The Kasturi/Files: Episodes 15 & 16: Spec Chic Smackdown! The Covenant vs The Craft!

It’s the Ides of October! The very hinge of the month! Welcome to Days 15 and 16 of The Kasturi/Files here at Speculative Chic! It’s a double-episode Spook-tacular! A Spec Chic SMACKDOWN! Could we use more exclamation points? Yes!!!!

We’re basically halfway through the month, and on a roll. To have some fun, we thought we’d revisit a couple of, well, silly but fun movies. It’s time for some of that Old Black Magic! While there might not be a nicer witch than you, there certainly are some goofier ones. Join us — Sandra Kasturi and Gemma Files — as we continue to chat about films, booze and books. Today we’re at Defcon 15 arguing about movies… that are not worth arguing about? (Okay, maybe… Defcon 2. Defcon 1.5.) Anyway, it’s boys vs girls in over-the-top magical high-school hijinks.

Gemma: Okay, guys, enough of this classic horror shit. Halloween is for fun, right? Time for a sexy teen witch/sexy teen warlock smackdown! The Covenant (2006, directed by Renny Harlin) vs. The Craft (1996, directed by Andrew Fleming)!

First off, get it straight: these are both undeniably lightweight movies, dumb young fun at the absolute most. Before I reminded myself that it’d been directed by former big budget pulpmeister Renny “You’re Finnish in this town” Harlin (Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger, The Long Kiss Goodnight), I thought for sure The Covenant must somehow be a mainstream reboot of the Brotherhood movies from David DeCouteau, a homoerotic straight-to-video softcore cheese-fest series that also happens to revolve around covens of hot, twink-escent dudes. The Craft meanwhile, annoys me on a personal level because it looks like a CW Network version of my own days — as a considerably less fashion-photo-shoot-perfect tweenage seeker in the realms of the occult. Especially given that my tastes back then ran more to saving my menstrual blood in a jar and cursing the girls who called me bad names, with homemade wax figures full of pins. Yes, that’s right — I liked it old school, and remain that one idiot who’s always sitting in the back of a movie about witchcraft trying to figure out what tradition the world-building derives from. Which, in the case of The Covenant, is… fuck if I know, considering that the entire film can essentially be boiled down to this one deathless line: “HARRY POTTER CAN KISS MY ASSSSSSS!!!”

Sandra: Oh, come on! It’s amazing! Renny Harlin can do no wrong! (And The Long Kiss Goodnight is my favorite Christmas movie. And Deep Blue Sea is my favorite shark movie. Long live Harlin!) Actually, he’s a decent director doing his best with flawed material. And annoying teens. Okay, okay, don’t get me wrong — these are both terrible movies. But they are hilariously fun and chock full of actors who went on to do other, way cooler things.

For example, from The Covenant, Stephen Strait grew up to star in the Game-of-Thrones-in-space sci-fi series, The Expanse. Sebastian Stan famously became Bucky in Captain America and the MCU. Jessica Lucas is the female lead on a cool little cop show called The Murders. Wendy Crewson is a perennial staple in all Canadian movies and TV shows EVER MADE. Taylor Kitsch of course was one of the headliners on the wonderful TV version of Friday Night Lights and played Gambit in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Chace Crawford did time on Gossip Girl and just starred as sleazy superhero The Deep on Amazon Prime’s awesome and fucked up The Boys. And Laura Ramsey went on to be a much better actress in things like The Ruins, which we talked about earlier this month.

Robin Tunney from The Craft, along with Liv Tyler and an unknown called Renee Zellweger, became Hollywood It Girls after they’d all starred in Empire Records. (Christine Taylor — from The Brady Bunch and other comedies, and also Ben Stiller’s ex — shows up in a small role and bitches around as a racist mean girl. Plus Skeet Ulrich!) Tunney of course went on to star in many other films, as well as popular TV shows like Prison Break and The Mentalist. Here, she’s the lead wannabe-witch, joined by Neve Campbell (star of Scream and much more), an awesomely crazed Fairuza Balk (Almost Famous, American History X, Valmont, etc.), and Rachel True (who’s still a working film actress and constant guest star on television, though never achieved the fame of the other three).

