her dysfunctional
family. But a violent encounter that ends in her stepfather dying of a heart attack
seems to prove that her prayers have not been ignored after all. A life insurance policy leaves
Nancy and her mother 175,000 dollars, which they use to move into fancier digs downtown.
At Nancy's new apartment, the witches practice "glamouring" — a type of spell
that can change outward appearances with just a bit of concentration.
All is not well in the witches' world, however. Sarah's love spell seems to have
been too effective, turning Chris' newfound desire into a dangerous obsession. Sarah consults Lirio
for advice on how to break the spell, but she learns an unfortunate truth about witchcraft:
a spell must run its course. She also learns about the law of karmic justice:
"Whatever you send out… you get back times three."
At the beach at twilight, the coven arrives with their familiars
as they prepare to invoke the spirit of Manon. Here, Sarah opens up some more about her past:
specifically, that she used to hallucinate snakes and insects around the time of her
suicide attempt. Unfazed, Nancy leads an incredibly intense ceremony that provokes
lightning and wind as the women chant. The next morning,
they awaken on the beach to find Nancy walking on water and a horde of dead sharks washed ashore.
Sarah — understandably freaked out by the invocation ceremony — tries to talk sense into
the other three witches, but they're all drunk on Nancy's power. Even though Rochelle experiences
some remorse when she sees Laura having a panic attack over her balding scalp, it's three against
one, and Nancy is starting to think that maybe Sarah shouldn't be part of the coven after all.
Feeling lost and afraid, Sarah turns to Chris for support, even though his obsession is reaching
dangerous levels. She agrees to go out with him for dinner, but instead, Chris takes her to a
remote spot where he sexually assaults her. Sarah manages to escape to Rochelle's house and tells
the other witches what happened, and in a fit of rage, Nancy lures Chris upstairs at a nearby party
and glamours herself into Sarah. When the real Sarah breaks the glamour and Chris is dismissive
once again, Nancy loses it. She throws Chris out a window with her mind, killing him instantly.
In the wake of Chris' death — which everyone conveniently thinks was an
accident — Sarah breaks with the coven entirely. She cuts Nancy out of a group
photo and attempts to do a binding spell that would prevent Nancy from hurting anyone else
or herself. Unfortunately for Sarah, the power of Manon has given Nancy the
ability to read her mind and torment her with terrible dreams and hallucinations.
At school, Nancy, Bonnie, and Rochelle accost Sarah in the bathroom, telling her that they
were all interviewed by police following Chris' death. Nancy argues that Ray and Chris deserved
to die and that if Sarah wants to leave the coven, she'd better watch her back.
"If a witch betrayed her coven… they would kill her."
Desperate, Sarah goes to Lirio at the occult shop for help and explains her
predicament. Lirio invites Sarah into the secret backroom — a pagan temple built on
a "place of power." She lights all the candles with one match and tells Sarah she's from a long
line of witches and needs to invoke Manon herself. Before Lirio can help any further,
however, Nancy disrupts the ceremony astrally, forcing Sarah to retreat home.
Sarah arrives at an empty house and finds out that her father and stepmother flew to
San Francisco thinking that Sarah had run away. Unbelievably, their plane crashed,
killing everyone on board. Just when Sarah thinks things couldn't get any worse,
the house starts filling with snakes, bugs, rats, and all sorts of creepy crawlies.
The creatures chase Sarah until she's face to face with Nancy,
who reveals that the whole thing was a glamour and that she's planning on staging Sarah's suicide.
Desperate to fight back, Sarah is forced to invoke the spirit of Manon herself.
In the process, she gives Bonnie and Rochelle a taste of their own medicine with the law of karma,
and the two run away in fear.
Sarah finishes invoking the spirit and uses the opportunity to torment Nancy
the same way she tormented her — using all sorts of glamours and tricky spells.
Nancy tries to kill Sarah, but with her newly invoked powers,
Sarah is able to successfully bind Nancy and end their showdown for good.
