Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: 10 spookiest moments of season 1

CHILLING ADVENTURES OF SABRINA production still. Photo: Diyah Pera/Netflix

A visit from the Dark Lord

Episode: “Chapter Two: The Dark Baptism”

“Wait, you’re not going to pick the actual ritual?” We can just hear you Chilling Adventures fans up in arms already. Here’s the thing: although yes, Sabrina’s failed dark baptism in the woods is spooky, it was also heavily shown in trailers and images. There really wasn’t much of a surprise to it at all, and that means it had an uphill road to be considered one of the 10 spookiest moments of the whole season.

Principal Hawthorne getting possessed by Satan, however? Now that’s something that came out of what feels like nowhere and everywhere at the same time. On the one hand, it makes sense that he’d come and tell Sabrina off for not signing her name away, but we would have expected a vision first.

Instead, the staid principal telling her that “All mortal flesh must burn”? Yeah, that’s the goods we didn’t even know we needed.

“Light as a feather, stiff as a board”

Episode: “Chapter Four: Witch Academy”

It feels like the writers’ room for this show looked at its first four episodes and said: “You know what we don’t have enough of? Ghosts.” And lo, ghosts were added. But these are not just any ghosts, no. They’re the ghosts of children killed during the harrowing, which is just a fancy word for terrible hazing.

Although those more learned than me have commented on the frankly awful racial politics of the scene, which entails hanging a black woman from a tree, the actual spooky moment doesn’t come from Sabrina at all. Rather, it’s from Quentin and the other ghost children, all wearing different period costumes, chanting “light as a feather, stiff as a board.” Who knew that a sleepover game could be made so much worse by having the spirits of essentially murdered children chanting?