The word "chilling" invokes feelings of spine-tingling terror—maybe it reminds you of the first time you watched a horror movie, a bit too young, a bit too impressionable. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, having just released its fourth and final season, falls a bit short in delivering the traditional frights its title might suggest. The Netflix series adapting the Archie comics classic of the same name sits squarely in the lane of teenage coming-of-age narratives worried about how their characters navigate the end of childhood and the beginning of an uncertain future. Although its production lends a certain darker edge to the show, its cheap scares and hodgepodge world of the satanic, demonic, and weird is not "chilling" so much as another adjective: "pulpy."
It's been more than fifty years since "the pulps" dominated newsstands and, with them, American pop culture. Paperbacks with rough pages and lurid covers brought fantastical stories to a public hungry for easy entertainment before the widespread adoption of television. More than purely a medium, pulp was a sensibility, an aesthetic of abundance and spectacle and thrill; even if that often came at the price of literary finesse. Even then, many later giants of literature had their starts in pulp fiction: Bradbury, Lovecraft, Wells, all began their careers writing what many in the establishment considered low-paid, low-quality schlock.
Pulp magazines like Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, and Adventure provided fertile ground for a whole cavalcade of lost worlds, alien civilizations, and plenty of “spicy” storylines all vying to grab readers’ attention with a mixture of camp, kitsch, and melodrama. This creative ecosystem helped produce many mainstays of American pop culture which persist to this day, from daring space rangers to gritty, hard-boiled detectives. By and large, however, pulp has disappeared from the mainstream, and so any reemergence raises the question of what being “pulpy” can mean and do for a modern audience. Decades removed from its original context, can pulp be more than just the collection of archetypes and assorted cultural vestiges that it’s left behind?
The opening sequence of Lovecraft Country, the recent HBO television series based on a book of the same name, does not attempt to hide its relationship to pulp’s cultural lineage. A phantasmagoria of alien spaceships, eldritch horrors, and folk heroes overlap in, what reveals to be, the vivid dream of the show's protagonist. Atticus "Tic" Freeman awakes to a world that, upon first glance, looks like any number of Jim Crow-era period pieces. Upon closer inspection, however, cracks begin to show as his dream slowly becomes reality.
Though the show clearly pulls from H.P. Lovecraft and his stories of cosmic dread, it does not limit itself to this one source of pulpy excess. Episodes teem with twisted monstrosities, mad scientists, extraterrestrial abductions, and magical spells, all seemingly ripped from the newsstands of its 1950s setting. The series’ deliberate pastiche is evocative and wonderfully entertaining, but that’s not all Lovecraft Country has to offer. Behind the pulpy veneer lies a clear theme of how the horrible reality of racism and the simple menace of people animated by hate rival any terror dreamt up in the pages of fiction.
This is where Lovecraft Country and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina cross paths. Beyond their usage of pulp's trappings and sensibilities, neither is satisfied to merely stop there. Each uses pulp to heighten and highlight social conditions which, even in their surreal settings, require our urgent attention.
Although the Devil himself stalks through the episodes of Sabrina, there are other deep-rooted evils at work. Sexism and misogyny plague its characters through all four seasons and give shape to the show's central conflicts. At times clunky and heavy-handed in dealing with these issues, Sabrina is committed to telling these stories with every creative decision. Like Lovecraft Country, Sabrina uses its pulpy presentation to show us that, even in a universe where sweet sixteens come with satanic blood oaths, the familiar injustices of bias and prejudice remain persistent and powerful forces. The show's main antagonist, Father Blackwood, can look almost comical with his Victorian frills and slicked back widow’s peak, and when the Devil does make an appearance you can feel the rubber of his goat's head mask through the screen. These characters are visibly villainous, a fact conveyed with all the tired tropes of a Party City costume section. Sabrina's villains, however, don't need to scare us with fresh horrors. In fact, their indulgent exaggeration allows us to look past the simple evil of devils and demons and reckon with the more complicated beast of their insidious misogyny.
Sabrina and Lovecraft Country obviously delight in their pulpy settings. The rich production design and twisting plots have the same enthralling effect 25¢ paperbacks did decades before. This is not to say both are entirely revolutionary in their inspirations; pulp has had an inextricable effect on pop culture, influencing shows from Star Trek to Jessica Jones. But these shows don’t merely seek to cash in on a vein of nostalgic Americana, rather they seek to use the otherworldly to bring our world into greater focus. Pulp may not be staging a grand comeback, but its reincarnation on the small screen gives us new ways to confront old problems, leaving us perhaps a little chilled after all.
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