Double, double, toil and trouble Netflix floats series for a pop culture world spellbound by witchcraft By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Thursday, Oct. 25, 2018

Opinion

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This article was published 24/10/2018 (2257 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Culturally speaking, it’s the witching hour.

The past several years have seen a steady uptick in the popularity of witches and witchcraft — as a spiritual practice, as an esthetic expression, and, inevitably, as a marketing tool.

There are no shortage of trend pieces about spellbound millennials and their fascination with the occult. Tarot has become trendy. Mysticism has gone mainstream. The hashtag #witchesofinstagram has 1.9 million posts. Young women have replaced “squad” with “coven” to refer to their girl gangs.

Self-care, with its potions and rituals, exists in a sort of witch/wellness/beauty Venn diagram. Cosmetic giant Sephora, briefly, was retailing a $42 “witch starter kit” — complete with a tarot deck, a rose quartz crystal and sage — which was pulled after criticism from actual practising Wiccans. “Basic Witch” T-shirts populate Etsy websites.

Part of the current appeal of witches might have something to do with 1990s nostalgia, which also remains a dominant pop culture force; it was the decade that gave us such coven classics as The Craft, Hocus Pocus, Practical Magic, Charmed and, of course, Sabrina The Teenage Witch — ABC’s bubbly TGIF-era sitcom starring Melissa Joan Hart, which debuted in 1996 and skewed more to Bewitched than Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

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Now, Sabrina is back — but the iteration that arrives on Netflix Friday is a decidedly darker Sabrina, a Sabrina for 2018. And unlike Charmed, which is also back this season, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is not a reboot. It’s a live-action adaptation of the comic-book series of the same name, itself an ink-black companion series to Archie Comics’ Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

The much-anticipated new series from showrunner/Archie Comics chief creative officer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa follows the same premise as its source material: Sabrina Spellman (played to perfection by Mad Men alumna Kiernan Shipka) is a half-witch, half-mortal who struggles to reconcile her secret life as a witch and her public life as a regular teenage girl. At home, Sabrina is raised by her witch aunts, the effervescent Hilda Spellman (Lucy Davis) and the icy Zelda Spellman (Miranda Otto); at school, she pals around with her besties, Rosalind (Jaz Sinclair) and Susie Putnam (Lachlan Watson), and her boyfriend, Harvey Kinkle (Ross Lynch).

That’s pretty much where the similarities end. (Now might be a good time to note that Salem the cat doesn’t talk; in this series, he’s a Familiar, a protective goblin that takes the form of an animal.) The fraught duality of Sabrina’s life comes to a head on her 16th birthday — which falls on Halloween, naturally — at which time Sabrina must pick a lane, as it were: sign herself away to the Book of the Beast and leave her mortal life behind, or turn her back on her coven, the Church of Night, and the Dark Lord. (In an amusing sight gag, both “Sweet 16” and “Dark Baptism” are neatly printed on her calendar.)

In terms of tone and setting, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina has a lot in common with Aguirre-Sacasa’s other series, Riverdale — the CW’s stylized Twin Peaks-meets-Scooby Doo series about the mystery-solving Archie gang. Both series employ a sort of gothic kitsch; they are set in the present, but they wink at their comic-book counterparts. But Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is frequently straight-up scary, as much a sumptuous otherwordly horror story as it is a coming-of-age tale.

The series feels timely, and not just because Sabrina is, as Shipka says, “a woke witch.” Chilling Adventures of Sabrina cuts to the heart of why modern women are so bewitched by witches. The attraction is power.

Witches are emblematic of power. They are a force and, to some, a threat — which is why the term witch is often used as a pejorative to describe powerful women. When you think about how the term “witch hunt” is employed in the #MeToo era, it would appear the witches are the ones doing the hunting.

The series, too, serves as a clear-eyed examination of power: who has it, who wants it, how to wield it, and what happens when it winds up in the wrong hands. The witches’ realm in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is not a feminist utopia; the Dark Lord is a malevolent patriarch to whom Sabrina is pressured to sign away her name and, thus, her freedom. In a scene early on, Sabrina lets it slip to her frenemy/tormenter Prudence (Tati Gabrielle) — a full witch with an axe to grind — that she wants to retain her freedom and power. Prudence says the Dark Lord would be terrified by the prospect of a woman having both. “He’s a man, isn’t he?”

Of course, Sabrina is not yet a woman, and if a witch is perceived as a threat, then certainly a teenage witch even more so. Teenage girls are also misunderstood, maligned, belittled and denied their power and autonomy. That’s why it’s so satisfying to see Sabrina Spellman, in Shipka’s estimable hands, morph into exactly the kind hero we need right now.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @JenZoratti

Jen Zoratti
Columnist

Jen Zoratti is a Winnipeg Free Press columnist and author of the newsletter, NEXT, a weekly look towards a post-pandemic future.

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