Netflix's Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is worlds away from previous depictions of Sabrina
the Teenage Witch.
Sure, all the characters are there, but this one takes its premise seriously and darkly.
Let's take a peek behind the black curtain to reveal the untold truth about this spooky
series.
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is a hip, modern take on a decades-old comics property, a show
about teenagers wise beyond their years, and a project centered around a strong female
character.
"My name is Sabrina Spellman, and I will NOT sign it away!"
That's why it's bewildering that it doesn't air on The CW.
That network presents a programming lineup made up almost entirely of comic book shows
like The Flash, teen shows like All American, or shows centered around remarkable women
like Jane the Virgin.
It even shares show-runners with the CW's Riverdale, which is based on the same Archie
comic books that gave the world Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
And yet, Chilling Adventures is a Netflix show, because The CW and the show's producers
just couldn't see eye to eye.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, The CW developed Chilling Adventures, but network
executives lost interest, reportedly because they were committed to airing another witch-themed
show: a reboot of Charmed.
Warner Bros. was pleased when Netflix picked up the show, for good reason.
On the streaming service, Warner retains full ownership of the series, but had it stayed
at The CW, they would've had to split revenue with their "corporate cousin" CBS.
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is closely related to fellow moody teen show Riverdale.
Both originated in Archie Comics, and both enjoyed dark print revivals under the creative
and watchful eye of Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa.
He's in charge of Chilling Adventures, but he almost brought Sabrina back to TV on his
other show first.
Aguirre-Sacasa initially considered introducing Sabrina as a major, end-of-season twist for
Riverdale's first season.
But Aguirre-Sacasa had difficulty fitting Sabrina into the Riverdale world, running
up against the question of whether she should have actual magic powers, or just be a member
of a cult, or some other variation on her witchy origins.
Eventually, the Riverdale staff just ran out of time to do anything with Sabrina and went
with a cliffhanger that involved Archie Andrews dad left for dead by a masked gunman instead.
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina maintains a lofty but narrow balance between dark and
campy and fun and frightening, and it takes a seasoned cast of veteran performers to pull
it off.
Before she was Sabrina, Kiernan Shipka grew up on TV as Sally Draper on Mad Men.
Lucy Davis, who plays Sabrina's lovable Aunt Hilda, is recognizable from her work in Wonder
Woman and the original British version of The Office.
Chance Perdomo, on the other hand, is a relatively new face.
Before Chilling Adventures, he only had about half a dozen screen credits to his name, so
how did he land a major role on a prominent teen series?
Well, it's because he almost won a major role on a different prominent teen series.
Perdomo auditioned to play Jughead Jones on Riverdale.
Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa loved Perdomo's audition but didn't think he was right for the part,
so when it came time to make Chilling Adventures, he cast him in the role of Ambrose Spellman,
a character who's initially under house arrest because of his role in a plot to blow up the
Vatican.
"I was arrested for attempting to blow up the Vatican."
Teen Satan-worshipping boys will be teen Satan-worshipping boys.
It's hard to believe that Miranda Otto, the same woman who played warrior queen Eowyn
in the Lord of the Rings movies, also plays the clever and wicked Zelda Spellman on Chilling
Adventures of Sabrina.
Her distinctive, stylized take on the unabashedly evil but family focused witch largely hails
from the screen stars of the past.
Otto told Vulture that in addition to thinking of Zelda as a father figure from a 1950s TV
show, she drew on screen stars Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Gloria Swanson to inform
her performance.
Actress Tati Gabrielle similarly looked to icons of the past to inform her ever-so-slightly
campy work as the extremely confident, swirling ball of energy that is Prudence Night, leader
of the Weird Sisters.
For her, the main inspiration came from Eartha Kitt, best known for her role as TV's Catwoman
and her sultry singing voice.
Chilling Adventures is easily the darkest and most sober adaptation of the character
to date, having ditched sillier elements like a talking cat.
That said, you just can't make a Sabrina show and fail to include Salem.
"This is Salem, by the way.
He protects and comforts me wherever I am.
He's very clever."
He may not be offering up pithy wisecracks like he did on the '90s Sabrina sitcom, that
seems to be Ambrose's job these days, but the sleek black cat does factor into many
episodes' plot lines.
And to think, Salem almost didn't make the cut.
That's because Kiernan Shipka, the actress who portrays Sabrina, is allergic to cats,
and breaks out in hives whenever she touches one.
"You know what, that still is actually, pretty much, the exact moment that I found out, when
I brought the cat so close to my face, and then the next day I had everywhere."
As a result of her allergies, Aguirre-Sacasa had a moment of wondering whether Salem could
be a dog instead, but eventually decided that the iconic teenage witch needed her iconic
familiar, too.
Presumably, they just keep Salem well groomed and have plenty of Benadryl stashed around
the set.
There's one other element of the Sabrina mythos that carried over from the comics to Chilling
Adventures: Sabrina's extra-bright, platinum blonde hair.
When actress Kiernan Shipka first tried out for the part, she was enjoying her freedom
from the role of Sally Draper by changing her hair to a long, dark brown.
When she got the role, though, the producers asked her to dye her hair, and Shipka was
once again back to the blonde.
However, if Sabrina would be blonde, they couldn't well have her boyfriend, Harvey,
also be blond, now could they?
