Park your broomsticks and fire up your cauldrons, the trailer for The Craft sequel has been conjured. Directed and written by Zoe Lister-Jones and produced by Blumhouse Productions and Red Wagon Entertainment, The Craft: Legacy continues 20 years after the original.
Similar to the original, The Craft: Legacy follows Hannah (Cailee Spaeny) as she moves house and school with her mum (Michelle Monaghan) to be with her new step-father (David Duchovny). Following a period-based embarrassment in the middle of class, Hannah is befriended by a trio of girls: Gideon Aldon, Lovie Simone and Zoey Luna. They invite her to take a ceremonial bath to ‘celebrate her’. In a blush pink tub surrounded by flowers and sparkling lights, a coven for 2020 is born.
In a series of flashing insights, the film follows a similar story to The Craft. The coven begins to explore their powers, levitating during sleepovers and hexing boys (haven’t we all tried that?) before things begin to take a dark turn – usually with one witch at the helm. With Douglas Wick as producer and Alan Fleming as executive producer, both involved with the original film, The Craft: Legacy is joined at the hip to its predecessor. The girls can be heard chanting ‘light as a feather, stiff as a board’, congregating in a forest to work their magic, and at the end of the trailer, we hear the infamous exchange: “Be careful, lot of weirdos out here,” warns Duchovny. The response: “We are the weirdos mister.” Fairuza Balk of the original also makes an appearance, albeit in polaroid form.
Wick states that “we wouldn’t so much call it a remake as a ’20 years later’.” He’s also said will explore the same themes as the 1996 film, those of “female empowerment and young women discovering their sexuality”. Whether other themes from the original, such as poverty and racism will be included is yet to be seen, but they’d be equally relevant in the modern-day as they were in the ’90s.
As a devotee of the original, I confess some scepticism. From the outset, the trailer lacks much of the darkness the original had (I even watched the original trailer for comparison’s sake). The magic is light, flowers, crystals and sparkling eye make-up added with the wave of a hand. Whether the light set up will make the descent into darkness even more startling and cinematic, we’ll have to wait and see.
The Craft: Legacy will be released 28th October.
Words by James Reynolds