I've finally gotten around to reading the first volume of Archie Comics' The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which was adapted into the recently successful Netflix show. I'll get this out of the way, the show is great fun and is visually gorgeous. If you haven't watched it, do.
I have never been deep into the Archie Comics books, but was intrigued when I saw their rebranding toward a horror aesthetic–including the development of their Archie Horror imprint for their horror themed books. In addition to Sabrina, these include Afterlife with Archie, Jughead: The Hunger, and Vampironica.
The first volume of Sabrina, entitled "The Crucible," was written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, with artwork by Robert Hack. It engages with the world of the young half-witch Sabrina Spellman, who lives with her two witch aunts and a cat familiar named "Salem." This post won't include a plot summary or detailed review of the book, as I take that information to be largely peripheral to the (admittedly exploratory and non-definitive) thoughts I'm working through here. Suffice it to say, overall I enjoyed the book and would recommend it.
This post was inspired by the fact that Sabrina left me thinking about the place of references in horror comics, as well as horror narratives more generally. Specifically, how do elements of horror stories hope to inspire fear (which presumably involves some level of surprise, uncertainty, or a disruption of expectations), in cases where those elements are tropes or references to other well-known narratives (which presumably involves a level of familiarity)? The reason Sabrina (particularly) left me thinking about references is that it is chock-full of them.
The first volume of Sabrina includes numerous references to external media, including Edgar Allan Poe, "The Monkey's Paw," the musicals Grease and Bye Bye Birdie, Ray Bradbury, and (if this can be considered a reference to external media) Archie Comics characters. Additionally, Sabrina's cousin Ambrose has familiars named Nag and Nagaina, who are referenced as children of Glycon. Glycon is a puppet snake god most prominently associated (in comics circles at least) with Alan Moore, who claims to have had numinous religious experiences involving Glycon.
The first volume of Sabrina includes numerous references to external media, including Edgar Allan Poe, "The Monkey's Paw," the musicals Grease and Bye Bye Birdie, Ray Bradbury, and (if this can be considered a reference to external media) Archie Comics characters. Additionally, Sabrina's cousin Ambrose has familiars named Nag and Nagaina, who are referenced as children of Glycon. Glycon is a puppet snake god most prominently associated (in comics circles at least) with Alan Moore, who claims to have had numinous religious experiences involving Glycon.
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| Glycon looking confident and stylish as hell. |
The references to occultist traditions and practices don't end with a gesturing toward the apostle of esoteric comics, however. During scenes in which Sabrina is put on trial by the Church of Night, the priest overseeing the ceremony is Aleister Crowley, the prominent British occultist and ceremonial magician. While he is never called by his full name, he is referred to as "High Priest Crowley" and the depiction is unmistakable.
A comprehensive list of references in the first volume of The Chilling Adventures is beyond the scope of this post, but needless to say there are plenty. Additional references include: the mythology of H.P. Lovecraft, Satanist symbology, the fiction of Shirley Jackson, Rosemary's Baby, Macbeth, the 1922 silent film Häxan, Carrie, and Creepshow.
So, with all these references flying around, how do they function in the context of horror comics? Like any interesting question, there likely is no single comprehensive answer. Therefore, this post will be exploratory in nature, rather than an attempt to assert a particular position.
References are one element of what scholars have come to refer to as "intertextuality." Intertextuality is the interrelation of cultural artifacts to one another. This tends to be explored mostly in terms of literature, but intertextuality also occurs in the visual arts and film, as well as across artistic mediums. The view that intertextuality is an important aspect of understanding a work is built on the understanding that:
The references in this book, being a part of intertextuality, locate Sabrina in a tradition of horror media tracking back hundreds of years. In part, these references serve to separate this comic from the widely known light-hearted television show called Sabrina the Teenage Witch, starring Melissa Joan Hart. With all of the references to occultism, Satanism, and horror, Aguirre-Sacasa and company position their Sabrina title as being firmly within the horror genre. This story, the creators are suggesting, has more in common with Stephen King than with the popular ABC sit-com.
