If the embed won’t play, Netflix’s trailer is also here on YouTube.
All eight episodes of Quinn Shephard’s The Body are now on Netflix, and the reviews have filed in behind them like a congregation arriving late for mass: noisily, and not all singing from the same hymn sheet. We covered the set-up when the trailer landed, so here’s the short version. After a dance-team initiation goes badly wrong at a Catholic school, a group of thoroughly badly behaved schoolgirls start having prophetic visions, and their town tips over into mass hysteria. Hanging over all of it is the question of what happened to Grace, the rookie the team cheerfully offered up to the Prince of Darkness in the trailer.
Shephard, who made Under the Bridge, created the series, runs it and directs the premiere. She has called it gritty camp, “a raunchy teen psychodrama with a dash of Catholic horror”, and lists Carrie, Jennifer’s Body and Heavenly Creatures among her influences, along with the Salem witch trials by way of The Crucible. It’s set around the turn of the millennium, so expect flip phones, lip gloss and moral panic in roughly equal measure. Kristina Bogic, Sara Boustany and Geena Meszaros play the ringleaders Anya, Elise and Lisbeth, Sofia Wylie is Grace, and Gabby Windey coaches the Lions dance team, with Scott Bakula and Logan Marshall-Green among the grown-ups. Riley Keough is an executive producer.
As for the verdicts, Variety was smitten, calling the show brilliant and praising it as an openly queer Y2K romp in the tradition of Bring It On and Mean Girls. The Hollywood Reporter was cooler, pitching it as Yellowjackets meets Carrie and finding the tone neither scary enough nor funny enough to land either way. Collider sat in the pew between them with seven out of ten. That’s about the split you’d expect for a show its own creator describes as camp: some viewers will take the incense and the pom-poms seriously, others will find the whole thing a bit much.
Here at SFcrowsnest, we’re simply glad to see high-school demonology back on the timetable. The genre has been short of a properly unholy teenage clique since Megan Fox ate her way through Jennifer’s Body, and Netflix has kindly dropped the lot at once, which saves anyone the bother of waiting a week between confessions.
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