‘Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’ Possibly Being Sued By The Satanic Temple

Netflix’s The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina has gone too far when embracing the worship of dark forces, resulting in The Satanic Temple threatening legal action against the streaming service due to the likeness of a statue in the series resembling a monument created by the organization.

Lucien Greaves, co-founder and spokesperson for The Satanic Temple, shared earlier this week, “Yes, we are taking legal action regarding The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina appropriating our copyrighted monument design to promote their asinine Satanic Panic fiction.

In the Netflix series, Sabrina attends the Academy of Unseen Arts, which features a Baphomet statue at the center which Greaves claims is an exact recreation of the statue his organization created and holds copyright over.

The statue’s likeness was modeled after a specific 19th-century illustration of Baphomet, though The Satanic Temple noted that this specific statue features unique elements, both in design and composition, that they are claiming copyright over and point out that the Netflix series also uses.

“It’s deeply problematic to us,” Greaves shared with SFGATE. “(But) even if that wasn’t the case we’d be obligated to make a copyright claim because that’s how copyright works.”

The organization unveiled the nine-foot-tall statue in Detroit in 2015, which was intended to be displayed across from a statue of the Ten Commandments in Oklahoma. In the Netflix series, the monument has connections to Satan himself, despite the real-life monument not intending to be modeled in the likeness of Lucifer. In that regard, Greaves feels as though the use of the Satanic Temple’s monument could misinterpret what the icon is meant to represent.

“It’s distressing on the grounds that you have to worry about that association being made where people will see your monument and not know which preceded the other,” Greaves detailed. “And thinking that you arbitrarily decided to go with the Sabrina design for your Baphomet monument, which rather cheapens our central icon.”

He added, “I feel that the use of our particular image that is recognized as our own central icon (being) displayed fictionally as central to some cannibalistic cult has real-world damaging effects for us.”

Greaves hopes that the series will replace the statue using visual effects.

“It looks like it’s a CGI facsimile to begin with. I don’t know how much work that takes, but I simply refuse to have our monument used in this way in perpetuity,” Greaves noted. “I don’t want our monument to be associated with this.”

The first season of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is on Netflix now.

What do you think about the series using the monument? Let us know in the comments below or hit up @TheWolfman on Twitter to talk all things horror and Star Wars!

[H/T SFGATE]