Watch the trailer on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wl7uj7n7DoY
Every dance team needs a routine that will impress the judges at regionals. The Lions, the badly behaved Catholic-school troupe at the heart of Netflix’s The Body, have gone for something rather more ambitious: calling on the Prince of Darkness and offering him a virgin in return for a podium place. As business plans go, it is no worse than most streaming strategies.
Created by Quinn Shephard, the writer-director behind Not Okay and the Emmy-nominated Under the Bridge, the eight-part series arrives on Netflix on Wednesday 11 November, all episodes at once. Netflix’s logline keeps things simple: a dance-team initiation goes wrong, and the girls start having prophetic visions that set off mass hysteria across their town. The trailer fills in the rest with a Halloween party, pills, rhinestone crucifixes, sudden nosebleeds and a girl called Grace, the designated sacrifice, who begins behaving very strangely indeed.
Shephard describes the show as “a raunchy teen psychodrama with a dash of Catholic horror”, which is about as honest a pitch as Netflix has put out all year, and she calls the tone camp with grit in it. Her stated influences are Carrie, Jennifer’s Body, Heavenly Creatures, Mean Girls and The Crucible, and you can more or less spot the join between each of them in the trailer. Readers of a certain vintage will also catch a whiff of The Craft, the film that taught a generation of goths that the occult is mostly about getting your own back on the popular girls.
The dancers are played by Kristina Bogic, Sara Boustany, Geena Meszaros, Shirley Chen and Sofia Wylie, with Nnamdi Asomugha, Louisa Krause and Jackson Kelly among the wider cast. Gabby Windey, winner of The Traitors and a veteran of The Bachelorette, plays Coach Miller, which is the kind of casting that tells you exactly how seriously everybody is taking the pom-poms. Riley Keough’s Felix Culpa, which made Under the Bridge with Shephard, is producing again.
Patron-saint character posters for the girls have been doing the rounds on X this week, and they are a cut above the usual floating-heads affair. Whether the series can keep up eight hours of hysteria without tipping into self-parody is another question, but a Satanic panic staged in a school gym is a premise with legs, and judging by the trailer, a decent kick line too. Here at SFcrowsnest we’ll be watching through our fingers, rosary at the ready.
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