Interestingly (and sadly), there seems to be some retroactive (and current) racism going on; according to True, popular media are ignoring that she was even in The Craft, and only talk about the three other actresses. Given that the film’s magical workings rely on there being four girls, this seems insane, like some kind of bizarre race-erasure. Given she’s the only person of color in that whole movie, it’s kind of awful. As there’s talk about a reboot of The Craft, True’s exclusion from events and interviews certainly does seem “about white” as she puts it — and an echo of the original racism she dealt with when the movie first came out. More on that here. True also calls out genre conventions in general for being predominantly white.

Both of these movies do read as a kind of generational Who’s Who of talent who mostly went on to bigger and better things: it’s fascinating to see them here and see how young they all are. I’m also amused to find myself thinking of these films as being of the same era, and of a piece, but in fact, they were released a decade apart. But, back to the films at hand!

Gemma: While the four main girls in The Craft “are the weirdos, mister…” i.e. at the very bottom of their social scale, the four main guys in The Covenant are at the very top, socially privileged up the ass. Other kids at the prep school they rule refer to them as the Sons of Ipswich, pointing out that they’re all descendants of the five families who settled the original colony in the 1600s. (Always five, like the points on a pentagram; I swear I did not remember this before I wrote We Will All Go Down Together, though The Covenant‘s incredibly shitty world-building did occur to me as something to avoid while writing the novellas that complete my own story cycle.)

As played by two guys who have since become genre mainstays (Steven Strait and Sebastian Stan) and three guys who have all but vanished (Taylor Kitsch, Chace Crawford, Toby Hemingway), they’re all gorgeous, athletic, confident — and better yet, around age thirteen, they suddenly could do magic! Which, granted, they mainly use for stupid dude-bro crap like harassing cops, making big entrances at raves or blowing girls’ skirts up and betting on the result. But all of them also know that A) using magic is addictive and B) when they turn eighteen they’re going to become exponentially more powerful, except that with their power suddenly bound to their physicality(?), every time they use magic after that they will literally be chiseling away at their own life cycle, aging prematurely. For a relatively short-term rush, if “you really start to use” after “ascending” you’ll keep your soul but lose your hot young body and still live on, a bitter old young man. So not worth it.

Sandra: As a sidebar, I don’t think Kitsch and Crawford have vanished — as I mentioned above — but yeah, okay, Toby Hemingway doesn’t seem around much.

Gemma: We can argue about that later! Okay, so — not ritual magic, so much, as some sort of weird X-Men-style mutation to which New England’s history of witchcraft persecution has been haphazardly appended, so that Tomandandy’s remix of Rob Zombie’s “More Human Than Human” can be played at full volume over a woodcut-full credits montage? Oh, and I guess in this version of that history, the women (plus some men) who got killed at Salem were framed by guys who were just as horny and assholish as these ones, who used their own powers to fake spectral evidence? Like: “Hmm, Goody Weaver will not give me some, by which I mean some of her land, so I will use these stupid Christian superstitions to get rid of her! And her relatives. And her friends… oh shit, I’m aging…”

Ughhhhh. UNHOLY GOAT OF MENDES, THIS SHIT MAKES ME INSAAAAANE.

Sandra: I was talking to author Don Bassingthwaite about The Covenant the other day, and he said, “Ooooh, it’s so pretty….” And he’s right. It certainly looks lush, and everyone is terribly attractive, and it’s full of woods, dark and deep, and suitably Gothic New England Olde Buildinges. But the script is deeply flawed and, like you say, Gemma, the means by which magic exactly works is very confusing. Frankly, the whole thing doesn’t make a lick of sense. So, you can do magic until you’re eighteen, but after that it sucks your life-force? Or… it already sucks your life-force, but you’re basically using it anyway but showing no ill effects? Or it’s fine to use it if what you’re doing is just “minor” stuff like spying on women in the shower and pulling off other voyeuristic, borderline-sexual-assault shit? Then you’ll be okay?! But you can also “inherit” someone else’s powers, and then… no ill effects and you are all-powerful? I don’t understaaaaaaand… she wailed. Oh, Renny Harlin! You’re better than this.

