Sunday, November 4, 2018

The Chilling Adentures of Sabrina

Title: The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina
Outlet: Netflix
Net: Not for everyone, but if you enjoy creative horror and can handle gore, and blatant Satanic mythology, you will find creative ideas and a very likeable hero.

Introduction: Sabrina Spellman is a young half-witch living in Greendale. She attends a normal high school with her mortal friends, but lives with her witch aunties, Zelda and Hilda, in their house, which is also the town mortuary.  As the series begins, she is approaching her sixteenth birthday, which naturally (or supernaturally, I suppose) occurs on Hallowe'en when a blood moon will appear.  On that birthday, she will be expected to sign her name in the book of the Dark Lord, and leave her mortal world behind.

None of what I've written so far is a spoiler.  You learn all of this within the first act of the first episode, and presumably you've started watching this show because of its premise.

Here are some other things you might know, or you might not.  They helped me decide to give this series a try.

Sabrina, the character, is from the "Archie" comic universe.  A very wholesome universe in the comics.  She was far more interesting a character than most of those found in Archie's hometown of Riverdale.  And, from my recollection, she was sweet and good-hearted.

Sabrina has had at least one other TV adaptation. I won't go look it up to see if there were more because the one I remember, which influenced me to try this one, starred Melissa Joan Hart.  It was a sitcom, and was, like the comics, sweet and wholesome.  (Hart was the perfect match for this, having come from Clarissa Explains It All, a Nickelodeon show which was one of the best "children's shows" which existed while my kids were growing up -- but I digress.)

Now, before you get the wrong idea, I was pretty darn sure that this new interpretation of the world of Sabrina was not going to be wholesome.  I've heard of the WB show Riverdale, and what I've heard makes it clear that it does not have a typical "Archie" flavor.  I have not seen it, at all, but I've been told.  So, I expected the new "Sabrina" to push the envelope.

Boy, does it!

Caveat:  At the point when I am writing this, I have only seen the first 5 episodes of the ten-episode first season.  If I decide to revise this review after seeing the full season, I will add to the bottom of this review.  Right now, at this moment, having finished 5 episodes, I wanted to capture my feelings.  I think it's important.  Here's why.

I almost stopped watching this series three times before episode five finished.  But now I am hooked.

As I said above, the Archie-verse, in the comics, is wholesome.  Even Sabrina, in the comics, though she's a witch, never deals with the evil side which is part and parcel of witchcraft in lore, legend and culture.  I knew this Netflix-produced show would be able to break through and incorporate some traditional horror.  I just didn't know how deeply they'd wade into that material.

They don't wade.  They dive!

The Witch Coven of Greendale serve the Dark Lord, but they don't just leave him with that name which has also meant Voldemort and other fictional enemies.  No.  They name him: Satan.  Well, OK, then.  This show is going to just flat out jump into Judeo Christian mythology.  (The real world Church of Satan is already angry at the show.  Google it if you want to find out why.  At this point, I don't know, nor do I care.  At this point.  Maybe in the future.)

OK, so bringing Satan into the mythology is going well past wholesome.  Would that stop me from watching the show?  No.  So, what else made me pause?

The overt grotesqueries involved in the witch world.  Like what?  Well, see, on her birthday, Sabrina is going to participate in a ceremony.  Auntie Zelda matter-of-factly states that blood is needed for the Dark Baptism, and human blood is best, so isn't it a good thing a fresh body has come in to their mortuary just a couple days ahead of time?  Yuck!  I've only mentioned this one thing, but there are many, many more.  And they almost made me stop watching after Episode 1.

Sabrina is played by actress Kiernan Shipka.  I've never seen her before, but she is very pretty, very young-looking (playing 16 at age 18, I think) and plays Sabrina as a kind, sweet girl (most of the time.) Yet she also seems completely accustomed to the unique environment in which she is being raised.  And she shows glimpses of being a bit more than your typical wholesome heroine, even in Episode 1.  So I gave the show a break, but I came back.

