Fans will finally get to see the darker, creepier take on Sabrina the Teenage Witch later this month when The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina finally premieres on Netflix later this month.
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Now Netflix has released a brand new clip from the series featuring Sabrina meeting her familiar, the black cat known as Salem. It’s a sinister introduction, hinting that Salem’s true nature might be much darker that some fans would expect. Take a look above.
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is a the next major series to be based on Archie Comics in recent years, coming in the wake of the massive success of Riverdale. The character of Sabrina Spellman almost appeared on The CW series, though those plans were quickly scrapped as the teen drama featuring Archie, Betty, and Veronica found its identity.
“During season 1 of Riverdale — before Riverdale exploded and found its footing as sort of a noir, crime, pulp show — we had said, ‘Maybe Season 2 will be like [the comic] Afterlife With Archie,” showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa told EW. “We’ll do a big genre switch and it will be horror, and it will be Afterlife and Sabrina could come and be the antagonist. There was even a time when we talked about the Season 1 cliffhanger being the arrival of Sabrina.”
But the fact that Riverdale started to become more clear allowed Aguirre-Sacasa to figure out a way to make a Sabrina show work, even if it wasn’t a spinoff.
“For various reasons, and I think partly because Riverdale found its footing as more crime show, that felt less and less like the right fit,” Aguirre-Sacasa explained. “It felt like if Riverdale is crime and pulp and all that stuff, then Sabrinacould be horror. It felt like there was a separation between Greendale and Riverdale — magic should exist in Greendale, but not in Riverdale. That was the thought.”
ComicBook.com visited the set of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, where series star Kiernan Shipka spoke about how the horror series is very different from Riverdale.
“There’s definitely that same edge-of-your-seat quality to the show,” said Shipka. “There’s obviously the timelessness of it, the really wonderful cinematography and fun references to different things, and the total suspense is right there. The shows are wildly different, but Roberto [Aguirre-Sacasa is] brilliant, and he’s he’s behind both of them, so there’s definitely a vibe, just sort of a general, addictive quality to both shows that people are really going to respond to.”
The first season of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina premieres on Netflix on October 26th.
