In the 1990s, The Craft was to Goth girls what Clueless was to popular girls: an acknowledgment that your fashion choices were totally legit, and that choker DOES look good on you. Also like Clueless, The Craft has maintained an affectionate nostalgia over the years, which is now being revisited in the form of a sequel, The Craft: Legacy. Written and directed by Zoe Lister-Jones (probably best known as Fawn Moscato on New Girl, but her feature directorial debut, Band Aid, is charming), The Craft: Legacy is a sequel to The Craft, about a new coven of girls using and abusing witchcraft at their high school.
The trailer has everything you expect from The Craft, including obnoxious boys, Ouija boards, and “light as a feather” (I was SO MAD when that didn’t work!). It’s a sequel, but based on the trailer it looks like a remake, down to the new girl in school and “We are the weirdoes”. I’m getting “soft reboot” vibes here more than “straight sequel”, but there is a tease of Fairuza Balk in the trailer, so maybe the movie will put “Legacy” to work and have some direct connection to the previous film. It would be fine if it doesn’t, it’s just confusing for the film to bill itself as a sequel but look like a remake. You always want to be careful of creating false expectations, audiences do not like to be tricked by movie marketing.
Speaking of audiences, this film will have a big one as it will premiere on video on demand on October 28. Legacy is produced by Blumhouse and they don’t make big-budget films, so undoubtedly this is right in the sweet spot of a low enough budget to do well on VOD. It’s also a good call to drop it right before Halloween, giving people stuck at home this year a new (“new”) horror movie to watch, though it is a bit strange Blumhouse will be competing with itself in October with their Amazon-exclusive tetralogy of horror movies debuting all month. The other big Halloween movie is Netflix’s new Adam Sandler comedy (“comedy”), Hubie Halloween. Of all of these movies, The Craft: Legacy—sequel, remake, whatever—looks the best by a mile.
