Sabrina Spellman, the protagonist of Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, makes a dramatic departure from her first Archie Comics incarnation. She’s still a half-witch, half-mortal teen, concealing her powers from everyone in the mortal world. But this latest iteration of the teenage witch, played by Kiernan Shipka, confronts problems that feel disconcertingly current. Early in the first episode, a female friend confesses to Sabrina that she’s been sexually assaulted by a group of football players. Indignant, Sabrina marches to the principal’s office to make her friend’s case to Principal Hawthorne (Bronson Pinchot). He’s dismissive, even uninterested. Sabrina insists on calling in the football team for questioning.

“You’re suggesting a witch hunt?” he says.

Sabrina doesn’t miss a beat: “I don’t care for that term.”

I'm Sorry, but You Need to Be Watching Riverdale The CW teen soap may be a high drama hormone-fest, but it's got brains. (OK, and biker gangs.)

But beyond being a now-familiar convention, it’s also a moment of startling awareness for the show: “witch hunt” directly evokes language that has been used to delegitimize the #MeToo movement, to suggest that claims against groups of men are paranoiac, hysterical. And across the first few episodes of Netflix’s new teen thriller, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina negotiates the paradox of gender in witch lore. On one hand, women witches must sign away their freedom to a patriarchal Dark Lord in order to gain power; on the other, their powers allow them to settle scores with oppressors of the mortal world. And in leaning in to that uneasy balance, the show revitalizes a once-frivolous comic-book character—and positions as her adversaries not just the everyday wickedness of the mortal world, but Lucifer himself.

The fantastically macabre update comes courtesy of Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who also created The CW’s Riverdale. Just as with that show, Sabrina takes its familiar cast of characters—Sabrina, her witch aunts, her feline familiar—and sets them in a darker, more mature milieu. Fans of Riverdale’s horny teen ensemble won’t find quite the same level of raging hormones in Sabrina. They will, though, see a lot more gore in this adaptation, which is unflinching in its inspiration from horror tropes and images. In one early scene, a pair of levitating scissors spears its victim’s neck, releasing jets of blood that pools decadently across the frame. And that’s just in the pilot episode.

The backdrop of the show is Greendale, whose quaint mid-century Americana instantly recalls the aesthetic of neighboring town Riverdale. We learn that Greendale had its own gruesome witch trials, hundreds of years ago, and the coven has lived on secretly ever since. Their latest initiate would be Sabrina Spellman—that is, if she makes up her mind. Sabrina was born from a warlock father and a mortal mother, both long deceased. On her sixteenth birthday, per Spellman tradition, she can choose to strike a deal with the devil and keep her powers, with a catch: she must cut ties with her mortal life, including her human friends and her smitten, oblivious boyfriend, Harvey Kinkle (Ross Lynch).

Sabrina doesn’t have much time to mull over her options. Her witch Aunts Zelda (Miranda Otto) and Hilda (Lucy Davis) are already preparing Sabrina for her Dark Baptism, scheduled for Sabrina’s sixteenth birthday, which is also on Halloween, which just so happens to fall beneath a vaguely portentous eclipse. If she chooses to sign away her freedom to the devil, in exchange for power, she must also attend the Academy of Unseen Arts, never to see her human friends again.

Unlike with previous adaptations of the Archie Comics character, though, magic is no laughing matter. The Netflix show’s representation of magic is more closely aligned to the medieval and Renaissance concept of witches, who were believed to have been bestowed with power by Satan himself. Lucifer makes a few appearances in the show, in the form of a grotesque goat monster, echoing medieval renderings and the devil of Goya’s haunting Witches’ Sabbath. Even Salem, Sabrina’s feline familiar, is no smart-aleck animatronic, but a cat that occasionally evinces hints of his fearsome demonic form. The show’s darker depictions of magic makes for some deliciously spine-chilling scares.