However, might this method of positioning the comics title also undermine the potential for Sabrina to be scary? While referencing popular horror movies, novels, and concepts works to intertextually relate Sabrina to pieces of media that are horrifying, such a clearly referential strategy may also have the effect of taking the reader's attention out of the storyworld of the comic. Or, to put it another way, intertextual references may remind readers that they are reading a comic, it's only a piece of media, and therefore there's nothing to be afraid of. Familiarity with concepts and narrative tropes may make readers respond with excited or nostalgic recognition, rather than the uncertainty or surprise typically associated with fear responses.
Now, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is highly playful when referencing the tradition of horror and occultism and it might be argued that Sabrina isn't intended to be scary. It may be that Sabrina is a comic with a horror aesthetic, rather than properly being a horror comic. This is a definitional point about authorial intent and I'm not concerned with engaging this angle here, as I don't see it having much of an effect on my line of thinking. The point still stands that this seems to be a philosophical quandary more broadly in horror comics and media. How do horror narratives draw on (and even highlight) intertextual references and simultaneously aim to engender fear in their audience (sometimes) using those very elements. Surely, audience members who recognize the references will have their attention drawn away from their engagement with the storyworld and will instead think of the fact that they are engaging with a cultural artifact (comic, novel, movie, etc.), which is a decidedly unscary prospect.
This post-modern intertextual strategy and use of metatextual narratives (that is stories about stories) shows up in horror media more broadly. Obvious examples include Scream (the film), Hellboy (Mignola's comic), From Hell (Alan Moore's comic influenced heavily by Stephen Knight's theories on the identity of Jack the Ripper), Cabin in the Woods (the film), Shaun of the Dead (the film), and Creepshow (a film that clearly references 1950's E.C. horror comics).
There are theories of horror that can potentially offer a way to resolve this issue. For example, philosopher Nöel Carroll argues that our experiences of horror in artistic contexts comes from our fear responses to representations of monsters that are "physically (and perhaps morally and socially) threatening in the ways portrayed in the fiction" (Carroll, 27). For Carroll, the reason that these monsters are so threatening is that they are "interstitial," meaning they cross the boundaries of "the deep categories of a culture's conceptual scheme" (31-32). Zombies and vampires, for example, are both living and dead. Bodily fluids which cause disgust (feces, blood, etc.) conflate categories of "me/not me, inside/outside, and living/dead" (32). "Horrific monsters often involve the mixture of what is normally distinct" (33). Possessed characters involve a confusion of appearance and essence, and werewolves and other shape-shifters blur the boundaries between human and animal forms.
A comprehensive list of references in the first volume of The Chilling Adventures is beyond the scope of this post, but needless to say there are plenty. Additional references include: the mythology of H.P. Lovecraft, Satanist symbology, the fiction of Shirley Jackson, Rosemary's Baby, Macbeth, the 1922 silent film Häxan, Carrie, and Creepshow.
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| High Priest Crowley |
References are one element of what scholars have come to refer to as "intertextuality." Intertextuality is the interrelation of cultural artifacts to one another. This tends to be explored mostly in terms of literature, but intertextuality also occurs in the visual arts and film, as well as across artistic mediums. The view that intertextuality is an important aspect of understanding a work is built on the understanding that:
There are always other words in a word, other texts in a text. The concept of intertextuality requires, therefore, that we understand texts not as self-contained systems but as differential and historical, as traces and tracings of otherness, since they are shaped by the repetition and transformation of other textual structures. Rejecting [the] principle of textual autonomy, the theory of intertextuality insists that a text cannot exist as a self-sufficient whole, and so, that it does not function as a closed system (Alfaro, 268).
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| Rosemary's Baby-style variant cover |
The references in this book, being a part of intertextuality, locate Sabrina in a tradition of horror media tracking back hundreds of years. In part, these references serve to separate this comic from the widely known light-hearted television show called Sabrina the Teenage Witch, starring Melissa Joan Hart. With all of the references to occultism, Satanism, and horror, Aguirre-Sacasa and company position their Sabrina title as being firmly within the horror genre. This story, the creators are suggesting, has more in common with Stephen King than with the popular ABC sit-com.
