‘Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’ Episode 5 Recap: Dream a Little Nightmare of Me

Gather round, witches, and don’t forget your koozies, because it’s a bottle episode, y’all.

If you were wondering about the deepest fears and insecurities of the Spellmans, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina has a sleep demon with your name on it. It turns out that when our girl unlocked her father’s Acheron Configuration, she unleashed a sleep demon named Batibat that he’d kept trapped there. He’d always told his sisters that he was haunted and couldn’t sleep, but no one realized it was quite so literal.

The Spellmans gather round and seal the house, then imprison the demon in an urn…or so they think. As Aunt Hilda tucks Sabrina into bed, Sabrina asks what would have happened if they hadn’t trapped the demon (which they totally didn’ttttt). “Oh, nightmares and torment.” Hilda morphs into the demon as Sabrina falls asleep, stroking her little cheek: “No darkness. No shadows. At least…at first.”

The demon lurks away into the house, where Evil Wardwell spots her through the enchanted mirror and tells her not to hurt Sabrina. The demon accuses Wardwell of abandoning her and call her “mother of demons,” then informs her that the sealed house means no one can get out…or in. For good measure, she smashes the mirror.

In Sabrina’s dream, the Fenty Triplets (how often do we think they have to touch up their black lipstick? Does it smudge when they’re ruining lives? Sephora reviews are unhelpful.), wearing Baxter High cheerleading uniforms, warn Sabrina against running for prom queen, Nick hints that he’d like to take her to prom, and Harvey talls his way in and proposes. As one does.

Sabrina, in her mom’s wedding dress that she wore to her baptism (you know, when she almost signed a contract with Satan) and a really good red lip, confesses to Harvey that she’s a witch, but they decide to go ahead anyway.

Nick, in full Chuck Bass drag, turtleneck under suit and all, and offers to whisk her away from the wedding on a broomstick. She declines, and is saved by her dad handing her a bouquet and walking her into the ceremony where her aunts, the Fenty Triplets, Principal Hawthorne and, if I’m not mistaken, Frank the Bunny, among others are assembled while Father Blackwood officiates, but things go downhill fast when Harvey’s dad (Dad Harvey) bursts in in his mining gear, Harvey chokes her, and the crowd yells to “kill the witch.” Harvey shoves her into an Iron Maiden and slams the door shut. Her blood pours out of a spout at the bottom as the sleep demon leers and says she’ll let Sabrina out if she tells her the spell to unseal the house.

Next, it’s Ambrose’s turn in dreamland. He’s confronted with the corpse of “a shut-in with no friends, so sad,” which, yep, turns out to be him. He’s forced to hack into his own corpse and decides to take a taste of his heart while he’s at it. Iron-rich, and all that. Hilariously glum, he tells Hilda it tastes “bitter” when she walks in on his snack sesh. There’s also some Shakespeare recitation in there, if anyone needed this to be more emo. He’s interrupted by Blackwood telling him his sentence is up and, oh, here’s a duffel bag of cash and there’s a car waiting outside. As a gleeful Ambrose walks out the door, the sleep demon tackles him and slashes the hell out of him. We restart the dream, now from the corpse’s perspective, with the same warning from the demon that it can all end, if Ambrose would just clue her in on the spell.

Hilda dreams that Principal Hawthorne asks her out, despite her being a virgin who can’t drive. While the two chat, Evil Wardwell and the most ridiculous cleavage I’ve ever seen on a TV teacher bust in, breathless, asking if they’ve seen Sabrina, and they send her away.

Zelda is exceedingly assholic to Hilda while she gets ready for her date, leading Hilda to slap her across the mouth and leave her with her gob sewn shut. She marches off to dinner, where Hawthorne piles plates of cookies in front of her and listens to her bitch endlessly about Zelda. Hawthorne can relate: he had a twin brother who he absorbed in the womb, which he later reveals has a very literal meaning. He lifts his shirt and introduces Hilda to Bob, the horrifying adult face sticking out of his torso. Hilda realizes that she and Zelda are suddenly stitched together. Yikes.

In Zelda’s dream, she’s tormented by Satan coming to a dinner party at Chez Spellman. She cooks up a nice roasted child — poor fat Fergus didn’t stand a chance — only to be reprimanded by Actual Satan for diminishing the numbers of the Church of Night. He much prefers Hilda’s vegetable pie anyway. Later, Zelda kills Hilda, but she doesn’t resurrect, and the Dark Lord doesn’t like her. This is her nightmare, but I realize a dream come true: Miranda Otto earnestly saying, “But isn’t roast child your favorite dish, Dark Lord?”

Back in Sabrina’s dream, Evil Wardwell and her evil cleavage show up. With the help of lucid dreaming, she’s found Sabrina and explains to her what’s going on and tells her to run when she wakes up, then in the real world stabs her trusty Sabrina voodoo doll.

Sabrina wakes up in the real world, and after extended conversation with Salem the cat and hide-and-seek with Batibat, poses as a corpse, puts herself to sleep, and uses Salem under a glamour as a diversion. She pops into Zelda’s dream, then Hilda’s, for help, and Hilda at least is able to give her some pro tips. She visits Ambrose, who agrees to do an amazing physical comedy routine with corpse-Ambrose to distract Batibat. It’s like Mom always said, two Ambroses are better than one, even when one is a semi-animated corpse in pieces on a table.

Time bought, Sabrina sics Hilda’s spiders on the demon and they wrap her in more webs than Frodo got from Shelob. After all, dreamcatchers don’t catch dreams — the capture nightmares.

All is well in the world, at breakfast the next morning, when the Spellmans seal Batibat up in a jam jar. Sabrina lies and says she, uh, doesn’t really remember any of their horribly depressing and revealing dreams, no. She has her own anxiety to worry about, after all: she calls Harvey and asks if he’d ever hurt her, and he’s like, no babe, see you in Evil Wardwell’s class tomorrow morning! Sabrina had apparently forgotten that Evil Wardwell was all up in her magical dreams and decides to confront her right then, demanding to know the truth about who she is. As if the drastic makeover and sudden interest in spellcasting shouldn’t have been a tip-off. Teens today are so involved in their own drama that they can’t recognize higher Satanic powers right under their noses, sheesh. Anyway, we end on Evil Wardwell inviting Sabrina in.

And thus concludes my favorite episode of Buffy other than “Once More With Feeling.” Could these dreams have been meaningful? (Yes.) Was there foreshadowing? (Um, yes.)

Tune into the next episode and find out if we’ll get to see Hawthorne’s torso again, hubba hubba.

Kase Wickman is a writer, editor, Ravenclaw and certified fraidy-cat who lives in Brooklyn. If she had powers, she’d never have to wash off mascara again. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram, if you dare.

Watch Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Episode 5 ("Dreams In A Witch House") on Netflix