EVIL WITCHES, BUT GREAT WARDROBES

It’s no surprise that ‘The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’ reflects our Trumpian, dystopian universe, writes

Bad is good and good is bad thanks to the right-wing nutters taking over the world. So it’s no surprise that The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina reflects this Trumpian dystopian universe. Thanks, Satan. Even though the characters are based on the Archie comic-book spinoff, this is not your friendly neighbourhood teenage witch with a sparkly pink wand that glitterbombs love potions and cleaning spells. No siree. These are your nasty, dark, cannibalistic, Satan-worshipping witches, albeit with amazing wardrobes.

Sabrina Spellman (Kiernan Shipka, above, aka Don Draper’s daughter in Mad Men) is a half-human, half-witch who lives in Greendale (nearest town Riverdale) with her two aunts, Zelda and Hilda, who are played respectively by Miranda Otto (Éowyn in The Lord of the Rings) and Lucy Davis (Dianne in Shaun of the Dead). They have sworn to take care of Sabrina since her parents died in a suspicious plane crash when she was just a baby.

Zelda is the stricter parent who marches around the house in severe black and maroon collared skirt suits, a cigarette burning in an elegant yet pimping roach clip that will surely make Snoop Dogg jealous. Softer Hilda roams around in dark florals and chintzes and takes care of the herb garden. She is often murdered by her infuriated sister with a whack of a spade.

This not being sinister enough, their house is the town mortuary where Sabrina’s pansexual cousin Ambrose (Chance Perdomo) performs autopsies and can bring the dead back to life.

The series begins with Sabrina nearing her sweet 16. Her birthday is also the day of her dark baptism when she is supposed to sign her name in blood in The Book of Beasts and relinquish her soul to Satan. She would then have to go to The Academy of The Unseen Arts and hang out with the terrors that rule the school — three teenage bullies who are called The Weird Sisters, very different from her salt-of-the-earth friends Rosalind (Jaz Sinclair) and Susie (Lachlan Watson) at Baxter High.

And like most trite teenage girl narratives that we can’t seem to get away from, she can’t imagine life without her boyfriend, Harvey (played irritatingly by Ross Lynch), and decides not to go through with the baptism. She doesn’t want to give up her freedom and her human life.

Satan and his minions are not too happy about it, mainly the head of the coven, Father Faustus Blackwood (a maleficent Richard Coyle) and her teacher Mary Wardwell, whose body has been possessed by, er, Madam Satan.

Shipka makes a superb Sabrina. She is good at playing innocent and vengeful simultaneously. Her Sabrina fights the patriarchy and Satan in leggings, flat pumps and an Alice band. She is easily led by Madam Satan to do spells that are not all that nice, such as performing a hex on the nasty principal of the school to force him to take some time out, even though she believes in the ultimate humane way to be and not to eat fellow sacrificial witches.

Then there is Tati Gabrielle, who plays Prudence, leader of The Weird Sisters. A vision in dramatic eye makeup, dark lipstick and short blonde curls, she rules The Academy of the Unseen Arts and, quite frankly, most of the show.

Not everyone is a fan of the show, the outfits or the statues. In a twist of the macabre, The Satanic Temple has filed a lawsuit against Netflix over the statue of Baphomet in the foyer of The Academy.

And please don’t be confused. The Satanic Temple is not The Church of Satan.

“As a significant number of people seem to be confusing this with us, we would like to clarify that TST is a political activist group that has nothing to do with us, nor with the religion of Satanism which we founded over 50 years ago,” said the

Church of Satan in a press release.

“The Church of Satan has not filed a suit against Netflix, nor do we have a problem with their Sabrina show, which we’ve previously discussed.”

Don’t be too scared or put off though, it’s not only gloom and doom. This pulpy version of Sabrina by showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa has quite a bit of camp and fun to lighten up the 10 episodes that make up season one. And if you have gobbled them up already, good news is that they have filmed season two back to back with season one, so that is on the cards.

And better news still is that there is a holiday special where the coven will celebrate the winter solstice in midDecember.

The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is available on Netflix.