Honourable mention: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina – season 3

Director: Various

First aired: 2020

Contains spoilers

One programme I simply adore is Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. The fact that they took something I remember as kids’ TV fare (and, yes, I know of its incarnations and roots, but I particularly remember the Melissa Joan Hart incarnation) and twisted into a thoroughly entertaining but also thoroughly dark series was magnificently done.

I watched the first two seasons with glee but it is in the third season that we get a vampire element – indeed two vampire elements – though they are series spoiler heavy as they are from the end of the season, so be warned.

the tomb

The primary vampire moment is when Sabrina (Kiernan Shipka) is on a quest/race to find the unholy regalia – artefacts of evil power considered lost and needed to stake her claim to the throne of Hell. In particular we are looking at the race to find the 30 pieces of silver given to Judas. Having questioned Christ’s betrayer in the 9th level of Hell, Sabrina discovers that the silver is with the bones of the first vampire, Vlad Ţepeş (Michael Antonakos, Odysseus & the Isle of Mists). The tomb does indeed contain bones, but as Sabrina stands (back to the tomb) counting the silver as advised by Judas, we see the reconstituted vampire rise.

bite

The vampire mojos Sabrina with his voice alone, and during the exchange we discover that Judas is Vlad’s father… this feels like a deliberate twist on the Judas as first vampire that was introduced to the genre in Dracula 2001. Anyway, Sabrina bares neck and he bites… and falls away, foaming at the mouth. Being the daughter of Lucifer (Luke Cook) she is part celestial and her blood is poisonous to the vampire. We see Vlad again, albeit very briefly, as a guardian of the regalia in the next episode, but he does little (bar kill a couple of plant zombies off screen and push a standing stone). So, a fleeting visitation.

tendrils of the Green Man

The other vampiric aspect to mention is the fact that the thrust of the season is that pagans come to Greendale to resurrect the oldest of their Gods, the Green Man. The tree which will birth the green man is watered with blood and the green man is totally resurrected through virgin sacrifice, but the sacrifice is put into the tree (now resembling the wicker man) and vines of the tree entwine the sacrifice, extracting the blood directly. We then hear that the green man subsists on the blood of the plant zombies (which are residents pollinated by the tree). All things being fair, I wouldn’t have covered this on the blog if it hadn’t been for Vlad’s fleeting visitation but it feels vampiric (and I’ll tag it vampiric plant). So, there you have it, a chance to look at Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.

The imdb page is here.