How ‘Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’ Tackles The Horror of Being a Teenage Girl

Even though it’s a bright and bonkers comic book adaptation, Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina has a lot to say about growing up as a woman in 2018. After a lifetime of being torn between two worlds, leading lady, Sabrina Spellman (Kiernan Shipka) is fed up with everything. When forced to choose between being a mortal and a witch, she fights to forge her own path of freedom.

But Sabrina’s journey mirrors one that all young women must take. Her “Dark Baptism” isn’t designed as a rebirth so much as it is a marriage. It is the moment where she is set to cross the threshold from girlhood to womanhood, and as Chilling Adventures of Sabrina points out, that transition has traditionally been fraught with pain. Chilling Adventures of Sabrina isn’t just about a teenage witch. It’s about a teenage girl fighting back against the traps set for young women by the patriarchy.

Sabrina Spellman is a character designed to exist in liminal spaces. As the daughter of a human woman and illustrious warlock, she is both human and witch. She is ordinary and extraordinary. Even her birthday is Halloween, the very day in which the dead walk among the living. But the first two episodes of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina meditate on Sabrina’s journey through two very different states of being. Her Dark Baptism — set for midnight on her 16th birthday — is the moment she crosses the threshold and devotes herself to the Dark Lord, Satan. It’s an over-the-top metaphor for when a girl becomes a woman.

I say that the metaphor is “over-the-top” because the imagery is profoundly on point. Sabrina starts her sixteenth birthday as an innocent, still untouched by the paternalistic forces of Satan. She wears her own mother’s white satin wedding gown, which was designed to riff on 1950s style. Amongst her mortal friends, she is a lily white Disney Princess. When she enters the wood, the dress turns black — against her will. Soon, she is disrobed down to a slip and asked to bind herself to the Dark Lord.

The ceremony is not what was pitched to her. The freedom and power she thought would come with signing the Book of the Beast and transitioning into “witch-hood” is actually another kind of trap. It’s all been a con. She’s not gaining free will, but signing her soul over to Satan. Not only that, but her hand is cut against her will, her blood pouring out on the page. At one point, Father Blackwood (Richard Coyle) literally forces her hand. The injustice of the situation strikes Sabrina as absolute — and it struck me that it’s exactly what happens to young women as they grow up under patriarchal rules.

As little girls, we’re taught that we have to obey our parents, but that when we become adults, we’ll get to do what we want. We’ll mature into our beauty, and our sexuality will be a power we can use. However, the reality is that as soon as young women enter adolescence, we discover that our own bodies are traps binding us. Our sexuality, doubly so. We’re judged, maligned, threatened, and pressured to be yielding. It’s not the so-called freedom of adulthood we were sold. And so it is for Sabrina. Signing the Book of the Beast won’t afford her the free will she was promised.

Sabrina is compelled to do something rather modern: she runs away from making this choice. She flees the forest as though she’s being pursued by a villain in a slasher film. And when the coven confronts her, she proclaims that “there is another path for me.” Sabrina wants to try to take a “third way.” Will it work? Will she succeed? That’s a more complicated question. But it’s worth noting that the very first thing Sabrina does when she returns to her high school is start a club cheekily called WICCA to protect young women from bullying and sexual harassment. Greendale also has a patriarchal streak — and Sabrina and her friends are leading their own resistance.

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina seems to be aware that the magical world has a patriarchal bent. It’s not just the way in which Satan needs total obedience from his (mostly female) subjects, but how Satan himself exercises his power. At the end of Episode 2, the Devil chooses to inhabit the body of one of the few men who has power over Sabrina’s life — her odious principal (Bronson Pinchot). And in Episode 3, he sues Sabrina, forcing her into a diabolical court case. The twist is that in Satan’s version of the law, witches like Sabrina are guilty until proven innocent. The burden is on Sabrina and her aunts to prove they’ve done nothing wrong, and the system is corruptly bent against them. And as for Sabrina’s aunts, the weird sisters, Madame Satan (Michelle Gomez), and all the other women who flock to Satan’s service? It turns out that the Dark Lord can grant powers to those who submit to him, and take them away at his displeasure. It’s a woefully apt metaphor for women who use the patriarchy to push themselves ahead – the Serena Joys of the world, if you will.

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina doesn’t offer its heroine an easy solution to this problem. In fact, the series continues to challenge her commitment to this “third way.” Complications arise and temptations lurk; and that’s how life usually plays out. You can start out with the noblest intentions of breaking a toxic cycle when you’re young, but then can suddenly realize that the society you live in has been ensnaring you all along. The freedom you thought you had is just another kind of dark magical illusion.

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Part 1 is now streaming on Netflix.  

Watch Chilling Adventures of Sabrina on Netflix