Revive, reuse and recycle: Revisiting Sabrina

The first ten years of the twenty-first century has been dubbed the ‘Re-’decade (Reynolds, 2011: xx) due to the profusion of ‘revivals, reissues, remakes, re-enactments’ (ibid). Whilst Reynolds specifically explores this in relation to music, the same can be said of other media texts then and now, including comics; this risks stasis or a constricted ability to act in the present (Atia and Davis, 2010: 181) as we ache for a temporal relocation to halcyon days, captured in a looped engagement with a romanticised past potentially over-simplified, even mis-remembered, devoid of criticality and boiled down to rehashed and recognisable stereotypes and sound-bites. This rather bleak (and some may argue contentious) view of contemporary art and storytelling overlooks the possibilities that the postmodern conundrum offers: we may lack wholly original material, but the possibilities offered in how we juxtapose elements of existing material and ideas is in itself a creative process. In turn, this may offer the reader a certain jouissance in the pleasures afforded by both an, albeit potentially narcissistic, trip down memory lane as well as a
playful spotting of the intertextual references used.
This paper looks at The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, a series within the Archie universe but explicitly (and lucratively) re-located and revived within the horror genre through seemingly intentional intertextual references and
aesthetics, creating a highly retro and restorative feel. The ‘bricolage’ of these influences also build on (often highly mediated) associations of character representations, in this case of the witch and the kinds of narratives in which
this archetype often appears. By weaving together the ways in which the texts draws on previous incarnations, horror texts, aesthetics and representations, I hope to illustrate how Sabrina both reflects both the critical aspects of retro
and nostalgia as well as responds to the playful possibilities this offers.