One of the locations used on The Craft: Legacy had to be spiritually cleansed by the film's Witch Consultant after the cast and crew experienced bad vibes on the set. Like its 1996 predecessor, writer-director Zoe Lister-Jones' new take on The Craft follows a quartet of teenage witches learning how to cope with growing up while trying to control their burgeoning supernatural powers.
In an effort to stay authentic to the often misrepresented subject matter of magic and witchcraft, the team at Blumhouse hired Aerin Foegel to serve as Witch Consultant to the production. As she put it, "Magic doesn't know you're acting," so her job, in addition to ensuring the film remained true to the actual rituals practiced by believers in witchcraft, was to make sure "any energetic spaces that are opened in the practice of the film are closed at the end of it." Thus, The Craft: Legacy should feel believable to enthusiasts of the occult, even when it ventures into more obviously fantastical territory.
Back in 2019, Screen Rant had the chance to visit the set of The Craft: Legacy, where we discovered Foegel's services were required on an additional, unexpected task. While shooting at one particular location, which just happened to be a former hospice center, several members of the cast and crew felt a strong negative energy. Foegel described the sensation as, "people having a heavy feeling on their chest, or wanting to leave, or having just a strong, visceral reaction." She said the reports were coming from even the "people on the crew who don't tend to consider themselves open to sensing or feeling energy or spirits."
As a result, Foegel was called by The Craft: Legacy executive producer Daniel Bekerman and asked if she could do anything to rectify the situation and get everyone comfortable and clear-headed enough to work again. She stepped in to purify the set, but not before having a curious and seemingly supernatural experience of her own:
"The night before I got there, had a dream about the space, and when I got there, it looked exactly the same as it had in my dream. I could already tell it was going to be intense, before I got there. I did a little bit of a ritual and a cleansing ceremony around the physical space and left some protective objects. It took me about an hour. I checked in with Dan and Zoe later in the day, and they said it felt a lot better."
Not everybody believes in the validity of witchcraft, magic, and the esoteric nature of positive and negative energy, but when a disproportionate number of people experience bad vibes, a professional like Foegel clearly has the power to grant them peace of mind and ensure filming can proceed smoothly. The power of belief and superstition cannot be overstated, and such beliefs are hard to shake. It's why films like The Exorcist are still tremendously haunting, even to atheists and non-Christians, and why The Craft continues to be a beloved story, among believers and non-believers alike.
The Craft: Legacy releases October 28 on VOD.
