Last season on The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Father Blackwood (Richard Coyle) unleashed the Eldritch Terrors upon Greendale. So, in the show’s final season, the characters have to fight against some of the most fearsome monsters yet — and they’ve literally battled the devil.
The Eldritch terrors are more entities than physical villains, which makes them that much scarier. “There’s something about an unknown villain that’s particularly intimidating,” Lachlan Watson (Theo) told Refinery29 at the CAOS junket. “I think that’s something people can relate to right now in 2020. It’s not really knowing what something is or having the physical representation.” Jaz Sinclair (Roz) added, “Or how long it’s going to go on. Or what it is.”
The characters on CAOS may not have known what the terrors were, but we the viewers do. There are eight terrors in all, one for every episode of the last season, and they all have roots in legends and mythology. Most of the inspiration for the creatures come from the works of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft (who, we should note, was an influential but notoriously racist author), whose identity Blackwood sort takes on as he preaches at his new church. He calls himself the Reverend Lovecraft and considers himself the harbinger of these Eldritch terrors.
The First Eldritch Terror: The Eldritch Dark
When Does It Appear? Episode 1 in Part 4, in the form of a group of miners who seek to extinguish all the light from Greendale. They can also kill people using a sort of Sith Lord-style Force choke move.
What Is It? The terror seeks to plunge the world into absolute darkness — a “crushing, consuming darkness.” Hence the lightbulb-destroying miners. But it also has an omnipresence that allows it to prey upon people’s weaknesses and fears. When Sabrina confronts it, she feels a hopeless despair. So the terror is both a physical darkness as well as a darkness of the mind.
It manifests in the miners because they died in a mining disaster — in the dark.
What The Eldritch Dark is Based On: Horror writer H.P. Lovecraft created a similar entity called Darkness (also sometimes called Magnum Tenebrosum and The Unnamed Darkness) as part of his group of Outer Gods. It’s part of the void that existed before all things. But little is known about it, so CAOS had a lot of room to develop the terror into murderous miners who hated light.
Kiernan Shipka, who plays Sabrina, told Refinery29 that this terror scared her the most. “It’s kind of like this all encompassing unknown, versus a lot of the more tangible Terrors that are sort of represented by people. This is just a thing. I think that to me was the most spooky,” she said.Photo: Courtesy of Netflix.
The Second Eldritch Terror: The Uninvited
When Does It Appear? Episode 2 in the form of a decaying zombie man who smells like trash but who wants people to invite him inside their homes.
What Is It? A herald of the void, The Uninvited was created when he was turned away from the warm fire during the creation of all things. Now he rips people’s hearts out who don’t welcome him inside — illustrating how “heartless” they are.
What The Uninvited is Based On: The Uninvited seems inspired by Lovecraft’s story The Outsider. In that tale, a beastly-looking man has never had contact with the outside world until he stumbles upon a party (much like The Uninvited attended Hilda’s wedding) and terrifies the guests there. But rather than being truly evil, The Outsider is just lonely and sad that his appearance scares people. No heart-ripping here.Photo: Courtesy of Netflix.
The Third Eldritch Terror: The Weird
When Does It Appear? Episode 3 in the body of a drowning victim.
What Is It? The actual Weird is a octopus-like creature that uses humans as hosts. It takes root in Sabrina and begins to turn her into a marine creature. The Weird is more of an entity than a singular being, though. It tells Sabrina, “We are one. We think as one. We feel as one.”
What The Weird Is Based On: Lovecraft’s most famous monster is Cthulhu, a part-human, part-dragon, part-octopus. The entity was introduced in The Call of Cthulhu published in Weird Tales magazine. Lovecraft’s universe of monsters is now deemed the Cthulhu Mythos. Photo: Courtesy of Netflix.
The Fourth Eldritch Terror: The Perverse
When Does It Appear? Episode 4 in a little golden figurine called “the Imp of the Perverse” collected by a trinket salesman.
