If your idea of Sabrina the Teenage Witch is a light-hearted tween comedy featuring a dodgy animatronic cat, Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is going to rock your world. The series adapts Robert Aguirre-Sacasa and Robert Hack’s 2014 comic of the same name, which takes the core concept of a high school girl finding out she’s a witch and gives it a fittingly horror treatment. There’s devil worship, characters die bloody deaths and classic horror references all the way through (don’t worry, there’s still a talking cat, too).
After a spell in development for The CW, Netflix picked up the show for two seasons, with Kiernan Shipkia (best known for playing Don Draper’s daughter in Mad Men) in the title role. With dark Archie series Riverdale proving a huge hit, Netflix has high hopes this one will hook horror fans, and they’re going the right way about it if this quote from an EW interview with creator Aguirre-Sacasa is anything to go by.
“Sabrina is the heroine in this series of mini-movies. I love The Exorcist. It’s one of my favorite movies. We’re doing an homage to that; we’re doing an episode that’s like [The Exorcist].”
So, who’s going to get possessed? Well, it could be Sabrina herself, but it might very well be her long-suffering boyfriend Harvey Kinkle (played by Ross Lynch) who gets the pea-soup vomit and twisty head treatment.
One thing we shouldn’t expect is for the show to crossover with Riverdale. Although the series are theoretically in the same dark Archieverse, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina going to Netflix from The CW means that any crossover is going to be a bit trickier to negotiate. And maybe for the moment, that’s a good thing. After all, I’d rather this awesome looking show stand on its own two feet first before they start messing with the formula.
