Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina gets a December special

Last Updated on January 8, 2024

Between February and June, the cast of the Netflix series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina shot the ten episode first season of the show. Recently they've been working on the ten episode second season… and somewhere in the midst of all that, they managed to fit in the making of a bonus episode that will be released on the Netflix service on December 14th.

Titled Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: A Midwinter's Tale, this holiday special has the following synopsis:

The Church of Night, like all covens, celebrates the Winter Solstice – the longest night of the year – when families gather around the Yule Fire to sing pagan carols and tell ghost stories. But the holidays are also a time for guests and visitors – both welcome and unwelcome – you never know what might come down the chimney…

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina stars Kiernan Shipka as Sabrina "the Teenage Witch", who is 

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.

Shipka is joined in the cast by Miranda Otto as Sabrina's disciplinarian aunt Zelda; Lucy Davis as her nurturing aunt Hilda; Ross Lynch as her love interest Harvey Kinkle; 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.

Unlike the previous TV show based on these Archie Comics characters, this series is a horrific take on the material that was described as being tonally in the vein of ROSEMARY'S BABY and THE EXORCIST. 

The first season of Sabrina arrived on Netflix on October 26th. I haven't watched it yet, but I hope to catch up on it soon.