In 1996 a supernatural horror film called The Craft was released. It told the story of four teenage witches as they discovered the depths of their power as well as the corrupting nature of it and one another. In 2020, Blumhouse released The Craft: Legacy, a film with spurious ties to the original, that was also labelled as a supernatural horror film despite being less horror focused than an episode of Charmed.
To give the film credit, it is decently shot and the actors are doing the best with what they were given. Thus ends the complimentary points.
This film is holding on tight to the original’s coattails. While usually with these types of films, one should try and see it for its own merits it’s hard when it relies so heavily on nostalgia. It outright quotes one of the original’s most iconic lines near the end and the opening scenes mirror the original, showing a trio of girls at an altar before switching to a zoom through clouds with the title in bright yellow. While the original’s opening gave an aura of intrigue as the viewer witnessed the girls in the middle of a ritual, setting a tone of darkness and mysticism around the magic, Legacy feels more like something lifted out of a CW supernatural drama. This is something that is maintained through the film, the use of magic is very casual and has a throwaway quality to it. Later scenes of the coven practicing are shown to a music backed montage with their powers including effects that are less impressive than those in Little Mix’s Black Magic video.
2020 Blumhouse Productions
The main flaws of the film are tone, characters and plot, as well as a lack of subtlety throughout. There is a running theme throughout of female power, which is an excellent theme to explore and something that comes up frequently in witch media. However it’s done so incredibly lazily here. Reminiscent of the 2019 Black Christmas remake, where sorority sisters fight against a cult of misogynistic fraternity brothers, the antagonist here is men. Pretty much every male character is shown either making comments disregarding sexual assault, mocking a female character over her period after she bleeds through her pants and jeans (fairly certain she would have felt her pants being damp) or, in the case of the film’s big bad (who is a big bad let down) trying to physically steal the lead character’s power from her. The one main male character who treats the female characters decently only does so following a spell. The female vs male theme goes all the way to character’s name as we have central character Lilith up against antagonist Adam, who also has a trio of sons with biblical names.
Adam is an antagonist in the very loosest sense of the word. He has very little screen time before the final confrontation and it’s never really made clear what the situation is with him. A throwaway line implies he’s a warlock and it’s not clarified if his sons also are, but all he really gets to do is spout some very forced lines about women backstabbing one another and being subservient. He then gets burned alive in what is meant as an obvious comparison (made clear by Lilith stating ‘now it’s your turn to burn’) to the witch trials… despite witches historically being hung, drowned, or crushed with rocks and never actually burned.
The other characters aren’t much more interesting. Outside of Lily, the three other witches are pretty indistinguishable from one another. I didn’t even know their names until I looked them up and even then I wasn’t sure which witch was which. The one scene where they are actually granted some emotional depth was interesting and allowed for a brief look at their morality, showing them with a little more shading but outside of that they’re just… there.
2020 Blumhouse Productions
This feeling of being present for no reason extends to the plot as well. The original dealt with themes of race but here that’s reduced to a line where one of the coven, Tabby, expresses fear for her younger brother. That’s the extent of it. Similarly, sexuality comes up at one point where a character reveals himself to be bi and that he previously had sex with one of Adam’s sons. He’s then promptly dispatched off screen and the topic never gets brought up again. The film does that quite a lot, creating potential plot points and then never doing anything with them. It feels like the writers threw a bunch of story ideas at a wall and included all the ones that stuck. Some are used for cheap one off scares, like a character sleepwalking or Lily having a bad dream full of snakes and knives as a harbinger of doom.
One such abandoned plot point involves Lily’s parentage as she’s revealed in the very last scene to be the daughter of Nancy Downs, the antagonist of the original. This raises some questions (Nancy appears to still be in the insane asylum she was left in so quite how she became pregnant is up in the air) and is also a completely wasted idea. With a title like ‘Legacy’, a better direction would have been to explore the idea of not being defined by family or blood. Lily shows signs of some reckless magic usage, similar to her mother, which could have been a catalyst to look at her heritage and her struggle against the corruption her magic could present. Instead, the viewer is left with perhaps the biggest question of all… why did this need to be ‘The Craft: Legacy’ when it did nothing with this connection? As with the Child’s Play reboot, sometimes these things work better as a stand-alone entity. At least then it doesn’t get compared to the original and found to be far weaker in comparison.
This film was a disappointment in so many ways. A spell made up of missed opportunities, poorly thought out plots and one dimensional characters that led to predictably messy results.
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