Top image: Still, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018) Netflix

It appears that not everyone is as bewitched by Netflix’s new series, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina as us, specifically The Satanic Temple (TST), who are attempting to sue film industry behemoths Netflix and Warner Bros. for a princely sum of $50 million over a copyright claim.

Based in Salem, Massachusetts, TST are a non-theistic religious and political activist group who have attracted considerable viral interest in recent years with inane ramblings on devil worship and satanic statues (see here). Now the group have turned their attention towards Netflix, filing a case against the use a statue of occult deity, Baphomet, which it claims borrows too closely from its own depiction, in addition to fuelling what they term, “Satanic panic”.

TST built their very own statue of Baphomet in 2014, at a reported cost of around $100,000, depicting two small children looking up at the bearded, goat-like incarnation once falsely believed to be the deity worshipped by the Knights Templar. The TST had originally planned for the statue to stand at Oklahoma’s State Capitol, but after the Supreme Court ruled all religious displays illegal, the statue was erected by a warehouse in Detroit.

For purposes of comparison… pic.twitter.com/AZJvmq1Cks

— Lucien Greaves (@LucienGreaves) October 30, 2018

In episode two of the show’s first series, which aired for the first time on 26 October this year, a very similar looking statue appears as the focal point of the Witches Academy, a fact that amounts to defamation in the eyes of TST.

The Satanic Temple’s co-founder Lucien Greaves recently addressed the issue on CNBC, saying: “A lot of people who haven’t heard of us first stand to just recognise that monument as the Sabrina monument, which dilutes and denigrates the entire project.” Neither Netflix or Warner Bros. (or Satan himself) are yet to comment on the allegation.