Netflix‘s Satanic Sabrina reboot, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina has ticked off a real life Satanic group known as the Satanic Temple and honestly, I’m bloody terrified on their behalf.
[jwplayer RfLMYyUD]
Following the release of the hit series, the cofounder and spokesperson for the Satanic Temple, Lucien Greaves tweeted his fury at the fact that the show allegedly knocked off their design of Baphomet.
In the tweet, Greaves claims to be taking legal action against the series as his organisation copyrighted the design.
“Yes, we are taking legal action regarding #TheChillingAdventuresofSabrina appropriating our copyrighted monument design to promote their asinine Satanic Panic fiction,” Greaves tweeted.
“Having one’s central icon associated with human sacrifice in an evil patriarchal cult is hardly good exposure and hardly a frivolous complaint. Fighting this bullshit is the heart of ‘the cause.’”
Yes, we are taking legal action regarding #TheChillingAdventuresofSabrina appropriating our copyrighted monument design to promote their asinine Satanic Panic fiction.
— Lucien Greaves (@LucienGreaves) October 29, 2018
Having one’s central icon associated with human sacrifice in an evil patriarchal cult is hardly good exposure and hardly a frivolous complaint. Fighting this bullshit is the heart of “the cause.”
— Lucien Greaves (@LucienGreaves) October 29, 2018
He claims to have spent a year and a half “refining the design” of the statue and spent more than $100k to bring it to life.
“Tell me exactly what in the show you think will make me accept that a monument I spent a year and 1/2 refining the design of, spent over $100k on, and having become the central image of our particular org, has been directly copied for use to portray a cannibalistic cult,” he wrote.
Tell me exactly what in the show you think will make me accept that a monument I spent a year and 1/2 refining the design of, spent over $100k on, and having become the central image of our particular org, has been directly copied for use to portray a cannibalistic cult
— Lucien Greaves (@LucienGreaves) October 30, 2018
Cofounder Malcolm Jarry told Broadly that the temple holds a copyright that was filed with the Library of Congress.
“Statues and their subsequent representations are protected,” he said.
“In fact, the U.S. Postal Service had to pay a hefty fine for their unauthorised use of the representation of a statue — ironically, a representation of the Statue of Liberty.… If a resolution cannot be worked out, we will take aggressive actions to protect our copyright.”
The statue in question sits at the center of the witchy school that Sabrina Spellman attends and is a prominent fixture in many scenes throughout the first season.
Speaking to VICE prior to Greaves’s threat of legal action, CAOS production designer Lisa Soper claimed the similarities between the show’s Baphomet and the temple’s statue are “kind of a coincidence” and that their design is “wholly original” and you “cannot compare ours with all previous depictions.”
“So depicting his children with him, that kind of stuff, and those kinds of elements are all kind of the same,” Soper told the publication. “But it’s no different from, in my opinion anyhow… from any other of the mass amounts of iterations of him that have been around.”
In a statement to Teen Vogue, Greaves acknowledges that his organisation doesn’t own the rights to Satanism and therefore the Satanic themes throughout the series aren’t the issue, per se, but more so their use of the unique Baphomet design.
“The issue isn’t the appropriation of Satanic religious symbols to portray beliefs and activities that bear no relation to what the practitioners of Satanism believe. We don’t own Satanism and we can only try to educate people as to what Satanism means to those who identify with it when we’re countering irresponsible fictions that feed real-world moral panics,” Greaves told the mag.
“It’s one thing that there’s another ignorant television portrayal of a Satanic Panic-style Satanic cult that engages in cannibalism, but it is another thing that they’ve used our unique and copyrighted Baphomet monument as the central icon of that cult. We spent a year and a half designing and financing our monument, which has become a central image of our own organisation. To see it appropriated as ‘the Sabrina monument’ while associated with cannibalistic rites is unacceptable. We owe it to everybody who identifies with us to rectify this situation. Netflix needs to remove the image of our monument from their show and they are not to use it in future seasons.”
Netflix have yet to respond to the accusation.
