The Halloween season has always been a time to embrace the brisk weather of fall and the mystery that comes along with those chilled breezes. However, for many, their day-to-day lives make it difficult to take in and embrace the spookiness of Halloween properly and how much fun could come along with it. Thankfully, entertainment has offered multiple outlets for many to indulge in the scary and festive side of the holiday.
While video games and movies have always been a quick go-to for getting a thrill or a scare during Halloween, many examples within are horror properties that can't always appease each demographic. For example, what may be fun to an adult could be utterly horrifying to someone younger. As a result, it's hard to find a balance between both. Thankfully, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina has garnered a story that could appease a wide range of fans while embracing and exploring some of Halloween's best tropes.
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Explore Halloween's Best Tropes
Like the comics that inspired the character and series, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina followed Sabrina Spellman as she grew to explore and embrace her abilities as a witch. However, being that she's still a teenager, this often came with foolishly made mistakes that led to dangerous consequences and revelations she was far from prepared to face. Interestingly, in doing so, the series also got a green light to dive even deeper into the many Halloween-themed tropes that permeate the series.
From the start, Sabrina's eerie and gothic home -- as well as her devout witch aunts -- set a precedent for how grim the series could look, but carry an Addams Family-style charm. Perhaps the most important example is Sabrina's birthday, which fell on Halloween. In the series, her 16th birthday also included a Dark Baptism where she underwent a ceremony to devote herself to the Dark Lord under an eclipsing blood moon. While a Dark Baptism is enough to embrace the Halloween feeling of the show, Sabrina was also tied to one of the main talking points of the holiday: Satan aka Lucifer Morningstar.
In the series, it's revealed that she's not just Sabrina Spellman but also Sabrina Morningstar, the daughter of The Devil. While that's a big enough surprise alone, the revelation also allowed Sabrina to explore even darker corners of her world as she now had hellish abilities she could explore. Thankfully, she had more than enough time to do so as her home of Greendale also embraced a Halloween-centric aesthetic with its gothic architecture and eerie stories reminiscent of some of horror's best writers. Plus, with its focus on witchcraft and unsettling imagery, it's easy to get lost in a Halloween-themed rabbit hole.
Sabrina & Nick's Romance a Perfect Direction Fit For Younger Eyes
For all the gore, scares, dark stories and magic, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina was surprisingly a series that didn't sit solely in the horror genre. In fact, it branched out into other sub-genres, such as teen drama and romance. But even with the constant wonder of who would and wouldn't remain together or survive a break-up, the story still managed to tie itself to the central theme of scares. As a result, if a romance fan may not be completely sold on the horror, they may find its take on relationships to be truly captivating. One of the best examples of this was the enduring relationship between Nick and Sabrina which continued even after the show reached its conclusion.
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina may not be for younger audiences most of the time, but the show has proven in four Seasons that it can explore different genres, the consequences of that, and the twists with skill and style. It's not intense violence from beginning to end, nor is it solely a love story with a hint of Halloween; it's a true exploration into the world of the supernatural complete with its own brand of drama and enough terrifying twists so that Sabrina could always live up to her title and experience truly chilling adventures. In the end, if there's ever a show that a broad audience could watch that captures the Halloween vibe, fans should look no further than Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.