One day I opened Netflix and something different, yet familiar, caught my eye. Sabrina. Or more correct the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.

Melissa Joan Hart as Sabrina in the '90s.

We millennials might remember how Melissa Joan Hart portrayed Sabrina Spellman, the teenage witch, in the TV-series with the same name, during the second half of the ’90s.

The story of a 16-year old girl, who just discovered her magic powers, living with her 500-year old aunts Hilda and Zelda. She was also accompanied by Salem, a former wizard wanting to take over the world, now banished to be a talking cat. All packaged in a colorful and cheerful Disney-like package.

The reboot takes all this into consideration. It keeps the concept, the characters and the rest of the Sabrina-universe. That is where the similarities end. The reboot is dark, graphical, scary and tense.

I like this version of Sabrina because of…

…how it is filmed.

More or less the complete series is filmed with a specific lens effect, making the edges a bit blurry.

The blur effect is quite strong in this example. Either you hate it or you love it.

Annoying at first, but once you get used to it, it’s brilliant and adds to the tension and gives a ghost-like feeling. I imagine that it should give the effect of that the audience is a restless spirit watching the characters of Greendale, the small town where Sabrina and her family reside.

…what the visuals and sets look like.

It’s very hard to understand what time the events take place in. Sabrina’s house is this old-style mansion-like house that would make Phantom Manor at Disneyland green of envy.

The house is dark, damp and foggy with muted colors, yet beautiful in some odd way. I guess the in-house mortuary and chapel adds to that feeling. And of course the small graveyard on their front lawn.

…the clothing.

The clothing of the actors gives no clues to what time it is. Could it be the 50’s? Or is it the 19th century? Could it be 2019? Sabrina's boyfriend Harvey is, after all, using a smartphone? The mixing of time markers does surprisingly not annoy me, quite the opposite in this case.

…how the original characters are placed in a darker context.

It’s brilliant to pull those well recognized, sparkling characters from old Sabrina and place them in a new, darker context.

Instead of Sabrina turning someone into a frog by mistake she kills another witch to resurrect a dead man.

The strict aunt Zelda spends some intimate time with Faustus, the devil’s right hand. If she gets annoyed with her sister, aunt Hilda, she kills her every now and then and buries her in the front yard. Luckily the soil is good and Hilda is back to life after a couple of hours.

Zelda got annoyed 😱

…the surprises and cliffhangers.

I normally don’t like the surprise effect in movies or TV-series. Those that make you throw your bag of popcorn all over the living room. But in this case, it fits in without being too much or too scary.

All episodes end with a cliffhanger, which just makes you want to watch another episode. It seems as those cliffhangers are made for binge-watching, as the next episode starts off in the same moment as we ended the last, but often with a twist.

The End

This level of scary suits me personally very well. The ghost/witch/devil/dark with a sense of humor theme is one of my favorites. Check it out and let me know in a response what you liked about the series!