Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year, they will once again set up a fundraiser for Best Friends, which works to save the lives of cats and dogs across America, giving pets second chances and providing them with happy homes.
Today’s theme: 1990s
The Craft had just cast a major spell over the box office, proving that angsty teen girls dabbling in the occult was a goldmine. Enter Little Witches, a rush-job Canadian-American co-production that looked at Hollywood’s glossy pagan playground, shrugged and said, “What if we did that, but with a tiny budget, a lot more Latin and a relentless producer demanding extra skin?”
Directed by Jane Simpson and starring Sheeri Rappaport alongside a pre-fame Clea DuVall in her film debut, Little Witches is a fascinating time capsule of mid-90s direct-to-video sleaze colliding with genuine behind-the-scenes creative frustration.
The story strands six rebellious misfit teens at an all-girl Catholic boarding school over Easter week. Leading the pack of hormones and bad attitudes is Jamie (Rappaport), a girl whose idea of casual downtime involves stripping for the local construction workers. Naturally, those same construction workers accidentally crack open a secret sub-basement Satanic temple complete with a hundred-year-old mummified schoolgirl and an ancient book of black magic.
Enter Faith (Mimi Rose), the good girl who happens to be fluent in Latin. When Faith translates the text, she discovers it outlines a demon-summoning ritual requiring a virgin sacrifice. While Faith wants nothing to do with it—especially after falling for a handsome construction worker named Daniel—Jamie teaches herself the dark arts out of sheer spite, poisons a bizarre nun played by Zelda Rubinstein and decides Daniel is the ultimate human sacrifice. Luckily, Sister Sherilyn (Jennifer Rubin) turns out to be the temple’s secret guardian, swooping in to stop the ceremony just as things get explosively lethal for everyone else.
If the movie feels a bit disjointed, interviews with Simpson and Rappaport reveal a minor war zone behind the camera. The studio wasn’t content with just a run-of-the-mill horror flick; they kept badgering Simpson for more nudity at every turn. When Simpson rightfully refused to exploit her young cast, studio suits floated the idea of hiring a separate crew for hyper-sexualized reshoots—at one point even pitching a pitch-black alternate climax where a demon shows up at the very end to assault all the girls. Thankfully, that didn’t happen, but the final product still bears the scars of a low-budget production trying desperately to balance a legitimate gothic premise with heavy-handed exploitation tropes.
Also: That is not Fairuza Balk on the poster.
You can watch this on YouTube.