You know I kept finding myself unable to shake the feeling that some pages went missing from the script for The Covenant. Or that the studio said, “It’s too long, you need to cut half an hour.” And so any worldbuilding or creating a magic system that made sense went totally out the window. I suppose it’s also possible that Renny Harlin said, “They’re good-looking. It’ll be fine.” Maybe he had a contractual obligation and just knocked it out as fast as he could so he could go on to more fun stuff, like Devil’s Pass (which I also liked). Who knows the arcane mysteries of Hollywood? Oh, I guess we should do a bit of movie recap. Gemma?

Gemma: The protagonist of The Covenant is Caleb Putnam (Strait), the eldest Son of Ipswich and soonest to ascend, who sort acts like a big brother to all the others — he’s the guy in charge of enforcing “the Covenant of Silence,” a rule most of the five families agreed upon after Salem went down: don’t splash your magic out enough to freak out the norms, or you get banished. This is what happened to one of Caleb’s own relatives, John Putnam, famous around Ipswich for never being able to keep it in his occult pants, lit or fig. He was banished, went away and promptly got hung for doing stuff like coming to women in the night as an incubus and putting insect-related spells on people.

Things really kick off in The Covenant when a guy named Chase Collins (Stan) comes to town, looking like he’s going to come between Caleb and his Boston transfer girlfriend Sarah (Laura Ramsey) — which is just a distraction, since what he really wants is Caleb. (Not, not like that; this movie ain’t that brave.) Chase is descended from John Putnam, which makes him Caleb’s older cousin, and has already ascended, but just so happens to have been using magic long before he was warned of the drawbacks; he’s addicted as hell, thus proving that eighteen really is six plus six plus six. He says he already tracked down his biological father and got him “will” him his power, which is what he now wants Caleb to do on the same night he’s due to ascend. Of course, doing it will kill Caleb, just like it killed Chase’s Dad — but then Chase won’t kill everyone Caleb loves, so… winner winner warlock dinner? “Why not go out a real hero?” he asks Caleb, who just glares at him smolderingly.

Female fan-service aside — apparently, they had to add a double hit of CGI steam in post because the shower scenes showed too much peen, high-ho, high-ho — The Covenant really is pretty freakin’ weak, when you come down to it. Stan chews the scenery beautifully, but his back story makes him about as sympathetic as a rich junkie who thinks he shouldn’t have to quit because… reasons? We never believe Caleb’s in danger, mainly because Sarah becomes the entire locus through which Chase threatens him, as if it’d just be WAY TOO GAY for them to touch directly. Hell, they even fight mainly using force-bursts. This is a movie so out of touch with the courage of its own convictions that it keeps having characters talk about seeing “darklings,” as though they’re afraid to use terms like ghost, doppelganger, fetch…. Then again, this was back when people in general were pussyfooting around the idea of Satan, trying to keep everything super-PG. Any random episode of Salem the TV series would have killed The Covenant’s audience dead.

Sandra: I know, I know. But somehow I can’t help but kind of have an amused enjoyment of its nonsense, even outside the post-pubescent man-candy. (Kind of like I can’t stop watching Justine Bateman in Satisfaction, another terrible film, but one I can’t look away from either.) It’s also fascinating to watch a film where the favored few, the over-privileged high-school bullies are kind of the heroes of the piece. It’s not even Gown vs. Town really, it’s Gown vs. Gown, for a nonsensical thrill-ride of fast cars and throwing people and objects around with one’s powers! I also can’t shake the feeling that Harlin stole a lot of cinematography from The Lost Boys (1987, directed by Joel Shumacher), to the point that I kept experiencing a weird kind of déjà vu, thinking I had seen certain scenes before, but not sure if it was because I had seen The Covenant before, or because they echoed scenes from The Lost Boys, or even other movies. Speaking of stealing, it also felt like Catherine Hardwicke (a much better director normally) kind of lifted scenes and atmosphere from The Covenant for Twilight. Can’t anyone make a genuinely new movie? But I still can’t stop watching. Maybe it’s just the simple fact that I love all movies involving witchcraft; whether they involve inherited powers or ones where you learn the craft.

