The Dark, Relevant Magic of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

Sabrina Spellman, the protagonist of Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, makes a dramatic departure from her first Archie Comics incarnation. She’s still a half-witch, half-mortal teen, concealing her powers from everyone in the mortal world. But this latest iteration of the teenage witch, played by Kiernan Shipka, confronts problems that feel disconcertingly current. Early in the first episode, a female friend confesses to Sabrina that she’s been sexually assaulted by a group of football players. Indignant, Sabrina marches to the principal’s office to make her friend’s case to Principal Hawthorne (Bronson Pinchot). He’s dismissive, even uninterested. Sabrina insists on calling in the football team for questioning.

“You’re suggesting a witch hunt?” he says.

Sabrina doesn’t miss a beat: “I don’t care for that term.”

But beyond being a now-familiar convention, it’s also a moment of startling awareness for the show: “witch hunt” directly evokes language that has been used to delegitimize the #MeToo movement, to suggest that claims against groups of men are paranoiac, hysterical. And across the first few episodes of Netflix’s new teen thriller, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina negotiates the paradox of gender in witch lore. On one hand, women witches must sign away their freedom to a patriarchal Dark Lord in order to gain power; on the other, their powers allow them to settle scores with oppressors of the mortal world. And in leaning in to that uneasy balance, the show revitalizes a once-frivolous comic-book character—and positions as her adversaries not just the everyday wickedness of the mortal world, but Lucifer himself.

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The fantastically macabre update comes courtesy of Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who also created The CW’s Riverdale. Just as with that show, Sabrina takes its familiar cast of characters—Sabrina, her witch aunts, her feline familiar—and sets them in a darker, more mature milieu. Fans of Riverdale’s horny teen ensemble won’t find quite the same level of raging hormones in Sabrina. They will, though, see a lot more gore in this adaptation, which is unflinching in its inspiration from horror tropes and images. In one early scene, a pair of levitating scissors spears its victim’s neck, releasing jets of blood that pools decadently across the frame. And that’s just in the pilot episode.

The backdrop of the show is Greendale, whose quaint mid-century Americana instantly recalls the aesthetic of neighboring town Riverdale. We learn that Greendale had its own gruesome witch trials, hundreds of years ago, and the coven has lived on secretly ever since. Their latest initiate would be Sabrina Spellman—that is, if she makes up her mind. Sabrina was born from a warlock father and a mortal mother, both long deceased. On her sixteenth birthday, per Spellman tradition, she can choose to strike a deal with the devil and keep her powers, with a catch: she must cut ties with her mortal life, including her human friends and her smitten, oblivious boyfriend, Harvey Kinkle (Ross Lynch).

Sabrina doesn’t have much time to mull over her options. Her witch Aunts Zelda (Miranda Otto) and Hilda (Lucy Davis) are already preparing Sabrina for her Dark Baptism, scheduled for Sabrina’s sixteenth birthday, which is also on Halloween, which just so happens to fall beneath a vaguely portentous eclipse. If she chooses to sign away her freedom to the devil, in exchange for power, she must also attend the Academy of Unseen Arts, never to see her human friends again.

Unlike with previous adaptations of the Archie Comics character, though, magic is no laughing matter. The Netflix show’s representation of magic is more closely aligned to the medieval and Renaissance concept of witches, who were believed to have been bestowed with power by Satan himself. Lucifer makes a few appearances in the show, in the form of a grotesque goat monster, echoing medieval renderings and the devil of Goya’s haunting Witches’ Sabbath. Even Salem, Sabrina’s feline familiar, is no smart-aleck animatronic, but a cat that occasionally evinces hints of his fearsome demonic form. The show’s darker depictions of magic makes for some deliciously spine-chilling scares.

But they’re also where Sabrina begins to lose its magic touch: The show at times seems so besotted with explaining the rules of the witch law that it belabors its own worldbuilding across the first few episodes. In a pilot episode of a show with fantastical elements, top-heavy exposition can be forgiven. But toward the end of the third episode, when a high priest of Satan’s Church of Night (a leering Richard Coyle) expounds on witch law during a trial for Sabrina’s soul, the show begins to feel didactic.

However, the show remains intact, held together by its center of gravity, the eponymous enchantress herself. Shipka plays an earnest, willful, occasionally vengeful Sabrina. She’s a Sabrina who speaks up, often ill-advisedly, against the draconic laws of both mortal and human worlds. Sabrina’s choices—whether she keeps her powers, or what she chooses to do with them—seem to grapple with this paradox as she grows across the season. It’s Shipka’s forceful performance that allows Sabrina to convincingly insert itself into current conversations on sexual assault and consent.

The show's very premise, in fact, centers on women’s relationship to power: what they can do when they have it, and how the men around them react. When Sabrina is rebuffed by Principal Hawthorne, she decides to teach the football players a lesson herself—and does, with the help of the Weird Sisters, a supernatural goth girl gang who relish in the boys’ torture a little too ardently. Coming down from her revenge high, Sabrina expresses misgivings about signing her name away to the devil in order to retain her powers. She confesses to the Weird Sisters that she wants to keep both her powers, and her freedom.

“He’ll never give you that, The Dark Lord,” says one of them, Prudence (Tati Gabrielle). “The thought of you, or any of us, having both terrifies him.”

When Sabrina asks why, Prudence smirks: “He’s a man, isn’t he?”

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is a fun, seasonally apt fantasia of your favorite classic horror tropes. (Satanic spiders pouring in through a window, anyone?) But its greatest strength is Shipka’s Sabrina, defiant even when unsure of herself, and determined to wrest back control from two worlds that try to strip it from her. While the witchcraft is set in 16th-century imaginations, the show portrays the agency and awareness of 21st-century teenagers against a retro-creepy background—with scares that are fun as hell.

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