Editor’s note: This is the first official entry in a new ongoing series of retrospective film reviews, which we are calling Calamities in Pagan Cinema. (Unofficially, it’s something we have been playing around with for a while – check out Meg Elison’s review of The Devil Rides Out, for example.) Consider this a dark mirror to our Classics of Pagan Cinema series – a chance to look back at some of the not-so-classic entries in cinema about Paganism and Witchcraft, examine what they got wrong, and have a good laugh while watching some bad movies. Enjoy!
The trailer for 2006’s The Covenant made clear that it was following in the lucrative footsteps of 1996’s The Craft: a portrait of teen rebellion marked by tossing hair, driving fast, and dancing to trippy music beside a bonfire. Even the opening credits imitate the earlier film, as we flash through Witchy ephemera, heavy on allusions to the Salem witch trials, accompanied by a remix of White Zombie’s “More Human Than Human” (a song contemporary to The Craft).
DVD cover for The Covenant (2006). “Spanks along nicely,” indeed. [Sony Pictures]
We’re introduced to cinematography many would recognize from this dismal era of filmmaking, as seen in Underworld, Twilight, and Harry Potter. Everything is either blue or orange, and Dutch angles are recklessly employed. In these flattering tones we meet the Sons of Ipswich: Caleb Danvers (Steven Strait), Pogue Perry (Taylor Kitsch), and Reid Garwin (Toby Hemingway), and Tyler Simms (Chace Crawford.) They’re joined by Chase Collins (Sebastian Stan), the new kid in town, who gives us a reason for a lot of turgid exposition.
The four boys, accompanied by their cut-glass jawlines and woodcut dialogue, engage immediately in a gesture of their power: concentrating, black-eyed and smoldering, as if very constipated, on flying their car over a cliff to evade the law. “Harry Potter can kiss my ass!” they shout into the night.
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Many movies about witchcraft turn magic into a metaphor, from Bell, Book and Candle (1958) posing it as female independence to Buffy the Vampire Slayer turning it into drugs to Death Becomes Her making it about youth and beauty. The Craft and Motherland: Fort Salem both dabble in the idea of witchcraft being an hereditary gift to which many can aspire but the most powerful are born.
The Covenant, however, decides to not pick any single lane, instead swerving into all of them artlessly and entirely without a destination in mind. These boys are descendants of the five families that originally settled the Ipswich colony, and they pass on their powers from father to son. But using these powers ages men, leading us to the reveal of the most haggard-looking 44-year-old since King Théoden sat rotting on his throne waiting for Gandalf to bring him an SSRI.
Steven Strait in “The Covenant” (2006) [Sony Pictures]
There are, of course, girls to stare at in this film, even though witchcraft is the purview of men. Laura Ramsey plays Sarah Wenham, another new student who somehow got into the very expensive and exclusive Harvard-feeder-school Spenser despite her crippling disability of having previously attended a local public school. She’s joined by her roommate Kate Tunney (Jessica Lucas), and together they have no desires of their own and no goals outside of Hot Boy Drama. The Covenant fails the Bechdel test the way that most of us would fail a Salem dunking: cold and screaming as it drowns.
Reviews at the time and retrospectives point out that the film is shot to maximize the sex appeal of our four swim-team heroes, referring to it as a “homoerotic utopia” and invoking the hoary old chestnut of the “female gaze.” (I don’t know any “females” who want to gaze upon barely-legal boys who have unimpressive CGI magic fights, but the term seems to crop up whenever male beauty is on display.)
The boys are lovely, in that early-2000s way: thin, hairless, not quite stylish enough for the “metrosexual” moniker, and utterly devoid of human emotions. We see Caleb attend his family’s mentally ill caretaker and calmly accept being shot at – because why would he be scared? Later, the boys use their collective magical abilities to blow a woman’s skirt up at a bar so they can settle the bet they’ve made about the color of her underwear. Luckily, she wears none at all! “Female gaze,” my Lycra-clad ass.
Sebastian Stan, Steven Strait, and Chace Crawford in “The Covenent” (2006) [Sony Pictures]
There are a handful of scenes lifted almost exactly from The Craft, including a girl covered in spiders screaming and stomping while they disappear into nostrils and go back into the CGI hell from whence they came. There’s a slowmo walk in schoolgirl uniforms and glowering bad boy classroom disruption. The high school pool also serves as the unlikely but familiar site of some paltry warlockcraft as one of the Sons of Ipswich uses his powers to win… not even a swim meet. Like a heat in class, at best.
Lacking the cohesive storytelling, acting talent, and practical input on real Witchcraft enjoyed by The Craft, The Covenant leans heavily on the environmental storytelling through the use of classically creepy East Coast shooting locations, including Bishop’s University in Lennoxville, Quebec, as well as locations in Montreal and Nova Scotia.
Somewhere in here there’s a murder. I wouldn’t go as far as to call it a “murder mystery,” because there’s no coherent clues or even chronology to this film. The boys are powerful “warlocks” – not Witches, naturally. They get into bar fights and drive cool cars, they argue amongst themselves, mostly about who’s got the biggest “wand.” They rescue the hot girl who gets kidnapped (oh! she does have a purpose!) and oil up their pecs off screen so that they can properly brood when their Nokia phone rings.
It is a testament to the early days of the internet and the dogged determination of people who like to look at beautiful young men that this film made $37.6 million on a budget of $20 million, and then raked in another $26 million in DVD and Blu-Ray sales when physical media was still a thing. There’s not a whiff of Wicca in this film, nor is there any good reason to rewatch it. It holds a stunning 4% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Boys and men who are Witches deserve a better representation of themselves on film. Women get all the good witch movies (and quite a few of the bad ones) and it’s high time we saw a male-identified person do some cool witchcraft on film – and be willing to call himself a Witch while doing it.
The Covenant is streaming on Amazon Prime.
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