What Is It? The goblin-esque statue can warp reality. It’s also a bit like a magic lamp, because it allows the owner to make a wish on it. When Father Blackwood gets his hands on the statue, he wishes to be the emperor of Greendale. Suddenly the reality of the town into a dictatorship.
What The Perverse Is Based On: The statue seems to take its name from the Edgar Allen Poe story “The Imp of the Perverse” where the Perverse seeks to make people do things contrary to their own self interest. Lovecraft was frequently influenced by Poe and eventually made his own God of Perversion, Y’golonac.
Several of the cast members listed this one as the scariest terror, because it resulted in the characters living in a reality they didn’t know was fake.
“With the other Eldritch Terrors, everybody knows that something’s up. So everybody can band together and figure it out,” said Sinclair. “But with the Perverse, you don’t know how long it’s going to last, you don’t know if it is going to last forever, and everybody thinks they’re in a normal world that’s clearly not normal. So, for me, that’s the scariest one. Because it’s like a bad dream.”Photo: Courtesy of Netflix.
The Fifth Eldritch Terror: The Cosmic
When Does It Appear? In episode 5, an angel comes to warn the witches of three approaching cosmos that will destroy the realms.
What Is It? The existence of two Sabrinas (thanks to the character’s time travel snafu from last season) seems to have made the universe’s chaos worse. Now the heavens, hell, and earth are colliding into one another. That won’t be helped by the three parallel cosmos hurtling to replace the realms that Sabrina and her friends occupy.
What the Cosmic is Based On: This doesn’t seem based on one entity so much as the entirety of Lovecraft’s work. He’s a “cosmic horror” writer, meaning that the villains encountered in his stories are more omnipresent and unknowable than a standard serial killer or even a zombie. He also often utilised parallel universes in his work.Photo: Courtesy of Netflix.
The Sixth Eldritch Terror: The Returned
When Does It Appear? In Episode 6, dead and departed characters return as zombies.
What Is It? The zombies — among them Dorcas (Abigail Cowen), a punk rock band, and the Spellmans’ dog Vinegar Tom — don’t know they’re dead. If you remind them, they’ll turn on you.
What The Returned Is Based On: This terror seems to rely more on the Bible than a Lovecraft story. The avatar of the zombified returnees is Lazarus. In the Bible, he was brought back to life by Jesus after being dead four days.Photo: Courtesy of Netflix.
The Seventh Eldritch Terror: The Endless
When Does It Appear? In Episode 7, when Sabrina Morningstar travels to the parallel earth.
What Is It? The Endless manifests itself through Salem, the janky talking cat puppet from Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Salem is head writer on the sitcom which stars Sabrina Morningstar as herself. She’s not a real witch in this realm, she just plays one on TV. And every day is the same as scripts get recycled, plot lines repeat, and new actors are shoved into the same old roles.
What The Endless is Based On: This literal take on the meaning of endless is likely inspired by the Lovecraftian deity Thasaidon, Master of the Endless Void. In the show, Salem says that the Endless and The Void work in tandem. The Endless is never-ending, and The Void is the end of all things.Photo: Courtesy of Netflix.
The Eighth Eldritch Terror: The Void
When Does It Appear? In Episode 8, the series finale.
What Is It? All of the other terrors have been leading up to this one. The Void represents nothingness and the end. Sabrina visits The Void and it’s a room filled with all the planets in the universe. It contains all things but is nothing at the same time and it threatens to destroy everything Sabrina knows and loves.
What The Void Is Based On: Like with The Cosmic, the inspiration behind The Void is less literal. Lovecraft doesn’t have a specific monster that COAS used here. It’s more that cosmic horror relies on the reader’s or audience’s fear of the unknown, which is exactly what a void is — a stretch of nothingness that we cannot understand.
And even if Sabrina defeats The Void, The Void will win because this episode is the series finale. The show ends just as it introduces a villain about, what else? The end of all things.Photo: Courtesy of Netflix.
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