Gone are the days of Sabrina The Teenage Witch, which took Sabrina Spellman out of her spooky comic beginnings and plonked her in the middle of a whimsical sitcom setting. The spookiness is back for Netflix’s Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina, which is already decidedly more harrowing than its predecessor, if these new images are to be believed:
Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina was created by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and is being developed for Netflix by Warner Bros Television and Berlanti Productions. Aguirre-Sacasa, Greg Bertlani, Sarah Schechter, Jon Goldwater and Lee Toland Krieger are all serving as executive producers.
The series stars Kiernan Shipka (Mad Men) as Sabrina Spellman, Michelle Gomez (Doctor Who) as Mary Wardell, Sabrina’s favourite teacher and mentor at Baxter High, Richard Coyle (The Collection) as Father Blackwood, the High Priest of the Church of Night and Dean of the Academy of the Unseen Arts, Lucy Davis (Wonder Woman) and Miranda Otto (The Lord Of The Rings trilogy) as Aunt Hilda and Aunt Zelda respectively, Ross Lynch (Austin & Ally) as Sabrina’s boyfriend Harvey Kinkle, and newcomer Chance Perdomo as Sabrina’s warlock cousin Ambrose Spellman, who has been placed under house arrest by the Witches Council and is forbidden from leaving the Spellman’s funeral home.
The new series will revolve around Sabrina’s origins. In the comics, the witch was born to a warlock father and a mortal mother before she was promised to Satan as an infant and was set to be placed in a coven to grow up with a group of other witches.
However, her mother didn’t want that life for her daughter and attempted to run away with her. When the escape plan inevitably failed, Sabrina was sent to Greendale (a neighbouring town to Riverdale) to live with her aunts, Hilda and Zelda.
According to Deadline, the Sabrina series will be “tonally in the vein of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist,” and finds Sabrina “wrestling to reconcile her dual nature — half-witch, half-mortal — while standing against the evil forces that threaten her, her family and the daylight world humans inhabit.”
Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina is available to stream on Netflix from 26 October. Get all the latest supernatural news with every issue of SciFiNow.