I was eight years old when The Craft came out in 1996. I remember seeing the VHS on the shelves of the video store for years and then finally
picking it out when I was in sixth grade.

There’s something special about The Craft for me — even now. I know that it’s just another ’90s teen movie, but it’s much more than that.

The Craft
is about a group of four southern California girls who are witches. Three of them practiced witchcraft together before the new girl, Sarah (Robin Tunney),
came to town. After observing her natural magical powers, they ask her to join their coven. The four of them are able to do real and big magic together,
until Nancy (Fairuza Balk), the group’s leader, becomes too power-hungry and squares off against Sarah in a battle of the witches.

I’d seen other teen movies like She’s All That and Never Been Kissed before I saw The Craft — they were staples at sleepovers,
along with Grease. And all of them told me the same things. If you’re weird, you’re never going to get a boyfriend. If you’re weird and smart,
what you truly and secretly want is to be popular and pretty.

The Craft
is different. There isn’t a boy who falls in love with the weird girl and makes her want to change — Sarah casts a love spell on a boy and when it works, she
realizes she doesn’t actually want him at all. No one undergoes a makeover that makes the whole school see that underneath the glasses, the weird girl is
actually beautiful. This is a movie about misfits who are always misfits. They don’t get the boy and they don’t get popularity because it’s not about the
boy or being popular.

Each of the witches in The Craft has something personal that she’s struggling with. Though these struggles aren’t the focus of the film, they’re
not simple problems. Bonnie was burned badly as a child and has scars covering most of her back that she is ashamed of. Rochelle is the subject of bullying
and racism on her swim team. Nancy attends a fancy, private school with all the other girls, but she lives in a trailer park with an alcoholic mother and
her abusive boyfriend. Sarah is recovering from depression and a suicide attempt, all while starting at a new high school. In another movie, each of these
would be worthy of a central plot. But in The Craft they’re all thrown together, background to a larger story about rebellion and empowerment.

Like many young girls, I didn’t feel a lot of power over my life or over growing up. That wasn’t something I could have articulated if you’d asked me, but
it’s true. I loved The Craft from the first time I saw it. There was something to seeing girls just like me have power. Not just power over boys,
the way some teen movies try to frame power, but actual power to change things. In a world where girls are told they have to change to get what they
want — the boy, being pretty, being popular — here were girls changing the world around them to make it more like what they wanted.

The witches of The Craft are weird. They’re misfits and outsiders. And not one of them seems to care. Narratives about young outsiders are mostly
male-centric — there are a lot more Holden Caulfields in literature, film, and music than there are Esther Greenwoods. Growing up is hard — and teens turn to
pop culture to find narratives that resonate with them to give them a map for how to do it. Young female characters often aren’t given the same freedoms
that young male characters are — to explore, to be outsiders who don’t want to come in, to crave something perhaps darker and more subversive than the status
quo. The Craft gives its young women room to be different.

Witches are currently having something of a pop culture moment — which I couldn’t be happier about — and movies like

Carrie

are showing us again what’s exciting about seeing women and girls with power. The young women in films like Carrie and The Craft are
allowed outside of socially accepted boundaries because they’ve forced their own way there.

This summer I was with a childhood friend. “Do you remember that weird movie you made me watch? About witches?” she asked me. Of course I do. I showed it
to my friends often, hoping they would see what I saw in it. I even did it in college. I wanted to show it to another girl and have her look at me with
recognition. I wanted us to share the power together.

There’s a scene in The Craft in which the four girls go on a bus ride into the countryside to cast some spells. As they get off the bus, the bus
driver tells them, “You girls watch out for those weirdos.” Nancy answers, “We are the weirdos, mister.” It’s my favorite moment in the movie because it
encapsulates everything that’s special about it: the brave rebellion of a group of misfit girls trying to make a world that suits them instead of molding
themselves to suit the world, and the empowerment that comes along with it — even if it is just magic.

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Dahlia Grossman-Heinze enjoys horror films, Prince, Bruce Springsteen, David Lynch, and girl bands almost equally. She is the social media intern at Feministing. She is a Portlander at heart, now living in Chicago. You can follow her on Instagram
@grossmad and on tumblr.