love this coven

Now & Then Perfectly Captured The Spooky Side Of Girlhood

The girls face loss, identity shifts, and the realization that adults cannot always protect or explain.

by Molly Wadzeck
Spooky Mommy 2025

By candlelight in the cemetery, four girls summon the courage to speak to the dead. Samantha’s hand tightens around Teeny’s as they sit cross-legged around Dear Johnny’s grave, attempting to summon answers about his death. For most millennial girls, this is familiar territory: the sleepover Ouija board, the dare to summon Bloody Mary, the friend obsessed with crystals or astrology.

When I first saw that scene in Now & Then, I was equal parts mesmerized and spooked, but fully entranced. It didn’t feel like make-believe; it felt like permission. Soon after, I was recreating it myself. These rituals weren’t about ghosts; they were experiments in courage, small acts of control in a chaotic world. I remember sitting in my bedroom, candles flickering on the windowsill, moving the planchette with a mix of terror and delight, convinced I might really make contact with the beyond. My friends told me what I was doing was anti-God, demonic even. As a Southern-raised good-girl Christian, I fought against those teachings, determined to pinpoint the quiet buzzing of curiosity surrounding me. What I was seeking then isn’t so different from what I seek now: connection, understanding, a sense that everything will somehow make sense someday.

Now & Then, released 30 years ago this month, captured that spooky, witchy side of girlhood not as rebellion but as a way of navigating life’s challenges. Where The Craft shouts defiance (“We ARE the weirdos, Mister”), Now & Then quietly shows girls using the supernatural to process grief, confront change, and claim agency. The girls face loss, identity shifts, and the realization that adults cannot always protect or explain, and sometimes even lie.

Each girl approaches the unknown differently. Teeny practices kissing in the mirror, testing the contours of her emerging sexual identity. Chrissy pushes gently against her mother’s rules, curious about what lies beyond them. Roberta fakes her own death, dramatizing her confrontation with the loss of her mother. Samantha, the quiet observer, feels her family splitting apart and doesn’t yet have words for the turmoil around her.

Their rituals — visiting strangers to call upon spirits, daring one another, diving into research during summer adventures — form a coven of trust and shared understanding. Sometimes that meant late-night bike rides through the rain, pedaling in search of answers to a mystery, or sneaking out to lie in the treehouse, talking, crying, and sharing secrets. Within that circle, grief and fear were acknowledged, curiosity was honored, and friendship became its own kind of magic.

Even as a child, I was drawn to the unseen. I remember wandering barefoot in the backyard, tracing tree bark, watching the wind stir the leaves, and imagining what stories the world held just out of sight. I always had a sense of unknown, unexplainable forces around me, and desperately wanted to follow the energy to see what answers would be revealed.

Over the last year of enormous personal and professional upheaval, I’ve been trying to uncover that magic again. I’m seeking it in women’s circles, through energy healing, Reiki, tarot, and calling on ancestors and spirit guides. I’m asking the universe: What do you have to show me? What have I been missing while focused on everything else? What’s surprised me most is how this search has become intertwined with friendship: women holding space for one another, sharing wisdom, bearing witness, exploring the mystical together. It feels like the coven of my childhood has returned, larger, deeper, wiser—something the adult Samantha embodies as she writes, shaping the chaos of that summer into meaning, translating fear into understanding and memory into insight.

The supernatural gave the girls a language for what was too big or strange to say aloud. It let them touch loss and change without being swallowed by it. Together, they learned what women keep relearning: fear softens when it’s shared, and care can turn uncertainty into strength.

Those rituals of care didn’t disappear when we grew up; they evolved. The coven still looks like this today: friends holding my hands now, as a divorced mother of three starting over, reminding me that connection and shared bravery are as vital in adulthood as they were in childhood. The monsters look different, but they still hold the same shape.

Revisiting the film now, I see the same lesson reflected in my own life. The rituals we invent — writing, storytelling, revisiting old movies — help us confront uncertainty, grief, and change in ways that feel manageable. Samantha narrates her childhood like a spell: translating chaos into a cohesive narrative through which the now grown women can pull apart the threads to see the details they’d missed. The ways girls practice bravery and empathy together, through imagination, ritual, and shared experience, become the patterns for how women navigate life: leaning on one another, testing limits, and finding power in connection.

In summoning Dear Johnny, the girls assert themselves, test boundaries, and take ownership of a small corner of the universe. Watching them, I’m reminded that these early acts of imagination and friendship aren’t just childhood pastimes, they’re tools for navigating life through the strength of friendship and deep, meaningful connection with other women. The supernatural gave them, and gives us, permission to practice control over what we cannot control, to name grief, face fear, and meet uncertainty—together.

Thirty years later, the magic of Now & Then endures. The whispered rituals, shared secrets, and circle of trust the girls create are the true enchantments of girlhood. Growing up is always a little haunting, but the bonds we forge with friends give us the courage to face it. The séances and ghosts of summer past linger in memory, but the real power of girlhood, and of womanhood, is in the friendships and rituals that carry us through the fires. That is the magic that lasts long after childhood ends.

Molly Wadzeck is a freelance writer and mother of three. Born and raised in Waco, Texas, she moved to the Finger Lakes region of New York, where she worked in animal rescue and welfare for many years. She writes essays and poems about feminism, mental health, parenting, pop culture, and politics. She is usually late because she stopped to pet a dog. She tweets at @mwadzeckkraus.

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