Did Netflix’s Sabrina show steal a design from the Satanic Temple? The temple thinks so
The Satanic Temple is threatening “legal action” against Netflix after it says “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” stole its design for a demonic statue of the occult deity Baphomet, the group’s spokesperson Lucien Greaves wrote on Twitter.
The temple also says it would not like to be associated with a cult that surrounds the statue in the show, which premiered earlier in October, SyFy Wire reported.
“It’s one thing that there’s another ignorant television portrayal of a Satanic Panic-style Satanic cult that engages in cannibalism, but it is another thing that they’ve used our unique and copyrighted Baphomet monument as the central icon of that cult,” Greaves said, according to the site. “We spent a year and a half designing and financing our monument, which has become a central image of our own organization. To see it appropriated as ‘the Sabrina monument’ while associated with cannibalistic rites is unacceptable.”
“The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” takes a darker spin on the older “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” comics and television show. Sabrina attends a witchcraft school, where a large statue resembling Baphomet sits at the center. Baphomet was a deity originally associated with the historic Knights Templar that was slowly adopted by occultists as a symbol, the BBC reported.
The statue, which features two children gazing adoringly at a horned goat-man-like creature with its hand raised, looks similar to another statue developed earlier by the Satanic Temple. That statue last made an appearance in August, when the Satanic Temple brought it to the state Capitol in Little Rock, Arkansas, to protest a monument of the Ten Commandments being installed at the site, NPR reported.
“We have as little interest in forcing our beliefs and symbols upon you as we do in having the beliefs of others forced upon us,” Greaves said at that event, according to NPR.
The Satanic Temple says it does not believe in a literal Satan and instead ascribes to a set of beliefs it calls the “Seven Tenets.”
Now Greaves and the temple are demanding Netflix pull the statue from its show and have sent a letter to Netflix’s lawyers, The Wrap reported.
“I feel that the use of our particular image that is recognized as our own central icon (being) displayed fictionally as central to some cannibalistic cult has real world damaging effects for us,” Greaves said, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. “I want them to take it out. It looks like it’s a CGI facsimile to begin with. I don’t know how much work that takes, but I simply refuse to have our monument used in this way in perpetuity.”
Netflix has yet to respond to the demand, although “Sabrina” production designer Lisa Soper said in an earlier interview with Vice that the similarities were “coincidence.”
“When you look at Baphomet, there’s really only a couple of statues of him — which, they have their statue, and we’ve got our statue in the show,” she said, according to the site.
This story was originally published October 31, 2018 at 8:30 AM.