The Witches are Back

The season of the witch reboot is upon us, and at least two of our favorite witchy shows from the late 90s are being remade and will be ready to cast a spell on your Halloween viewing.

First on the list is Charmed, a reboot of the series from that ran for nearly ten years starting in the late 1990’s. The original featured Holly Marie Combs, Shannon Doherty, as Alysa Milano “the Halliwell sisters” a powerful trio of witches that fought demons and dark entities and do so with a fair amount of female empowerment, the same is true and even amplified for the reboot.

The cast features a trio of sisters who only discover their powers after the death of their mother.

Melonie Diaz plays Mel Pruitt. The middle sister, in her mid-twenties, is a political activist who begins to lose control after the death of her mother. Her downfall takes a toll on all the people she’s closest to including her girlfriend, Detective Nico Hamada (Ellen Tamaki).

Sarah Jeffery plays Madison Pruitt. The youngest sister Madison is the opposite of her feminist sister; she is a young college student who’s looking to for her own identity and finding a place to belong. Something mad drastically more difficult when she finds out that she’s a witch and her powers include reading others minds.

Madeleine Mantock plays Macy Vaughn, the eldest of the three and half-sister of the other two members of the show’s sisterly coven. She is a gifted geneticist, and when she discovers that she possesses the power of telekinesis, all of her scientific expertise comes into hard opposition with her reality.

Charmed will premiere on The CW on Sunday, October 14 at 9 p.m.

The next on the list is a bit more of a departure from the original. Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is not much like its namesake Sabrina, the Teenage Witch (which ran from 1996-2003). It looks creepy and spooky with some very dark elements of the occult revealed in the trailer.

There are some similarities:

First, Our lead is a spunky 16-year-old blonde, her name is Sabrina Spellman, and she’s Half witch and Half mortal.

Second, She still lives with her magically powered aunts Hilda (Lucy Davis) and Zelda (Miranda Otto), her cat Salem, and her human and oblivious boyfriend Harvey (Ross Lynch).

That’s pretty much where the similarities end, so let’s talk about the changes.

Instead of the warm and cozy suburban home of the original Sabrina and her aunts now live at Spellman Mortuary, and it’s a dark and foreboding Victorian mansion, and they live in the city of Greendale, an eerie New England town “that always feels like Halloween.”

There is a bevy of dark imagery and eerie horror style shots, glimpses of demons and hangings, and plenty of decidedly non-family friendly things in the trailer for the remake. It seems to be much more of a haunted house than a pumpkin patch.

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina premieres October 26. Only on Netflix.

Which Witch are you most excited to see? Do you see your childhood memories dying in front of you?

Bradley Pierce

This geek is the co-creator of and producer for ZFO Entertainment, a writer for ZFOnline, and also a filmmaker and was the original voice of Chip in Disney's Beauty and the Beast, and actor from Jumanji, and The Borrowers.

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