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Archive Photos/Moviepix/Getty Images(SeaPRwire) - In 2026, teenage girls have a wider selection of horror movies than ever before. Most recently, Forbidden Fruits was created specifically for this demographic, which was previously underserved, as I noted in Inverse’s review of the film. However, a decade before "girl horror" was even conceived, one horror movie was immensely popular among witchy teenage girls everywhere.The Craft was released on May 3, 1996, and received mixed reviews, primarily from male critics. Despite this, it became a sleeper hit at the box office, cultivating a devoted cult following that expanded significantly after its release on VHS and DVD in the summer of 1997. This is how I first encountered The Craft, at a slumber party in the late ‘90s, where we attempted to play “light as a feather, stiff as a board” after watching the movie. While no one floated a few feet off the ground like Rochelle (Rachel True) did in the film, I could have sworn I felt my friend’s body becoming lighter as we continued to chant. Were my fingers simply going numb? Likely. But it felt magical nonetheless.This is one of the aspects that makes The Craft so remarkable: Just as the film's slumber-party scene—which also features a memorable moment where Robin Tunney’s character, Sarah, magically changes her hair color from auburn red to blonde—inspired us to replicate what we saw on screen, the rituals depicted in the film also served as a guide for aspiring witches. Through a friend who owned an occult shop, Lirio’s Occult Shop in downtown L.A., where the characters are seen browsing in several scenes, director Andrew Fleming enlisted Dianic Priestess Pat Devin to assist with the film’s magical elements. Having been a teen witch herself, she agreed. Thanks to Devin’s involvement, The Craft offers a fairly accurate portrayal of Wiccan spells and ceremonies as they were practiced in the mid-’90s, with one notable exception: Mannon is not a real Wiccan deity. (Devin stated that she did not want "hordes of teenagers running down to the beach or out to the woods invoking anybody real.")All sleepovers end this way. | Peter Iovino/Columbia/Kobal/ShutterstockIn the early days of the internet, this kind of information was much more difficult to access, especially in smaller towns and cities that lacked their own occult stores. This added an element of mystique to the film, though inspiring aspiring Goth girls to embrace their darker sides wasn't the sole reason for its appeal to teenage viewers. Another significant connection The Craft offered its young audience was its depiction of a difficult rite of passage experienced by many teenagers, even those not interested in witchcraft: the dissolution of a friend group.While most high-school bullies lack the destructive capabilities of coven leader Nancy (Fairuza Balk), it can feel that way when your friends suddenly decide they dislike you, grounding the film's supernatural horror in relatable, real-world emotions. There's a reason why multiple generations of teenagers have connected with these characters: When you feel alienated from your peers, your friends become your entire world. And losing that feels as dramatic as the movie's climax appears.Rachel True in 2023. | Arnold Turner/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty ImagesThe character of Rochelle has been particularly influential. Despite being excluded from the film's publicity in 1996, Rachel True's portrayal of a young Black witch discovering her powers—and her candidness about her experiences with racism in Hollywood—have established her as an icon among witches and horror fans of color. As a practicing witch herself, she even released her own Tarot deck, True Heart Intuitive Tarot, in 2020.All these elements combine to give The Craft an aura of magic, something that many subsequent witch-themed movies and TV series have attempted to replicate. While some have succeeded, if you're looking for a movie that the entire coven can enjoy, The Craft remains unparalleled.The Craft is available for rent on Prime Video and other digital platforms. This article is provided by a third-party content provider. SeaPRwire (https://www.seaprwire.com/) makes no warranties or representations regarding its content. Category: Top News, Daily News SeaPRwire provides global press release distribution services for companies and organizations, covering more than 6,500 media outlets, 86,000 editors and journalists, and over 3.5 million end-user desktop and mobile apps. SeaPRwire supports multilingual press release distribution in English, Japanese, German, Korean, French, Russian, Indonesian, Malay, Vietnamese, Chinese, and more.

