Children’s Folklore Recent Titles in Greenwood Folklore Handbooks Myth: a handbook

Th
 e Craft
(1996), Sarah (Robin Tunney), who has just survived a suicide attempt, 
meets three black-garbed girls—Rochelle (Rachel True), Bonnie (Neve Camp-
bell), and Nancy (Fairuza Balk)—at her new high school. Like the three witches 
in Shakespeare’s 
Macbeth,
these girls spend their free time together plotting mali-
cious spells. After Sarah joins the group, the girls buy books of magic and cast 
spells to get revenge against a callous boy and a prejudiced girl. Eventually, their 
spells work; the boy falls hopelessly in love with Sarah, earning his friends’ scorn, 
and the girl bursts into tears when she starts losing her beautiful blond hair. In one 
of the movie’s most entertaining scenes, Sarah, Nancy, and Bonnie perform the 
ritual “Light As a Feather,” trying to lift Rochelle with two fingers of each of their 
hands. Quickly and smoothly, Rochelle rises up into the air. After the girls remove 
their hands, she still floats in front of them. When Bonnie’s mother opens the 
door, Rochelle falls to the floor. The alarmed mother shouts, “Are you girls getting 
high?” Of course Rochelle 
has
been getting high, but not on drugs. This scene 
marks a turning point: playful magic becomes real.
Mean Girls
(2004), a film about a difficult adjustment to a new school, asks an 
intriguing question: how can a teenage girl home-schooled by zoologist parents in 
East Africa adjust to daily life at a public high school in the United States? Cady, 
the 16-year-old central character and narrator of the film, compares teenagers’ 
interaction at school with animal behavior in East Africa. Although she thinks 
like a young anthropologist, Cady cannot resist the glamour of the “Plastics,” 
the school’s leading clique. Mimicking typical high school customs, the Plastics 
of “Girl World” follow a strict schedule of behavior. On Wednesdays they wear 
pink; on Fridays they wear jeans or track pants, and once a week they put their 
hair in ponytails. They play phone pranks on other girls, including a call to a girl’s 
mother to explain that her daughter’s pregnancy test results are ready to pick up 
at Planned Parenthood and three-way calls in which one girl criticizes another 
without knowing that girl is listening.
All of the Plastics’ nastiest thoughts about their friends go into a pink “Burn 
Book,” which resembles traditional slam books. Toward the end of the film, when 
Regina (Rachel McAdams), the clique’s leader, spreads pages of the Burn Book all 
over the school, chaos ensues. Miss Norbury (Tina Fey), a popular math teacher, 

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136 Children’s 
Folklore
tries to defuse the meanness of a large group of high school girls by making all 
of the girls apologize for mean things they have done. Amusingly, the girls offer 
backhanded apologies that cause even more hurt feelings. These apologies mirror 
schools’ attempts to stop girls’ meanness in therapeutic interventions of the early 
twenty-first century (Wiseman 40; Tucker 14 –16).
The lighthearted “gross-out” film 
How to Eat Fried Worms
(2006) begins with 
Billy (Luke Benward) entering his new fifth-grade classroom. Mean kids under the 
tutelage of class bully Joe (Adam Hicks) fill Billy’s thermos with worms and give 
Billy a contemptuous nickname: “Worm Boy.” Joe and his buddies throw candy 
worms at Billy, chanting his nickname until Billy claims to be a worm-eater: “The 
greasier, the better.” After Joe dares Billy to eat 10 fried worms, the excitement 
begins. The boys cook worms 10 different ways, preparing a peanut-butter- and-
worm sandwich, a worm fried in pig fat, and other creative dishes. Besides dem-
onstrating the versatility of children under pressure from their peer group,