A Century of Glamour Ghouls: 1990s
Nancy Downs in The Craft (1996)
The Movie
The Craft (1996) is widely thought of as a guilty pleasure for women who came of age in the 90s but in recent years its cult following has grown considerably and its reputation is being reconsidered. It’s a more complicated movie than most give it credit for despite its faults.
Sarah (Robin Tunney) moves to LA from San Francisco with her father and stepmother following a suicide attempt. As she gets the lay of the land at her new Catholic high school, a fledgling coven of witches at the school recognize her natural talent for witchcraft and set their sights on her. Sarah’s new sisters all have struggles of their own and use witchcraft as a coping mechanism and as a means of empowerment. Nancy (Fairuza Balk), the de-facto leader, is deeply depressed and poor. Rochelle (Rachel True) is the only black girl in school and her teammates’ overt racism is holding her back from pursuing her passion for diving. Bonnie (Neve Campbell) is disfigured with burn scars covering much of her body. With the addition of Sarah to their coven, their witchcraft begins to produce real results. At first, their problems seems to be solved. The boy who spread rumours about Sarah after she turned him down for sex is now hopelessly obsessed with her. Nancy’s abusive father is dead and she and her mother now have a better lifestyle living on insurance money. Rochelle’s most violent tormentor starts to go bald. The painful treatment for Bonnie’s scars is suddenly successful. It doesn’t take long for things to spiral out of control though. Intra-coven conflict and a misunderstanding of the nature of magic(k) have dangerous consequences for all four of them.
The Craft is one of the more interesting pieces of fiction to emerge from the ashes of the satanic panic of the 1980s. In the 1980s a moral panic was created around a number of later discredited stories about satan worship. While the initial panic focused mainly on child abuse and day care centers, once it settled into the cultural zeitgeist, satanism (and by extension witchcraft) became the scapegoat for all sorts of social issues. It’s a bit difficult to convey to anyone who didn’t live through it how pervasive this fear was in certain communities in the US. But honestly, if you go back and watch some episodes of the first seasons of Unsolved Mysteries, you’ll be a bit flabbergasted at how often parents and husbands tack satanism and witchcraft onto straight-forward crimes & missing-persons stories. The Craft was released in the aftermath of the panic just as it was receding. (As someone who was way into Marilyn Manson in the late 1990s, I can tell you for a fact that it didn’t die.) Quite cleverly, the film took the worst fears of gullible parents and realized them while simultaneously presenting a realistic depiction of the practice of witchcraft and Wiccan beliefs. Funnily enough, The Craft definitely encouraged a whole generation of kids to try out spells or witchy games at slumber parties across the country.
The Look
Nancy Downs is a very mid-90s Southern Californian goth. She rocks a whole mess of styles throughout the film, some of which are very inappropriate for the weather (desert goth life), all of which are very inappropriate for Catholic school attendance. So, there are a lot of styling options for a Nancy cosplay.
The Clothes
The base for many of Nancy’s outfits is her school uniform; white button up shirt and blue-and-green kilt. At school, she’s usually bare-legged and mixes up the uniform pieces with black undershirts or black mesh and a black leather jacket. More often later in the film, she goes full 90s goth witch with a long black jacket with flared sleeves and big flowy black and dark red skirts. Nancy’s ever-present accessories are rosaries worn as jewelry, a dog-collar choker, upside down cross earrings, a nose ring, and pointy lace-up ankle boots.
I went the simple route: a play on the school uniform. I don’t own anything resembling a uniform kilt because I went to Catholic school myself for 16 years and will never own a skirt like that again. I also don’t own any black mesh, but I do have a pair of fishnets that I put on as sleeves. If you want to add color to a Nancy look, I’d recommend blood red in your accessories.
The Makeup
Nancy’s makeup is harsh though the face makeup is rarely very heavily applied. Nancy’s eyebrows are sharp and thin and her eyes are smoky and smudgy, later in the film her eye makeup gets deeper and less shimmery.
It seems that is every scene, even if it’s directly contiguous with the scene prior, Nancy has reapplied her lipstick in a different shade. I love this because it subtly reinforces the notion that she exhibits compulsive behaviors and also suggests that perhaps her “five-finger discount” attitude extends beyond the magic shop to makeup counters and drug stores.
Start with a neutral base and set it lightly with powder a shade lighter than your skin tone to get a California-goth pallor I concentrated some extra light powder under the hollows of my cheekbones to make my cheeks look fuller, more like Balk’s and more like a teenager’s.
Deconstructing Nancy’s eye makeup was fun because I realized for the first time that it’s actually a pretty standard late-90s smoky eye with heavier liner. (1.) Start with a neutral gray shade as a blending base. (2.) Take a darker gray shade to build up the outer V of the eye concentrating the pigment at the crease and lashline. (3.) Take a black shadow (I went cool black with this, but you can go warm instead) and build up the deeper areas of shadow, take an angled brush and bring it along your lashline. Take what’s left on the brush and bring it under your eyes. (4.) Next take black liner and draw a thick line all around your eye with very little flaring at the outer edge. (5.) Go back in with your black shadow to set the liner and smudge the line a bit. Basically try to make it look like you didn’t wash off yesterday’s makeup and just reapplied more in the morning. (6.) For the highlighted parts of the eye, silver would be perfect. I don’t have any silver shadow, so I went in with white shadow and a pearl-colored highlighter to get the shimmer. Concentrate the silvery shade on the inner and middle part of the mobile lid and on the browbone. (7.) To finish off the eye, tightline your eyes with black liner and load up your eyelashes with black mascara.
For the brows, go in with black powder on a wet brush so it’ll be easier to correct mistakes. The head is a lot fuller than the tail, which tapers dramatically. It’s a more natural shape than the sperm brow that was starting to take over at the time.
For my Nancy look, I chose to go with a brownish lip because most Nancy cosplayers gravitate toward the bright red and black combo. The same method applies, just choose the colors you like best. Take a brown, black, or burgundy liner and fill out your bottom lip and line your upper lip to be just a touch smaller than your lower lip. Fill in the center of your lips with a nude brown or red lipstick and blend it into the liner. Don’t blend too much though because you want to keep the liner distinct.
With your liner brush at the ready, draw a small beauty mark on your right cheek an inch or two from your mouth. I already have a beauty mark here, so I just filled it in.
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