Netflix is bringing Catholic school drama to a whole new level of unholy chaos with The Body, an eight-episode series about a group of badly behaved teenage girls whose dance-team initiation goes horribly wrong. The newly released trailer promises a mix of teen rebellion, prophetic visions and Satanic Panic, with an entire town caught up in the question of what happened to one of its young residents.
“They pray hard and sin harder,” Netflix teases in the trailer, introducing the Lions, an all-girls dance team whose members have a rather unconventional approach to school spirit. Led by captains Anya (Kristina Bogic) and Elise (Sara Boustany), the group takes part in a drug-fueled initiation ritual involving their newest recruit, Grace (Sofia Wylie). The girls hope their little ceremony will help them win at regionals. Instead, things take a decidedly darker turn.
Soon, Grace’s strange behavior and a series of prophetic visions send the town spiraling into mass hysteria. As suspicion spreads, the girls find themselves dealing with a secret that could be much harder to contain than their usual school scandals. The big question hanging over the series is simple: What happened to Grace?
Created by Quinn Shephard, the writer-director behind the Emmy-nominated mystery series Under the Bridge, The Body draws on the familiar ingredients of teen movies while pushing them into decidedly stranger territory. Shephard has described the show as “gritty camp,” calling it a raunchy teen psychodrama with a dash of Catholic horror.
The influences include Carrie, Jennifer’s Body, Heavenly Creatures and Mean Girls, along with the Salem witch trials and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. That combination should give the series plenty of room to move between high school satire and something much more sinister, particularly as the town begins interpreting the girls’ experiences through a religious lens.
Shephard has also described the project as a personal one, drawing on her own experiences of adolescence, repression and the confusion that can come with trying to figure out who you are. The supernatural elements give those themes a suitably twisted setting, while the dance-team rivalry offers a very different kind of teenage pressure cooker.
The series stars Bogic, Boustany, Sofia Wylie, Geena Meszaros, Shirley Chen and *The Traitors* winner Gabby Windey, alongside Nnamdi Asomugha, Louisa Krause, Jackson Kelly and other cast members.
All eight episodes of The Body arrive on Netflix November 11. Until then, perhaps the Lions should consider a different approach to preparing for regionals. Holy water might be a better investment than whatever they had planned for Grace.
