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The Banality of Skeevil
Skeet Ulrich was a ’90s dreamboat, the villain in the era’s biggest teen horror movies, and a chilling warning of the evil to be found in ordinary men
There was a scene, in the 1995 movie The Craft, that all of my friends both wanted and didn’t want to talk about. We didn’t give it a clear name, or even always say why it mattered, but we’d mutter about it, in shorthand, in hard conversations: “The thing he does to her in the car.”
“He” is Skeet Ulrich, playing Chris, a high school football player who tends to leave girls with terrible stories after they date him. “Her” is Robyn Tunney, playing Sarah, a girl with a crush on Chris. “What he does” is an attempted rape. He’s already spread rumors around the school that she puts out (she hasn’t) and followed her around campus, and shown up at her house at midnight demanding she returns his love. After being stalked, Sarah agrees to go on one more date with Chris, and — with a truly disturbing amount of realism — he tries to rape her. He comes very close to succeeding, until Sarah manages to fight him off and flees, sobbing.
