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Fairuza Balk Wants You to Know That She Was Never Actually a Witch
She played one in The Craft, but now she wants to clear up some rumors.
Actress Fairuza Balk is undoubtedly most known for her show-stealing performance as Nancy Downs in 1996’s The Craft, a role that nabbed her a Saturn Award nomination for Best Actress. In fact, Balk was so good as the witchcraft-practicing teen that many still believe to this day that she actually is a witch in real life!
Balk set the record straight in a chat with EW, detailing her connection to an occult shop in the ’90s that furthered the rumors that she was practicing witchcraft at the time.
“The true story is I found this occult shop in L.A. and I used to go there to ask them questions and do my research,” Balk explained. “They were really lovely people. [The woman who owned it] wanted to retire. She couldn’t put the kind of money into it that it needed to keep it up and so it was going to be turned into a Chinese restaurant. I thought for the oldest occult shop in the country, that’s a tragedy. There was a man that used to work there and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject and he was a sort of a teacher to me during [The Craft]. I thought, what a shame this is going to be turned into a Chinese restaurant. So I bought it and put some work into it and helped it survive.”
“But people of course were like, ‘She bought an occult shop and she’s fully into this and it’s all real.’ That has taken on its entire own mythology that’s essentially out of my hands,” Balk continued. “You can tell the truth and talk to people but they want to believe what they want to believe. What can you do? I’m not involved with that shop anymore. It was a very long time ago.”
“She’s mine, and I’m hers.”
The prison movie is a cornerstone of the cinematic landscape. Often adjacent to horror, there’s something inherently horrific about a building full of “convicts” jockeying for power. Criminal masterminds and the wrongfully convicted alike become pawns in a dehumanizing system and struggle to stay alive in the restrictive environment. Claire Denis pushes this genre to its outer limits with sci-fi and horror elements comparing incarceration to the prison of the human body. Her 2018 film High Life follows a group of prisoners turned astronauts who struggle to retain their humanity after the world has cast them out.
When we first meet Monte (Robert Pattinson), he’s raising a toddler on an isolated space station in the galaxy’s outer reaches. His daughter Willow was conceived through assault by fellow inmate Dr. Dibs (Juliette Binoche) as a part of her mission to reproduce in space. As Denis unpacks the story of this troubled crew, they slowly realize they have been discarded and forgotten. Some find freedom to enact their violent agendas while others try to retain a semblance of normalcy in the extreme environment. Essentially guinea pigs, Monte and his crewmates hurtle through space and grope for a reason to keep existing.
The Lady Killers continue Killer Moms Month with Claire Denis’ beautifully complex film. Co-hosts Jenn Adams, Mae Shults, Rocco T. Thompson, and Sammie Kuykendall chart the mysteries of the cosmos in their quest to understand the glacial plot. They’ll chat about screaming babies, space gardens, black holes and spaghetti along with heavier themes like reproduction and bodily autonomy. Why is Dr. Dibbs so obsessed with pregnancy? Why doesn’t Monte partake of the sex box? Does Mia Goth actually have a big booty and what really happened on that spaceship filled with dogs? They’ll approach the black hole and try to withstand spaghettification while zeroing in on the unpleasant themes of this exceptional film.
Stream below and subscribe now via Apple Podcasts and Spotify for future episodes that drop every Thursday.
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