Gemma: Speaking of craft (see what I did there?), in my opinion, The Craft is definitely a less silly film than The Covenant (though that wouldn’t exactly be hard), mainly because it bases its version of witchcraft on an actual tradition — Wicca with Santeria lashings, though they make up a nature-god named Manon for the central coven to invoke — and therefore has interesting things to say about balance, the Threefold Rule, the idea that your intentions inform your actions, especially when magic is involved.

Sarah (Robin Tunney) is still grieving her mother’s death, and recently tried to kill herself; she has to move because of her father’s work, so she switches schools, ending up at the same one as an incomplete coven of three: Nancy (Fairuza Balk, at the height of her spiky-toothed punk allure), Bonnie (Neve Campbell) and Rochelle (Rachel True). “Oh shit, it’s the Bitches of Eastwick,” local lothario Skeet Ulrich sneers, as they pass. Nancy identifies herself as trailer trash, while Bonnie suffers from a massive inferiority complex due to huge burn scars on her back, and Rochelle’s basic problem is that she’s a black girl in an otherwise all-white California Catholic school. (Why Catholic? The sexy uniforms, naturellement.)

Sandra: Ostensibly The Craft is about high-school difference and isolationism for those who are “other”: by virtue of race, appearance, disability, socioeconomic status, “sluttiness,” and the usual teen cruelty that pounces on any variance from the so-called norm, and uses it to eviscerate those who differ. And then the “losers” get their revenge on the “cool” kids. But also learn Valuable Lessons. Like . . . DUN DUN DUUUUUN . . . absolute power corrupts absolutely. And it’s important to have good hair. But, like The Covenant, it seems to me that The Craft also doesn’t have the courage of its convictions in the end. Nancy gets punished by losing her mind, Sarah recovers but retains her powers (though keeps them semi-secret), and the other two sort of… apologetically go back to “normal.” It feels like a limp ending. I kept wanting Fairuza Balk as Nancy to be the POV character, allow her to get her revenge, but have her come back from it, keep her powers and have her and Robin Tunney reach some sort of détente, or, hell, I don’t know. Stay enemies? Live to battle another day? They could have taken the route Joss Whedon used for the Willow-going-bad arc on Buffy. But I guess time constraints limit what you can do in a film vs a TV series. But that would have been a more interesting movie.

For me, the other (very personal) issue is that I never could bear Robin Tunney, who always seemed like kind of a not-very-interesting, blank-slate actress, who wasn’t even good enough to absorb and reflect the other much better performers back at themselves. Much like Bridesmaids would have been better without Kristen Wiig in it, The Craft would have done just fine without Tunney. But I guess you can’t just ditch the lead actress/main protagonist without serious fallout and rewriting. Maybe the reboot (if it happens) will be smarter? (But I confess I did love that “stiff as a board, light as a feather scene,” which capitalizes on teen-girl group-think and hysteria… and suggests that, with focus, it might have real power.)

If The Craft had been just a bit smarter, a bit more cleverly constructed, a bit better acted, it could have become a cult classic, on par with The Gift or The Ruins. Instead, it’s just a sort-of-engaging piece of teen fluff that is of its era, and fuel for occasional cosplay. Like you say, Gemma, oh, those Catholic Girl uniforms! And if The Covenant had been… a whole other movie, it would have been more enjoyable too.

To sum up, if you want to watch pretty people blasting each other with powers and behaving badly in high school, these are the movies for you! Watch them back to back and amuse yourself picking out all the tropes that get beaten into the ground! Argue with your friends about which is better! Worse! Schedule your own SMACKDOWN.

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Cocktail: Witchy Cocktails

Sandra: Really, you might need a restorative beverage while watching either of these movies, or maybe more than one if you’re watching both. So, here are a couple that seem apropos!

The Salem Witch Cocktail

Ingredients:

• 1/2 fluid ounce vodka
• 1/2 fluid ounce raspberry schnapps
• 1/2 fluid ounce melon liqueur
• 1 splash lime juice
• 1/4 cup sweet and sour mix
• 1 fluid ounce club soda
• 1 splash grenadine syrup

Directions: Fill a tall glass with ice, and pour in the first four ingredients. Add in the sour mix until the glass is 2/3 full and top off with soda water. Stir gently, then add a splash of grenadine to serve.