Just as the dark-haired Shipka had to lighten her locks, the naturally blond Ross Lynch,
as seen in My Friend Dahmer, had to dye his 'do brown to fit the part.
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is low-key one of the most inclusive shows on mainstream
American television, and not just in terms of featuring both witches and mortals.
The main cast of the series is full of characters of many races, sexual identities, and gender
identities, and those differences are rarely if ever discussed.
That's all intentional on the part of the creative team.
Aguirre-Sacasa told Collider,
The show consulted GLAAD and other organizations to make sure it got it right and specifically
sought out performers who identified as queer, non-binary, and transgender.
Lachlan Watson, who portrays Sabrina's close friend, Susie Putnam, identities as non-binary
and helped Aguirre develop their character to make them more authentic in the part.
The character of Ambrose identifies as pansexual, and at a New York Comic Con panel Perdomo
said that he finds playing the part of a pansexual person of color with so much depth to be
Additionally, Production Designer Lisa Soper is a practicing pagan and actress Lucy Davis
says one of the show's writers and a crew member identify as witches.
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is a horror series that features all kinds of scary stuff,
from Satanic rituals to witches who bring loved ones back from the dead with some dire
consequences to full-on cannibalistic demons.
"Seriously, what is it with witches and cannibalism?"
Dealing with that kind of subject matter on the set, all day long for months on end, may
have summoned up some things the cast and crew would have preferred to have left alone.
Actress Michelle Gomez, who plays Sabrina's favorite teacher and undercover demon Miss
Wardell, revealed during a cast interview that the spooky sets definitely had some sort
of supernatural vibe going on.
"And I feast on male flesh."
Lucy Davis mentioned that friends who visited her on the set did not enjoy being in the
Spellman Mortuary's embalming room, and that being on set just generally made her feel
uneasy.
Perhaps the spookiest thing went down during an episode read-through.
As the cast read the script out loud, one phrase scarily activated a heretofore unknown
smartphone feature.
When they mentioned the Dark Lord, Chase Perdomo's phone answered, with Siri asking if she'd
been summoned.
Who knew that friendly phone voice was a devil in disguise?
In late 2018, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina fans received a surprise Solstice present:
a bonus holiday episode called "A Midwinter's Tale."
As a standalone episode that helped to tide fans over until new episodes dropped the following
spring, it's just as well-made as the rest of the series.
That might actually be surprising, since it was a rather last-minute addition to the show.
According to Aguirre-Sacasa, the whole thing came out of a conversation with another writer
about how much they liked all those scary ghost stories that get made into movies at
Christmastime.
"Christmas is the best time for ghost stories."
Aguirre-Sacasa decided to push their other work aside in favor of some holiday horror.
The team decided to tell the story of Gryla and the Yule Lads, based on Scandinavian mythological
tales about an evil witch and her twelve terrible children.
As for the most famous Christmas monster of all, Krampus, they opted to avoid him because
he's become a little too mainstream thanks to a recent Hollywood film.
That's right: the monster who drags naughty children to Hell in a sack just isn't hardcore
enough for Sabrina.
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina boasts such an elaborate, stylish, and mood-setting animated
opening sequence that makes it difficult to take Netflix's suggestion to skip the intro.
That makes sense, since the show is based on a darker comic book version of Sabrina,
written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa with art by Robert Hack.
With Sabrina's comics heritage and the idea that a comic book cover is comparable to a
show's credit sequence, Aguirre-Sacasa brought in Hack to create the intro.
The comic veteran put together the images that make up the animated sequence, some of
them taken straight from the pages of the comics.
One thing he did have to change, ever so slightly, were the visages of the characters depicted.
Instead of using the versions he'd been drawing on the page, he gave the TV series versions
of Sabrina and Harvey that more closely resemble the actors who play them.
Hack had experience with that sort of work, having previously worked on comic adaptations
of Doctor Who and The X-Files with faces of the actors from those shows.
This time, though, it was going from comics to TV and keeping the pulpy look that Hack
brought to the page.
Sabrina Spellman attends classes at the Academy of the Unseen Arts, which is like a darker,
deadlier, and scarier version of Hogwarts.
Enjoying a prominent position in the school is a statue meant to depict the Dark Lord,
Satan, who has the head of a goat and is flanked by worshipful kids.
It looks ancient, but, as a lawsuit alleges, the sculpture was built only a few years ago,
under the direction of the real-life Satanic Temple, an activist group that keeps tabs
on the power of organized religions.
The Satanic Temple used its goat-headed statue, "Baphomet With Children," as part of a protest
against the Oklahoma State Capitol building allowing a monument to the Ten Commandments.
Rather than allow the Satanic Temple to have its statue installed on the grounds, the Oklahoma
Supreme Court ordered that the Ten Commandments be removed, and so Baphomet took his mission
elsewhere.
Alleging that the Academy of the Unseen Arts statue completely ripped off the design of
its statue, the Satanic Temple sued Chilling Adventures producer Warner Bros. and Netflix
for copyright infringement and for negatively impacting the Temple's reputation for equating
the statue with evil.
It seems that a few legal wizards were called upon to use their particular magic: the parties
reportedly reached an out-of-court agreement in November of 2018, just two weeks after
the suit was filed.
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