Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina spent part of its latest season teasing an even bigger plot that’s yet to come. While Sabrina (Kiernan Shipka) and the others may have been busy fighting pagans and figuring out who’s going to rule Hell, Father Blackwood (Richard Coyle) was making other plans. And in a new interview, the showrunner confirms those plans will come to terrifying fruition next time around.
In my latest review, I talked a bit about Father Blackwood’s disappointing storyline, in that it was mostly designed to tease future plot points. Having relocated to a land where times moved differently so couple of months stretched into 15 years, Blackwood had become a loyal follower of the Eldritch Terrors (Eldritch meaning any creature or creation that’s impossible for humans to comprehend), using his powers to summon a Creature from the Black Lagoon-type monster, which handed him a mysterious egg with something growing inside.
It was a really cool premise—and seemed like it was following up Harvey’s Lovecraftian nightmare vision from part two—but for the most part it didn’t matter much. The egg was immediately stolen, so Blackwood allied with the pagans to reclaim his treasure and bring about the era of the Old Ones. The alliance didn’t pan out (because they almost all died), but in the end that didn’t matter. The season ended with Blackwood cracking the egg and releasing the creature upon the world. Showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa confirmed to TheWrap that part four is going to be about Eldritch horrors set loose upon Greendale, specifically drawing inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft.
“One of my favourite horror writers is H.P. Lovecraft, and there’s a definite H.P. Lovecraft vibe to part four,” he said. “We’re taking very, very old primal ideas of horror and fear and unleashing them on Sabrina, on the Spellmans, and on Greendale. And Greendale becomes a battle ground for [these] really epic battles between evil and good and horror and sanity and it’s huge, it’s big.”
It does seem like a bad time for Greendale to be dealing with Cthulhu. Both Sabrinas (yes, there are two Sabrinas now) will be confronting timey-wimey problems as a result of breaking the timeline, not to mention all the ways the show is teasing that Harvey and Sabrina will get back together. But it looks like we’ll definitely be getting a consistent line of new terrors to deal with, which will be a refreshingly horrifying change of pace for the series. But, according to Aguirre-Sacasa, the Eldritch rise will actually be a good thing…for one person.
“At the end of the season, Father Blackwood says he’s unleashed the ‘Eldritch Terrors’ and those are kind of our threats in part four,” Aguirre-Sacasa said. “So each episode has a Big Bad that represents this primal terror, this primal fear. So we see Blackwood ascend a little bit more again to the level he was around season one as a threat, because of what he’s unleashed.”
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina part three is currently available on Netflix. According to Aguirre-Sacasa, part four is currently filming but an expected release date has not been announced yet.