Honestly, this sounds a little sweet for my taste, and I’d be tempted to leave out the melon liqueur, but your own MMV.

The Bad Witch Cocktail

Ingredients:

• Ice cubes or ice sphere
• 2 ounces bourbon
• 3/4 ounce yellow Chartreuse
• 3/4 ounce honey simple syrup (Remember when we talked about simple syrup before? Just do that, but add a tablespoon of honey.)
• ¾ ounce fresh lime juice
• Pinch salt

Directions: Fill a short glass with ice cubes or a large ice sphere, if you’re fancy. Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker and fill with extra ice. Shake until chilled. Strain into cocktail glass twice, to make sure there are no floating bits. Or use a double-strainer/filter method. Personally, I’m a lazy drinker, so doubt I’d even bother.

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Book Recommendations

Sandra: Obviously, I am going to recommend Gemma’s book from ChiZine: We Will All Go Down Together, her interconnected stories about the Five-Family Coven, full of emigrée witches from the Old Country, messed-up changelings, and monster-killing nuns. I’d also recommend Susie Moloney’s The Thirteen  — a kind of gonzo, mirror-universe, occult version of The Stepford Wives, with a dash of Stephen King thrown in. I confess that I reviewed that book for The Globe & Mail, and later editions of it actually used my quote on the cover! So exciting.

I can’t help but mention Discovery of Witches here, because it’s SO TERRIBLE, that you almost have to read it, because you simply might not believe me otherwise (and it fits the level of nonsense we’re talking about today). Here’s what I said about it before.

The criminally unsung Bernard Taylor wrote a lot of terrific supernatural novels (in particular, his ghost story, Sweetheart, Sweetheart is fantastic). His take on the occult and ritual magic, The Reaping, is similarly a wonderful read, though perhaps a little over the top at times. Er . . . ignore the one with the demonic fetus on the cover. It’s not really indicative of the content. Oh 1980s! Where would paperbacks be without you?

And finally, The Little Broomstick by Mary Stewart. (You might have to go to abebooks.com to get a copy.) Long before Hogwarts, Mary Stewart created Endor College, a school for witches and wizards. Sly and funny, cleverly plotted and thrilling, this wonderful children’s book remains one of my favorites — combining adventure, magic, and kids rescuing animals. Best!

Gemma: Great recs! I’m on board with all of them, especially my book. 😉

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Sandra Kasturi is the publisher of ChiZine Publications, winner of the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and HWA Specialty Press Awards. She is the co-founder of the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium and the Executive Director of the Chiaroscuro Reading Series, and a frequent guest speaker, workshop leader, and panelist at genre conventions. Sandra is also an award-winning poet and writer, with work appearing in various venues, including Amazing Stories, Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales, Prairie Fire, several Tesseracts anthologies, Evolve, Chilling Tales, ARC Magazine, Taddle Creek, Abyss & Apex, Stamps, Vamps & Tramps, and 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin. She recently won the Sunburst Award for her short story, “The Beautiful Gears of Dying,” in the anthology The Sum of Us. Her two poetry collections are: The Animal Bridegroom (with an introduction by Neil Gaiman) and Come Late to the Love of Birds. Sandra is currently working on another poetry collection, Snake Handling for Beginners, a story collection, Mrs. Kong & Other Monsters, and a novel, Wrongness: A False Memoir. She is fond of red lipstick, gin & tonics, and Idris Elba.

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Formerly a film critic, journalist, screenwriter and teacher, Gemma Files has been an award-winning horror author since 1999. She has published two collections of short work, two chap-books of speculative poetry, a Weird Western trilogy, a story-cycle and a stand-alone novel (Experimental Film, which won the 2016 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the 2016 Sunburst award for Best Adult Novel). Most are available from ChiZine Publications. She has two new story collections from Trepidatio (Spectral Evidence and Drawn Up From Deep Places), one upcoming from Cemetery Dance (Dark Is Better), and a new poetry collection from Aqueduct Press (Invocabulary).