“Sabrina, you’re not yourself.” The Borrowings of Sabrina Spellman

Authors

  • Willem De Blécourt Meertens Institute (Amsterdam), The Netherlands

Keywords:

Sabrina Spellman, witchcraft, ChAoS series, sources, Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, cultural borrowings

Abstract

This article examines the contradiction between shallowness and silliness in the television series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina from the perspective of creative piracy. I argue that the show adopted the superficiality of the 1960s comics. Despite substantial hijacking of elements from series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or a movie Something Wicked This Way Comes the writers failed to lift this new Sabrina to a better quality. The borrowed elements simply made it more chaotic.

Author Biography

Willem De Blécourt, Meertens Institute (Amsterdam), The Netherlands

Willem de Blécourt is an historical anthropologist specialized in the study of witchcraft, werewolves and fairy tales in Europe from the Late Middle Ages to the twentieth century. He is an independent researcher and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Meertens Institute (Amsterdam). He is also one of the editors of the series Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic (together with Jonathan Barry and Owen Davies). His own books include Tales of Magic, Tales in Print. On the Genealogy of Fairy Tales and the Brothers Grimm (2012), and the edited Werewolf Histories (2015). He is currently putting the last hand on: The Cat and the Cauldron. A Cultural History of Witchcraft in the Low Countries. In between,
he is working on werewolf films, with articles in Contemporary Legend and Gramarye. He discussed witchcraft films in The Oxford Illustrated History of Witchcraft and Magic (2017) and in The Fairy Tale Vanguard (2019).

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Published

2021-02-02

How to Cite

De Blécourt, W. (2021). “Sabrina, you’re not yourself.” The Borrowings of Sabrina Spellman. Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai - Dramatica, 65(1), 227–244. Retrieved from https://dramatica.ro/index.php/j/article/view/41

Issue

Vol. 65 No. 1 (2020): Images of Witchcraft: Theatre, Cinema, Visual & Performing Arts

Section

Articles

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.