By rights, The Craft should seem dated now. There’s that mopey faux-shoegaze on the soundtrack , and the black PVC coat worn by Nancy (Fairuza Balk) a full three years before The Matrix made it standard neckbeard attire . There’s Sarah (Robin Tunney)’s unconvincing wig, worn after she shaved her hair off for Empire Records, which once you have seen, you cannot un-see for the duration of the film (it’s that little bit too bouncy, too full of witchy secrets…)But somehow The Craft is timeless, thanks in part to its familiarly ‘teenaged’ aesthetic. How many of us at some point rolled up a school skirt to make it shorter, or bought a pentagram necklace from a weird shop selling candles and bongs? How many of us smeared on Black Cherry lipstick, and accessorised it with a scowl?The Craft’s plot also strikes a universal note, in that the horrors the girls face are mundane. Sarah is the friendless new weird kid at school, wrists scarred from a suicide attempt. Nancy is labelled trailer trash and a “major slut” after falling for a feckless jock, who dumps her after she sleeps with him. Bonnie (Neve Campbell) is tormented by the burn scars on her back and shoulders–in one of the film’s more disturbing scenes she grits her teeth as treatment lasers pummel her back, her tragically hopeful mother seated beside her. Meanwhile Rochelle faces racist bullying from a girl on her diving team.Each of the girls is branded a monster long before they discover the occult. Magic becomes a refuge, binding them in friendship and shared ambition. Money, power, glory: their demands are simple and familiar, and everything a sad girl craves.Which makes it so much more painful when that magic works against them. Their powers offer control, until they become another token of adult responsibility, unwieldy in their hands. Power, vanity, even love corrupts, just as with Heathers, another film where we root for the teen rebels but are chastened by a morally ‘palatable’ ending, The Craft’s parting lesson is that what goes around comes back with a vengeance.The “Bitches of Eastwick” are made to suffer, none more than Nancy–she of the Betty Blue pout and Marla Singer hairdo–whose spellcasting brings about the death of her abusive stepfather and a life insurance payout for herself and her mother. More than the others, Nancy forges her own chaotic version of a left hand path . The coven’s clearest transgression comes in the beach scene, where Nancy walks on water and a series of dead sharks wash up on the sand.