Universal/Kobal/Shutterstock(SeaPRwire) - The early 1930s Hollywood horror craze spawned some of the genre’s most cherished and impactful films. Though every studio in town dabbled in horror, Universal—home to the iconic monsters—mastered the formula uniquely. Everyone recognizes Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, and their counterparts. But among those iconic figures were numerous underrated treasures, such as the 1934 film The Black Cat. It ranks among the best of its time. The 1941 remake, however? Not nearly as good.Adapted from an Edgar Allan Poe short story, the original The Black Cat centers on a naive American couple on their honeymoon in Hungary. They meet Dr. Vitus Werdegast, a psychiatrist with a shadowy history, and together, they seek shelter in the home of renowned architect Hjalmar Poelzig—someone Werdegast is determined to take revenge on.Billed extensively back then as the much-anticipated showdown between Boris Karloff and Béla Lugosi—two of Universal’s top horror stars—The Black Cat is an unexpectedly twisted film. It’s far grimmer than most of its peers, featuring a plot involving illegal drugs, abduction, torture, and human sacrifice, which peaks with Lugosi’s character flaying Karloff’s alive (a scene depicted entirely in shadow, making it all the more unsettling). It’s astonishing that The Black Cat hit theaters in this form, considering the Hays Code was being strictly enforced around that time and usually wouldn’t let such a deranged work escape censorship.The movie was a major success, but as the decade progressed, the Hays Code made it increasingly difficult for horror films to be as edgy as they needed to be, leading to a decline in their popularity. They didn’t vanish entirely, but between the Code’s restrictions and audiences growing tired of overcrowded markets, a change was necessary. Over at Paramount, executives found success with a mix of horror and comedy—their 1939 Bob Hope-starring film The Cat and the Canary was a big hit. Universal had some experience in this genre blend too: 1933’s The Invisible Man is a horror film, but it also includes slapstick humor, plenty of dark comedy, and jokes about nudity. So the studio decided to try lightning in the same bottle again, reusing the Poe story that had given them a hit just a decade earlier. They also brought Lugosi back for a supporting role to help audiences link the new film to the old one.The 1941 version of The Black Cat bears little resemblance to Poe’s original story. Henrietta Winslow, a woman who loves cats, invites her greedy relatives to her estate to settle her will. Her niece, granddaughters, and their partners are eager to get their hands on the money immediately and are willing to do whatever it takes. Enter chaos. And cats, naturally.The Black Cat barely resembles the Poe story, much less the much-better 1934 film. | Moviestore/ShutterstockThis iteration of The Black Cat has some enjoyable concepts, playing with classic theatrical conventions and a traditional spooky house setting. But the screenplay is a disaster—a haphazard, rushed piece that feels like it never left the draft phase. It’s sluggish, the horror elements aren’t particularly frightening, and the jokes fall flat. Each of its mismatched genre components is poorly executed, a far cry from Universal’s capabilities at the time. Turning a horror-comedy into a murder mystery seems like a bad idea when the climactic reveal is so hurried and unfulfilling. The only thing holding it together (just barely) is the cast: Lugosi, Basil Rathbone (then famous for his Sherlock Holmes roles), Oscar winner Gale Sondergaard, and Anne Gwynne—an early scream queen and Chris Pine’s grandmother! However, making the film wasn’t a pleasant experience for them. Sondergaard later said she "hated doing the thing. It was beneath me." Critics shared her sentiment.In the same year as the The Black Cat remake, Universal put out Hold That Ghost—a horror-comedy starring the beloved comedic pair Abbott and Costello. This film was a much bigger hit and launched an entire franchise where the duo starred alongside Universal’s monsters, including Frankenstein, the Invisible Man, and Jekyll and Hyde. These movies were tailored to the pair’s established comedic style, so audiences were already predisposed to enjoy them. They were crafted around their strengths, whereas The Black Cat felt like a blatant copy of something audiences didn’t want.Horror-comedy is a fantastic mix when done right—take Jordan Peele’s films, The Evil Dead series, or Apple TV’s new Widow’s Bay, for example. There’s plenty of potential in balancing humor and darkness, and vice versa. Universal had nailed this blend before and would do so again after The Black Cat. Unfortunately, with this remake, the studio lacked the courage to fully commit to the genre mix, resulting in a minor Universal monster film that can’t hold a candle to its delightfully bizarre original. This article is provided by a third-party content provider. SeaPRwire (https://www.seaprwire.com/) makes no warranties or representations regarding its content. Category: Top News, Daily News SeaPRwire provides global press release distribution services for companies and organizations, covering more than 6,500 media outlets, 86,000 editors and journalists, and over 3.5 million end-user desktop and mobile apps. SeaPRwire supports multilingual press release distribution in English, Japanese, German, Korean, French, Russian, Indonesian, Malay, Vietnamese, Chinese, and more.

