Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

This interdisciplinary edited collection examines multiple themes found within the popular Netflix series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Chapters on topics such as genre, postmodernism, adaptation, history, fashion, and ideology offer new insights and contextualize the series within contemporary teen television.

This book presents interdisciplinary perspectives on Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, situating the series within contemporary discourses of genre, form, historical place, ideology, and aesthetics. The essays in this collection argue that the series’ unique blend of horror, the Gothic, and melodrama offers a compelling approach to the coming-of-age narrative and makes CAoS a significant part of the teen television canon.

PART 1. “A girl who was half-witch, half-mortal”: The Witches of Greendale

Chapter 1: The Revised Image of the Witch: Historical Archetypes Revamped for the Contemporary Online Audience

Farhana Irshad

Chapter 2: The Inclusive Witch in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

Diana Celeste Etain and Cori Mathis

Chapter 3: Controlling the Female Body: Foucault, Catholic Ireland, and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

Shannon Hughes Spence and Cori Mathis

PART 2. “I want freedom and power”: Depictions of Feminism

Chapter 4: Proliferating Feminisms and the Irruption of the Material in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

Tp Coughlin

Chapter 5: The Devil You Know? Feminism and Postmodern Pastiche of Satanism and the Infernal in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

Alice Capstick

Chapter 6: Giving Satanic and Divine Patriarchy a Run for Their Money: Hybridity, Liminality, and Female Empowerment in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

Luisa Fernanda Grijalva-Maza

PART 3. “I feel more myself in boys’ clothes”: Identity and Intersectionality

Chapter 7: From Having to Choose to Being Chosen: Analyzing Sabrina as a Mixed (Race) Being

Lisa Delacruz Combs, Nicole Neifert, and Marc P. Johnston-Guerrero

Chapter 8: “I want freedom and power”: The Allegory of Queer Rhetoric in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

Stephanie A. Graves

Chapter 9: Empowering Liminality in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

Laura Davidel

PART 4. “Top boy, Sabrina?”: Gender and Gender Performance

Chapter 10: “I’m sick of being the afterthought, the joke”: Hilda Spellman’s Empowering Domesticity in Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

Katie E. Cline

Chapter 11: The Gothic Mother and Daughter in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

Melissa Tyndall

Chapter 12: Devouring Women, Consuming Men: Cats, Mice, and the World of Sabrina Spellman

David Rosen

PART 5. “Where it always feels like Halloween”: Style and Form

Chapter 13: “What’s needed here is a fundamental shift in thinking”: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and the Complexities of the Teen Drama

Cori Mathis

Chapter 14: The Legacy, Liberation, and Limitations of Gender and Genre in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

Lori Bindig Yousman

Chapter 15: Anachronistic Bricolage and Eternal Autumn Aesthetic in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

Daria Romanova and Maggie Webster

Chapter 16: Intersecting Narratives and the Book(s) of the Beast: The Multiplicity of Textual Engagements and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

Alissa Burger