The Craft: Legacy is the latest Blumhouse film starring Cailee Spaeny, Lovie Simone, Zoey Luna, Gideon Adlon, Michelle Monaghan, and David Duchovny. This film continues the story of the Craft witches but for a new generation. The Craft: Legacy manages to pay homage to the original The Craft while very much forging its own identity and voice. Director Zoe Lister-Jones succeeds at giving new Craft fans their own heroes while showing respect and appreciation for the cast and crew of the original film. The Craft: Legacy ending really helps merge the old and new.
Let us explore The Craft: Legacy ending and its connection to the original film and how that adds some new layers to this story and makes us want to see where the Legacy takes us next.
Warning spoilers ahead about The Craft: Legacy ending. Turn back now if you want to be unspoiled. Blessed be.
Lily’s Mother And The Original Craft
The Craft: Legacy ends with Lily (Cailee Spaeny) going to meet her birth mother. She enters what seems like a psych ward. She then explains to the woman that she’s her daughter, and we see Nancy (Fairuza Balk) turn around to face her. The Craft fans will remember that Nancy was last seen in a psychiatric facility after she took on Sarah (Robin Tunney) and had her powers bound, resulting in the complete loss of magic powers.
The Craft: Legacy immediately ends after viewers see Nancy. We’re left with a million questions. Lily learns towards the end of the movie that Helen (Michelle Monaghan) isn’t her birth mother and that she was adopted, a secret Helen kept from Lily all her life. All Helen tells Lily about Nancy was that Helen helped her when she was in the crisis center and that Nancy asked that she never reveal the truth about her lineage to Lily.
Now because Nancy very much still seems to be locked away, and the combined details of Nancy experiencing trauma, we can assume that Lily’s father isn’t a good guy. The relationship could have been either an abusive one or the product of some sort of sexual assault, which seems the most likely outcome considering the fact that Nancy probably isn’t meeting eligible bachelors in a psych ward.
We saw so little of Nancy that we can’t really figure out the mental and emotional state and whether she’s a good or bad witch now, or still no witch at all.
How Lily And Her Friends Defeated Adam
The other major reveal from The Craft Legacy ending was that Adam (David Duchovny), Helen’s boyfriend, was actually an evil warlock out to destroy Lily and all women, especially those of the witch variety. Throughout the movie, Adam shows signs of being not the best guy, like writing a whole book about masculinity and calling Timmy (Nicholas Galitzine) weak for killing himself. The big unveiling comes when he shapeshifts into Helen to get Lily to give him her powers. She immediately knows that her mother would never ask her to do that.
Adam must reveal his true form and the battle begins. Lily starts to fight with Adam alone, but then Frankie (Gideon Adlon), Tabby (Lovie Simone), and Lourdes (Zoey Luna) show up to unbind her and take on Adam.
The girls use a bag of witch tricks, like summoning elements to take on this evil dude. They eventually burn him and the order is restored.
How The Craft Legacy Differs From The Original Movie
The Craft: Legacy has many elements that give nods to the original, like using direct quotes: “We are the weirdos, mister” and “blessed be.” It also even mentions things like Manon, the necessity of four witches to represent the four elements and four directions. And it starts with a very 90s song, “Hand In My Pocket” by Alanis Morissette, to give a little tribute to the decade of The Craft. The presence of the original film is very much felt throughout the movie, but it does a lot of things completely different than the original.
The original Craft had the girls turning against each other but this one shows that they’re stronger together. The whole film takes a very girl-power stance, which was the aim of Zoe Lister-Jones. In an interview with Vanity Fair, she had this to say about the intentions of The Craft: Legacy:
No shade to the original—and women are allowed to be villains—but ultimately it was about women whose power was too overwhelming for them to harness and was turned on each other ... the message that I want to put into the universe is that there is no power too great for women to harness and that we always need to be wary of turning that power on each other.
The Craft: Legacy also shows more of an evolution of powers. The witches in this movie can do a lot more than we saw with the original Craft film. They can shapeshift (eventually), read auras, use elements as weapons, telepathically communicate, and freeze time. We also see an expansion of the Craft magic and universe, because the only witches we saw in the original were Sarah, Nancy, Rochelle (Rachel True), Bonnie (Neve Campbell), and possibly Lirio (Assumpta Serna). Now The Craft: Legacy added the possibility of male witches with Adam.
Additionally, Tabby, Lily, Frankie, and Lourdes feel very much like their own characters, with their own unique diverse backgrounds and not just copies of Bonnie, Rochelle, Sarah, and Nancy. Even with Nancy being Lily’s mother, the characters feel nothing alike.
The Craft: Legacy feels like it exists in The Craft world but a more modern version that’s relevant to issues faced by today’s young women and girls.
Could This Be The Start Of More Craft Movies?
The Craft: Legacy left us with way more questions than answers. The first one involves Nancy. What happens next for Nancy and Lily? We see them meet but we don’t know if it’s a happy reunion, or if Nancy wants nothing to do with her birth daughter. We also don’t know if Nancy’s mental stability is still all over the place and if she’s still bound without powers. The film also left us with questions about Adam’s boys. Do they have powers too?
They were basically background characters in the movie, but I wanted to know more about them. We also didn’t learn anything about their mother. With Adam dead (presumably), who takes care of them? Their mother? Another relative? Helen somehow? We want to know more about them and if and how they come into their own powers. They all seemed fine as people, just messed up from their father’s bad influence.
The way The Craft: Legacy set up the ending and tone, it felt like the story could easily continue in future films, or better yet, as a Craft TV show. I would love to see these questions answered and learn more of the lives of Lily, Tabby, Lourdes, and Frankie. I think whether we get a sequel of The Craft: Legacy or a television series depends on how it’s received and whether it has good VOD sales.
I personally would love to see The Craft: Legacy turned into a Hulu series, and then maybe they can also bring back Timmy (R.I.P.) as a ghost. Still not okay with how he got “woke” and died.
The Craft: Legacy is a fun movie that’s a little lighter than the original The Craft, but has a great message about female empowerment, and it carves its own identity but pays respect to its witch sisters who paved the way for this story. The Craft: Legacy is available to rent or purchase at your favorite video on demand service. Rent or purchase it here.