Days later, Bonnie and Rochelle visit Sarah to apologize for their actions during the
confrontation. They reveal they've lost their powers, but that doesn't stop Sarah from using
her abilities to try and crush them with a tree branch. Finally, "The Craft" ends with Nancy in
a mental institution shouting about the power of Manon as she's being restrained and sedated.
While "The Craft" is framed as a movie about four young witches with new girl Sarah Bailey
at the center, over the years, the discourse surrounding the film has
deepened considerably to propose the notion that Sarah might in fact be the bad guy here.
For one, Sarah abandons her sisters on several occasions to run back to Chris Hooker — the guy
who spread a nasty rumor about her right at the start. Even after Chris tries to
sexually assault Sarah and Nancy kills him in retaliation, Sarah still tries to defend him.
"I think that he was a good guy underneath it all."
Say what?
By the end of "The Craft," when Sarah has invoked the spirit of Manon,
instead of trying to help Nancy with her newfound powers, she taunts her with the same manipulations
that Nancy used on her, effectively driving her mad by the film's end. She also ends the
film by threatening Bonnie and Rochelle even after they confessed to losing their powers.
"Be careful. You don't want to end up like Nancy."
It seems as if Sarah took her powers to as dark a place as Nancy's went — but
for whatever reason, she's allowed to get away with it.
If Sarah is the actual villain of "The Craft," then we need to reassess her foil, Nancy Downs.
Nancy starts the film living in a trailer park where her stepdad regularly abuses her alcoholic
mother. Their electricity is often out since they can't pay their bills, and there's even a hole
in the roof over Nancy's bed, dripping water on her face as she tries to sleep. The implication
is that Nancy is a scholarship student at the elite St. Benedict's Catholic school
and that she spends her free time casting spells to try and lift her and her mother out of poverty.
On top of all that, Nancy was given an STD and abandoned by Chris Hooker, not to mention how
often Ray seems to violate her bodily autonomy. The link between poverty, a lack of healthcare,
and possible underlying mental illness, combined with dabbling in the occult,
was a devastating cocktail for Nancy: she wanted the power to change her life and circumstances,
but she didn't know how to do it without using supernatural means. Even when she and her mom
come into a considerable amount of money, Nancy still isn't able to address her root traumas.
That said, "The Craft" has a far more ambiguous ending than people think. Thanks to Sarah's spell,
Nancy is only bound against hurting herself and others — not against using magic as a whole. If
she'd been able to gather her thoughts and regroup internally, she could realize that she still has
access to Manon's power. This could change her circumstances for the better once again,
even without violence. Furthermore, a spell only lasts as long as the witch who cast it lives,
so if Sarah dies before Nancy, Nancy could be walking on water again in no time.
On the surface, "The Craft" is a story about young women coming into personal
and collective power through magic. However, this camaraderie only lasts briefly, and
it's not long before the four women involved all turn on each other in vicious ways.
First, Nancy's ongoing jealousy of Sarah's natural powers turns into a disaster
as Sarah tries to guide the group's growing magic down what she considers
healthier paths. As the divide between Nancy and Sarah grows, Bonnie and Rochelle choose
the side of power and stick with Nancy, even as she becomes increasingly erratic and violent.
Once Sarah has had enough, the other three mercilessly bully her just as they've been
tormented by others, culminating in a truly grotesque plan to kill Sarah and
stage it as a suicide. Nancy exploits vulnerable information about Sarah's
suicide attempt — information that was told to her in confidence — to further torture her.
Even after Sarah helps wake Bonnie and Rochelle up to their bad behavior,
they still only apologize because they've lost their powers and want them back.
"The Craft" ends with Sarah cutting off Rochelle and Bonnie, while poor Nancy is locked up in
a mental institution. If it isn't already obvious, "The Craft" is more about fraught
and toxic relationships between women than female friends who actually empower each other.
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please
call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).