However, might this method of positioning the comics title also undermine the potential for Sabrina to be scary? While referencing popular horror movies, novels, and concepts works to intertextually relate Sabrina to pieces of media that are horrifying, such a clearly referential strategy may also have the effect of taking the reader's attention out of the storyworld of the comic. Or, to put it another way, intertextual references may remind readers that they are reading a comic, it's only a piece of media, and therefore there's nothing to be afraid of. Familiarity with concepts and narrative tropes may make readers respond with excited or nostalgic recognition, rather than the uncertainty or surprise typically associated with fear responses.
Now, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is highly playful when referencing the tradition of horror and occultism and it might be argued that Sabrina isn't intended to be scary. It may be that Sabrina is a comic with a horror aesthetic, rather than properly being a horror comic. This is a definitional point about authorial intent and I'm not concerned with engaging this angle here, as I don't see it having much of an effect on my line of thinking. The point still stands that this seems to be a philosophical quandary more broadly in horror comics and media. How do horror narratives draw on (and even highlight) intertextual references and simultaneously aim to engender fear in their audience (sometimes) using those very elements. Surely, audience members who recognize the references will have their attention drawn away from their engagement with the storyworld and will instead think of the fact that they are engaging with a cultural artifact (comic, novel, movie, etc.), which is a decidedly unscary prospect.
This post-modern intertextual strategy and use of metatextual narratives (that is stories about stories) shows up in horror media more broadly. Obvious examples include Scream (the film), Hellboy (Mignola's comic), From Hell (Alan Moore's comic influenced heavily by Stephen Knight's theories on the identity of Jack the Ripper), Cabin in the Woods (the film), Shaun of the Dead (the film), and Creepshow (a film that clearly references 1950's E.C. horror comics).
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| Crowley, the occultist symbol of the pentagram/pentacle, and a Lovecraftian tentacle in one panel... oh my! |
There are theories of horror that can potentially offer a way to resolve this issue. For example, philosopher Nöel Carroll argues that our experiences of horror in artistic contexts comes from our fear responses to representations of monsters that are "physically (and perhaps morally and socially) threatening in the ways portrayed in the fiction" (Carroll, 27). For Carroll, the reason that these monsters are so threatening is that they are "interstitial," meaning they cross the boundaries of "the deep categories of a culture's conceptual scheme" (31-32). Zombies and vampires, for example, are both living and dead. Bodily fluids which cause disgust (feces, blood, etc.) conflate categories of "me/not me, inside/outside, and living/dead" (32). "Horrific monsters often involve the mixture of what is normally distinct" (33). Possessed characters involve a confusion of appearance and essence, and werewolves and other shape-shifters blur the boundaries between human and animal forms.
If our aversion and fear when engaging with horror comics often comes from the upsetting of our deeply engrained cultural boundaries, then it may be the case that intertextual referencing of well-known horror narratives and concepts can work in favor of inciting fear in the reader. Insofar as Sabrina draws on concepts from other horror media that are "categorically transgressive" (33), it may give readers a fright precisely because of those intertextual references. Sabrina can (to some extent) presume its readers' familiarity with the history of horror narratives in order to suggest horrifying interstitial concepts in ways that are more culturally resonant than they would be if they were not grounded in intertextual referencing. So, when a character in Sabrina mentions the "Necronomicon," the weight and dread of Lovecraftian cosmic horror mythology may come to mind for readers who are familiar with Lovecraft's works. This may serve to make Sabrina more horrific, as opposed to less.
As I said above, this post is exploratory and doesn't constitute a complete argument or definitive viewpoint on these issues. I am not completely convinced by this potential application of Carroll to the question of how references (read as references) can be scary. It seems to me that including so many clear intertextual references in a horror comic, at least potentially, serves to pull the reader out of an immersive reading experience of the storyworld of the comic, and thereby, makes the comic less threatening or scary. Being someone who loves the aesthetics of horror far more than I enjoy being actually scared, I am perfectly fine with a book like Sabrina that is steeped in intertextual references to the history of horror. But it seems that the heavy reliance on intertextuality may dampen the potential for reader emersion and scares.
Works Cited
Alfaro, María Jesús Martínez. “Intertextuality: Origins and Development of the Concept.” Atlantis, 18, no. 1/2 (1996): 268-285. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41054827.
Aguirre-Sacasa, Roberto and Robert Hack. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: The Crucible. New York: Archie Horror, 2015.
Carroll, Nöel. The Philosophy of Horror
or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge, 1990.
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