As I said, I almost gave up on the show more than once.  Another aspect which pushed me towards dropping the show was the gore.  Some horror productions imply gore, some have bits of gore, and some embrace it.  At the beginning, I thought this series was going to imply it, then it moved to bits, and by the third episode or so, it was embracing gore.  Here's this sweet, pretty teen-aged heroine, and she's in scenes with guts and ... well, gore.  So, if you cannot handle gore, you will not get through this show.  I'm sure WB (the network home of "Riverdale") decided to create this on Netflix rather than on their network for many reasons, and the gore was certainly among them.

So if I'm so disturbed by those aspects of "Sabrina" why am I still going on?

Episode 5, and "Sleepy Hollow."  Let me deal with those in reverse order.

A few years back, there was a network TV show called "Sleepy Hollow."  Very few people I know watched the show, but I really liked it.  It was a "horror" show loosely based on the mythology of the Washington Irving story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," mixed with the concept that the supernatural world was very much a part of the world during the American Revolution.  Ichabod Crane (the "protagonist" of Irving's story) pulled a Rip Van Winkle -- slept for a couple hundred years, and woke up in modern day New England, where he ended up partnering with a very capabile police detective, and soon they were fighting supernatural evil in and around Sleepy Hollow in the 21st century.

Being a network (Fox) TV show, it could not go very far in its gore, sex, religiosity and so on, but each week the story arcs advanced, and each week history and the supernatural were cleverly blended to build a mythos and give our heroes quests and enemies.  It was great fun.  I don't know where you can stream it, but if it sounds fun to you, I bet it will be.

Anyway, the first season of "Sleepy Hollow" dealt, primarily, with a story arc which arose from the premise of the show: Ichabod Crane had faced the Headless Horseman during the Revolutionary War, and now the Horseman was back.  But, the show also found a way to tell tangential horror stories.  These stories were primarily one-off episodes.  You could watch them without having seen the full story so far and enjoy them for their clever ideas.  Want a story about a Banshee?  A Will-o-the-Wisp?  There you go - you have one.  Now, for the series faithful, the one-off episodes would drop in a bit of information to advance the big story plot, but these single story episodes were well done.

That's Episode 5 of Sabrina.   If you have reached the end of Episode 4, as I had, and you think "I'm not sure I can go on" try episode 5.

It's still gory.  You have to accept that.  And by this point in the series, "wholesome" is out the window (except, not really -- it's still there, as long as you can separate the heroic from the Satanic.) But the story -- the story -- is great fun.

Anyway, I'm going to keep watching this series through the end of its first 10-episode season.  I'm not exactly sure what they are trying to accomplish in this first main story, but it certainly has something to do with our hero growing up a bit and dealing with the consequences of sticking to her principles -- a common theme, to be sure, told in an uncommon way.

This show is not for everyone.  But for now, I think it's for me.

Addendum: I figured out one more thing that bothers me about this show.  Auntie Zelda (and a couple other characters) are as pious in their Satanism as the most stereotypical Evangelicals are pious in their Christianity.  It bothers me to hear "Praise Satan" every time something happens that Zelda likes, just as it would bother me to hear "Praise God" if the character were Christian.  I wonder if that's one of the points the writers are making?

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This post is part of The List.


3 comments:

Michael Hacker said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Michael Hacker said...

Interesting. I look forward to seeing this show. I've only seen the trailers, and the satanic imagery seems, like you say, overt. As overt as the imagery in 1960's and 70's shows, like Dark Shadows, which pushed the envelope in that direction further than any show before or since--think actual prayers to the Prince of Darkness, and conjurations complete with dark rituals. I have seen every episode of Dark Shadows, but I also digress. I look forward to this show as a companion to Riverdale, which I have seen and is obviously inspired by Twin Peaks in terms of its setting and some of the characters' quirks. However, it doesn't have that intensely disturbing David Lynch atmosphere, which gets into your subconscious in a BIG way. No, Riverdale is more like Twin Peaks meets 90210. In fact a former star of both shows appear in Riverdale, Madchen Amick from Twin Peaks, and Luke Perry from 90210. There are also Canadian character actors that you've seen a million times in The X-Files and StarGate: SG-1.

Michael Hacker said...

Man it's hard to edit comments on Blogger!