Netflix’s The Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina is meant to be a dark and evil revival of the classic comic strip and family-friendly sitcom, but apparently the series is so dark and so evil that it has managed to make the real-life Satanic Temple mad. As reported by The Wrap, this all stems from a huge statue seen in the show’s Academy Of Unseen Arts (a magical school where aspiring witches learn to worship Satan) that the Satanic Temple says is a ripoff of its copyrighted design for a monument to Baphomet. Basically, the show’s evil statue is too similar to the group’s real-life evil statue.
Now, Satanic Temple co-founder Lucien Greaves is threatening to take “legal action” against Netflix for “appropriating” his group’s design, and he tells The Wrap that his lawyers have asked the streaming service to remove the statue from the show (he believes it’s a computer-generated thing that could easily just be erased). Speaking with SFGate, Greaves explained that he has to move forward with the copyright claim so they can “send some message” to any other people who may want to rip off the Baphomet statue “because that’s how copyright works.”
Greaves has also made similar comments on Twitter, referring to Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina as “asinine Satanic Panic fiction” and arguing that this is no different from a real mosque taking issue with being depicted as the headquarters of a terrorist cell.
It is worth pointing out, however, that the Baphomet statue was originally commissioned by the Satanic Temple to make a point about the First Amendment when Oklahoma installed a monument of the Ten Commandments outside its state capitol, so—regardless of the claim that Netflix stole the design—it’s not quite the same as putting terrorists in a real mosque.