When Teenage Magic Met Real-Life Growing Pains
When chilling Adventures of Sabrina appeared on Netflix, it felt different from any other supernatural teen drama. It felt like a modern dark fairy tale. Part horror, part coming of age, and part coming of age and rebellion against fate. Below the story of the spell books and the pentagrams lies the story of identity and the courage it takes to go one’s own way.
What made the story more powerful was the author’s emotional parallel journey with the characters, especially Kiernan Shipka. Sabrina Spellman is central to the series’s emotional core. She is a product of two different realms, one a witch and the other a mortal. Shadowing Greendale’s town, the aunts Hilda and Zelda, on Sabrina’s sixteenth birthday, she must write her name in the book of the beast and pledge her undying loyalty to the dark lord.
But Sabrina Spellman, as always, is a full- no part witch. Therefore, she is not and never will be a part of the world of doubt.
Sabrina does not want to be the perfect little witch and just stay with the coven. Sabrina wants to be with Harvey Kinkle and be able to practice witchcraft. Sabrina wants a “normal” life with a little bit of magic. Obviously, that goes against everything the Church of Night believes. So, Sabrina gets condemned as a defiant little witch by the church and the Dark Lord and gets viewed as a wacko by the humans. With each new season, Sabrina gets challenged more and more. The challenges get a little more dark and a little more dangerous, and she is faced with not only magical challenges but also emotional challenges, as she is dragged kicking and screaming to face the responsibilities that come with being ‘the chosen one’, and face the guilt and the fear that is a product of being the ‘chosen one.’ In the later seasons, Sabrina no longer wants to be a confused little teenage witch. She becomes the Queen of Hell, and has to sacrifice herself to protect both the human and magical worlds. It is a story of wisdom not earned too late and power gained too late.
Sabrina Spellman is almost poetic. Before being a Sabrina Spellman, she was Sally Draper on the television series, Mad Men, and was the child actress that was surrounded by a bunch of adults.
The intense storytelling she encountered while growing up influenced how she portrayed the character Sabrina in the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Similar to Sabrina, Shipka also had to grow up to take on the responsibilities of a challenging leading role. She remarkably ‘carried the show’ with its heavy themes — feminism, free will, death, and destiny.
Shipka has also said that the role was emotionally very challenging. There was no simply being a character. She was constantly in a life threatening circumstance. This isn’t much ‘different’ Sabrina’s exhaustion. She had the burden of always having to be the one that saves everyone.
Shipka had the choice to portray the emotional scenes how she wanted to. She decided that instead of exaggerating them, she wanted to portray them realistically. She wanted Sabrina to be trapped in a difficult situation, not a superhero. This also enabled her to portray some of the most real and emotional moments without being silly.
Shipka’s growth in her character parallels that of Sabrina. From a simple student, Shipka’s character grows to be the ‘Queen’ of Hell.
Miranda Otto and Lucy Davis: Aunts Who Felt Like Mothers
Zelda and Hilda Spellman are not regular guardians. They are witches, and are witches bound by their own traditions and fear of punishment. While Zelda is rule oriented and Dark Lord devotional, Hilda is kind and soft.
As Miranda Otto is an actress from The Lord of the Rings, she incorporated her own experiences of leaving a role of powerful women into Zelda. The character’s struggles of highly zealous Zelda reflects the difficulties of these belief systems.
While Otto and Davis were being cast, Lucy provided Hilda with all of the emotional strength that character’s role called for. Davis, in a behind the scenes interview, described Hilda as a sacrificial individual. This quality, in Davis’s view, was the character’s most tender role, and the tenderness towards killing Hilda was a quality that made her one of the most popular characters in the entire series.
The Spellman aunts were a little less like witches and more like desi-aunts, strict and soft with a strong internal protective.
The Burden of Love and Sabrina Spellman’s Choice
As Sabrina’s love interest, Harvey Kinkle, played by Ross Lynch, Sabrina’s relationship with Harvey Kinkle, played by Ross Lynch, Sabrina’s Harvey represents her human heart, gentle, artistic, and scared of the darkness she brings into his life.
Ross Lynch as Harvey Kinkle had the most difficult transition from child Disney actor to adult actor as he had to capture trauma and loss. Lynch’s performance after his character’s brother dies is vividly emotional. Off-screen Lynch expressed a desire to be viewed as a serious actor and Kinkle’s pain and loss journey fit that desire. Sabrina’s later relationship with Nick Scratch (Gavin Leatherwood) examines love and loss. Nick’s character portrays a real struggle that most young adults experience: loss of self due to the need for power.
These relationships showed the audience that the show was about way more than magic and spells: it was about real and serious repercussions.
A Cultural Storm in Black and Red
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’s greatest impact was as a cultural phenomenon. Sabrina and the other characters redefined the meaning of a witch as simply evil. The show presented witches as characters of freedom and defiance. Sabrina’s character was a metaphor for the defiance of the young adult and adolescent population who refuse to conform to the social order.
The show’s impact in India was extremely relevant due to the country’s vast and deep-rooted mythology. The show’s impact centered around the themes of destiny versus choice, a theme prevalent in Western witchcraft as well as Indian epic stories, and is strongly tied to the show’s themes of feminism and the defiance of social order.
The enchantment of the setting where dark forests and candle-lit rituals were harsh strong enough to keep even the most critiquing eye enthralled with the juxtaposing dark and light medieval-modern fairy-world.
Not many fans know that the rituals performed in the show were based on historical texts the writers found in their research. They weren’t looking to create gibberish magic words, and what they found and used in their own way was honest historical magic.
The actor playing Sabrina, Kiernan Shipka, used the voice of Sabrina the character to keep a personal journal to articulate the character’s feelings of fear and hopes. This tool casted out even the more simple and clear monologues from the clockwork of the script.
The cast of the show has another shown tradition of rehearsing play rituals as if they were on an actual theater stage.
The viewers favorite feeling of other worldly creepiness was crafted from the silence in the dark woods play rehearsals and intricately choreographed the spider scene in the candle lit rituals.
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina continues to be loved not just as a tale of dark magic, but the strong and dark emotions that witch has a terrifying coming of age story with the horror of difficult choices, painful endings, and acts of bravery.
Kiernan Shipka and her peers projected their own shifts, challenges, and hopes into their performances, which is why Sabrina felt real and not fictional. The character’s story was not one of battling the forces of evil, but was more of an exploration of the self.
Ultimately, Sabrina’s journey reflects the age-old wisdom found in many Westerns as well as Indian fables: power is empty without empathy and fate is only for the fearlessly self-determined.
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