First image shared of Kiernan Shipka’s Sabrina the Teenage Witch

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Sabrina the Teenage Witch Melissa Joan Hart

There's a new teenage witch in Greendale. The Archie Comics character Sabrina the Teenage Witch was brought to life by Melissa Joan Hart (pictured above) for seven seasons of an ABC / The WB sitcom that ran from 1996 into 2003, but now Netflix is rebooting the Sabrina property with a darker, more horrific take on the material, and for this new show the character is being played by Kiernan Shipka.

Created by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who also took Archie characters in murder mystery territory with the CW show Riverdale, this new Sabrina series may or may not end up being called Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Either way, it will find Shipka's version of Sabrina 

wrestling to reconcile her dual nature as a half-witch, half-mortal, while fighting the evil forces that threaten her, her family and the daylight world humans inhabit. 

Sabrina Spellman is described as an empowered young woman — half-human, half-witch — who is just beginning her dark education as a sorceress, even as she tries to maintain a normal life as a sophomore at Baxter High. Intelligent, compassionate and brave to the point of recklessness, Sabrina is all that stands between us and the forces of darkness that threaten our world.

Yesterday Aguirre-Sacasa took to his Twitter account to share the first image of Shipka's Sabrina, a picture that shows her holding hands with her love interest, Ross Lynch as Harvey Kinkle.

In the show's cast with Shipka and Lynch are Miranda Otto as Sabrina's disciplinarian aunt Zelda; Lucy Davis as her nurturing aunt Hilda; Jaz Sinclair as her best friend Rosalind Walker; Chance Perdomo as her warlock cousin Ambrose; Michelle Gomez as Sabrina's teacher Mary Wardell, who becomes possessed by the devil's handmaiden Madam Satan; Richard Coyle as Father Blackwood, High Priest of the Church of Night and Dean of the Academy of the Unseen Arts, a man with a "terrifying dark agenda"; Bronson Pinchot as Baxter High's villainous puritanical principal George Hawthorne; and Tati Gabrielle as Prudence, leader of a trio of witches called the Weird Sisters and a character who has a possibly life-threatening grudge against Sabrina.

Netflix has ordered two seasons of this new Sabrina show, with each season consisting of ten episodes. The series is said to be tonally in the vein of ROSEMARY'S BABY and THE EXORCIST.

Source: Twitter

About the Author

Cody is a news editor and film critic, focused on the horror arm of JoBlo.com, and writes scripts for videos that are released through the JoBlo Originals and JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channels. In his spare time, he's a globe-trotting digital nomad, runs a personal blog called Life Between Frames, and writes novels and screenplays.