Film Reviews & Movie Analysis

The night of Sabrina Spellman’s Sixteenth Birthday is nigh. On that day she will receive her dark baptism, and sign her name in the Book of the Beast. However being born half witch and half mortal means this spunky teenager has a lot of questions which threaten to throw off the balance of both her worlds.

Chilling does not even begin to describe the adventures this Netflix witch gets up to.

If you’ve come for talking cats, kitschy high school dilemmas, and an airing cupboard that will take you to another realm with the crack of lightening…. Well the nineties called – they want your innocence back.

What was really nice and wholly necessary, was the way the series set the tone from the very beginning. Melissa Joan Hart is Sabrina Spellman; she’s the only one we’ve ever had and so comparisons were only natural. This new series needed to make a clear separation between the old and the new, which it succeeded in doing in the best way as it created two very different series’ to like equally instead of having a preference.

I think the main feature that stood out to me in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina was the normalcy of the “demonic”. I’m no stranger to supernatural shows having watched and enjoyed the likes of Charmed, Supernatural, The Vampire Diaries, The Secret Circle, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and what not…. but yowza was this on a whole other level.

There was something giddily creepy about how it was their everyday lives, and though there were some discoveries Sabrina had to make about her coven, we as the audience were walking into something that had already been established.

There was lots to like about this series, such as the subtle entanglement of Sabrina’s mortal friends in the Supernatural. They weren’t blind to the weird things that was going on in their small town even if they couldn’t always explain what was so off.

I enjoyed that there was almost a timelessness to Greendale, from the seventies style costumes, unconventional houses, and holding on to relics such as home phones and soda shops.

It’s funny because after ten episodes I was still surprised by how events culminated even though in a sense, it was leading that way from the start – but even so, man did things get hecka dark.

By the end of the series I did end up having more questions than answers, but this wasn’t necessarily a bad think as it means we know exactly what explanations we’ll get in the next series.

Interestingly enough, watching Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, made me want to sit down and read the comic (in theory… I literally have no time) I want to know more about this darker side of Greendale that was completely stripped from the Nickelodeon series and so I guess in that vein, roll on season two.