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‘The Craft’: The New Series Is Not A Remake, It’s A Reboot or Sequel

By Skinner Bachs
Published on: 01:41 PST, May 5, 2016

The Craft turns 20 this week, and is the subject of a remake — or not. This time, it will be a series rather than a big screen feature, and showrunners claim the 2016 edition is not a remake, but a sequel or reboot with a present-day setting.

Douglas Wick, who is producing the series, has history with the original movie. He was one of the producers in 1996. In an interview with Hitfix about The Craft, he asserted that the series would not be a remake, but a sequel with connections to the source material.

“I wouldn’t say that we wouldn’t so much call it a remake as a ‘twenty years later.’ There will be callbacks to the original movie, so you will see there is a connection between what happened in the days of The Craft, and how these young women come across this magic many years later.”

Wick might be enthusiastic about a reboot series version of The Craft, but two of the 20-year-old movie’s coven of baby mages have reservations about the new series. In the same Hitfix article, Rachel True, who played Rochelle, stated she wants to be supportive, but wonders why the powers that be in Hollywood won’t conjure up another witch story. She added that fans of The Craft would be interested in finding out what happened to the girls once they grew up.

Making The Craft was the source of many happy memories for Neve Campbell, who played Holly in the original film. She told the U.K. website Metro that she recently reminisced about working on the movie with co-star, Skeet Ulrich. While she admits she is excited about Sony’s reboot series, she thinks it would be more interesting to make a new story altogether.

As noted in a recent article by Sinead Stubbins of the A.V. Club, The Craft was more than just a horror movie about pretty girls calling up demons. The teens in The Craft were wrangling elemental powers but the real demons they tangled with were of the inner variety. Their actions were manifesting adolescent rage at the social minefield of high school that most teenagers felt at one time or another or constantly.

Being an outcast was not a new theme 20 years ago and it still drives many movies aimed at young people today. Screenrant reports that while Wick is still working the magic angle, he sees the “series sequel” as a psychological study of teen girls.

“Here are some young women who once again discover the power of magic, and we explore their emotional lives, their wants, their fears, their longings, as they become empowered. So you know, the same way you use a war movie to explore the psyche of men, you get to create a heightened world to explore the psyche of these women.”

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Magic mixed with teen angst spoke to many girls in 1996. The Craft’s success paved the way for Sabrina, The Teenage Witch, a much lighter take on the subject and the publishing blockbuster status of Silver Ravenwolf’s Teen Witch books and kits franchise.

It remains to be seen if today’s teenagers will find some aspect of their own lives reflected in a version of The Craft created for their generation. If the remake (or sequel or reboot) does strike a chord with a new audience, thirty- to forty-somethings who loved the original movie might see a new crop of young ladies donning pentagrams and seeking out their own magic circles in the near future.

[Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images]

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