LMPC/LMPC/Getty Images (SeaPRwire) - By 1961, the notorious Ed Wood had abandoned all hopes of breaking into Hollywood, following the flop of his Psycho-inspired ripoff The Sinister Urge the year prior, which pushed him to shift toward an exploitation circuit that suited his one-of-a-kind skills far better. Spotting an opening for low-budget genre films that intentionally ignored logic, working actor Coleman Francis made the jump to directing for a chaotic blend of Cold War espionage, boogeyman horror, and nuclear protest movie—one that made Wood look like a master of his craft by comparison. It doesn’t take long for The Beast of Yucca Flats, named for the actual irradiated location, to leave viewers completely bewildered. In the first proper scene, we learn the Soviet Union, a country hardly known for being reserved, had kept secret that it had beaten the United States to the first moon landing. And after defecting to their fiercest rivals, their top “renowned scientist” Joseph Javorsky (Tor Johnson) is now being hunted by the KGB before he can reveal this unbelievable secret. What follows is an endlessly long chase sequence that starts when he lands at the airfield and ends in the middle of the Nevada desert. Despite the area having almost no signage or security measures, it just so happens to host a nuclear facility. And in an incredible stroke of bad luck, Javorsky arrives right as their latest test sends up a cloud of radioactive smoke. Thus, The Beast of Yucca Flats is born. You might notice that by this point, none of the characters have spoken. In fact, it takes roughly a third of the way through the 54-minute film for a character to speak at all—even then, their lines are delivered off-screen. Francis shot the movie like a silent film, though there’s a rumor he simply lost the original soundtrack, but lacked the ability or willingness to sync the dubbed dialogue to the actors’ on-screen faces. As a result, all of the film’s dialogue is either spoken out of frame or from a distance. That doesn’t mean The Beast of Yucca Flats is a quiet experience, though. There’s an overbearing orchestral score that rarely matches the action unfolding on screen. The same goes for the ominous narrator who keeps popping up to deliver exposition, but whose stiff, confusing riddles—delivered as if they were run through Google Translate back and forth—leave viewers even more baffled than before. “Boys from the city not yet caught by the whirlwind of progress. Feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs,” is just one of these unhinged non-sequiturs; “Flag on the moon. How did it get there?,” is another. Joseph Javorsky in his monstrous form. | Cinema Associates Of course, the overall vibe of disorienting audio and visuals is established in the cold open. Here, a loud, distracting ticking clock plays as an unidentified, scantily clad woman is strangled in her motel room by a mysterious attacker. Amazingly, this murder (and the implied necrophilia) has no connection to the rest of the film and is never referenced again. Francis included this scene purely as a cheap attention grab that let him show bare breasts, a brazen example of Hollywood’s history of marginalizing and exploiting women. The film’s other portrayals of women are just as poor. Jim’s wife, played by Bing Stafford, is one of two bumbling, trigger-happy cops assigned to capture the mutant. She isn’t given a name or any lines, but she does get a lingering close-up of her getting out of bed in revealing nightwear—and in a clear case of misleading marketing, this shot takes up the most prominent space on the film’s poster. And while the man killed by the Beast is left to decompose on the roadside, the barely alive body of his wife is carried up the mountain for no clear reason. On the rare occasions Francis isn’t sexualizing women, he frames them as helpless. A mother who loses her two children at a gas station spends most of her screen time sitting still and crying instead of, y’know, actually searching for her kids. At least she avoids almost getting killed, unlike her more active husband, who is forced to run for his life after the area’s gun-toting Keystone Cops-style officers mistake him for the Beast. “Shoot first, ask questions later,” is one of the few pieces of narration that actually makes sense. The Beast alongside one of the film’s many poorly portrayed female characters. | Cinema Associates Thankfully, after nearly shooting an innocent father in cold blood, the cops realize the giant, hulking figure who looks like a low-budget take on Fantastic Four’s The Thing is far more likely to be the radioactive culprit, and they aim their guns correctly. The Beast slowly succumbs to his injuries, but not before cradling a jackrabbit that wanders into the frame—this was an unscripted, brilliant ad-lib from Johnson that ties into the description of Javorsky as a “kind man.” Yes, the film’s only truly poetic moment was completely accidental. Johnson, a former Swedish professional wrestler who appeared in multiple Ed Wood “classics” including Plan 9 from Outer Space and Bride of the Monster, is the film’s strongest element, simply because all he’s asked to do is grunt silently and look vaguely threatening. Though this proto-The Rock saw this as his final film role, Francis and his producing partner Anthony Mendoza went on to make two equally nonsensical films—The Skydivers and Red Zone Cuba—to create the most heavily panned trilogy of the early 1960s. The Beast of Yucca Flats, however, is unquestionably their worst flop of all. The Beast of Yucca Flats can be streamed on Tubi today. This article is provided by a third-party content provider. SeaPRwire (https://www.seaprwire.com/) makes no warranties or representations regarding its content. Category: Top News, Daily News SeaPRwire provides global press release distribution services for companies and organizations, covering more than 6,500 media outlets, 86,000 editors and journalists, and over 3.5 million end-user desktop and mobile apps. SeaPRwire supports multilingual press release distribution in English, Japanese, German, Korean, French, Russian, Indonesian, Malay, Vietnamese, Chinese, and more.