Netflix’s New Horror Thriller ‘The Body’ Is Like Nothing Else on Streaming Right Now

Ask any elder millennial woman, and she’ll tell you: the early 2000s were a hellish time to be a teenage girl. So the era of Cosmo sex tips, endless body-shaming, and Britney’s VMA snake dance is a fitting backdrop for The Body, Netflix’s new 2004-set horror thriller about a Catholic school dance team whose lives figuratively (and perhaps literally) go to hell after an occult-tinged hazing ritual goes awry.

But while that set-up might sound like a recipe for the next Ryan Murphy mess, The Body is something more subtle, moodier and far more thoughtful. Though it utilizes many of the tropes of teen horror and suspense — including ghostly visions and an evil classmate who will do anything to get ahead — it doesn’t use its eight episodes to unmask a murderer or uncover a secret conspiracy. Instead, showrunner Quinn Shephard‘s (Under the Bridge) series examines sticky questions about faith, gender roles, internalized homophobia, good and evil, and what it means to believe in anything — from love with your best friend to actual miracles.

Viewers looking for the next Riverdale or Pretty Little Liars will be disappointed; the bleak but often darkly funny drama is more like taking an extended trip to a world that exists only inside a Lana Del Rey song than a traditional teen thriller. But viewers who can handle a show that’s more atmospheric than propulsive will be rewarded by standout performances from a crackerjack ensemble of young actors, who dive deep into this examination of teenage girls whose lives are bedazzled, Juicy Couture-filled cages they can’t quite break free from.

What Is ‘The Body’ About?

On Halloween night, 2004, the St. Marks Lions, a hard-partying Catholic school dance team, decide to initiate their newest member, the deeply devout Grace (Sofia Wylie), with a hazing ritual designed to feel like edgy, sacrilegious fun. The group takes ecstasy (that’s what we used to call molly, kids!) at a party, while pretending to engage in a Satanic rite. Over the course of the night, The Body quickly develops a double meaning — while it’s a Catholic theological concept the girls learn about at school, it also refers to the literal body of Grace, who falls into a coma at the party under mysterious circumstances.

When she’s found by team co-captain and queen bee Anya (Kristina Bogic) and awkward outcast Lisbeth (Geena Meszaros), the two make a decision that sets up nearly every domino that falls in the rest of the series. Does Grace’s coma have to do with the questionable party drugs that the girls scarfed during their ritual? Is Lisbeth’s even freakier brother, Leo (Jackson Kelly), to blame? Is Grace’s illness somehow caused by the chapel’s black mold, or was their fake ritual more real than any of them thought? And when team members begin having religious visions of the comatose Grace, are they lying? Hallucinating out of stress? Or is something otherworldly going on?

That might make The Body sound like a typical teen suspense series, but it absolutely isn’t one. The real mystery being unraveled here is how Grace’s coma — and the team’s decision not to tell the authorities about the drugs that Grace took with them that night — reveals the truth of the lives of the people around her. Lisbeth, who initially reads as a Carrie White type, unmasks herself as shockingly Machiavellian, leveraging the group’s secrets in order to become popular. Maddie (Shirley Chen), Grace’s high-strung best friend, wonders why she’s the only one who doesn’t seem to be getting a supernatural visit from her comatose pal. Elise (Sara Boustany), the team’s charmingly surly co-captain and Anya’s best friend, is suspicious of Lisbeth’s role in Grace’s coma, but devotes far more energy to pining over Anya.

School principal Father Franklin (Nnamdi Asomugha), who is also Grace’s uncle, attempts to uncover whether his niece truly is a candidate for sainthood, while Grace’s father, Michael (Motell Foster), looks for hope that she’ll eventually wake up. And in the center of it all is Anya, who’s perpetually overwhelmed and frozen by the demands placed upon her by her community, her religion, and 2000s society: that she be a perfectly sexy-but-not-sexual 2000s teenage girl; that she reject her love for Elise and maintain her hollow relationship with swim team star Steven (Orlando Norman); that she keep the circumstances of Grace’s coma and her role in it a secret so that she can continue living a “normal life.” Over the course of the season, few plot points get clearly resolved; a cliffhanger ending leads to more, and stranger, questions, rather than a satisfying resolution. But each actor has a beautifully complete character arc, bringing the season to a different kind of close.

‘The Body’s Greatest Asset Is its Cast

If The Body‘s greatest weakness is its somewhat thin and occasionally confusing plotting, its greatest asset is without a doubt its actors, who tackle complex and sometimes unlikable characters with a depth and passion that make them thrilling to watch. Stars Bogic, Meszaros and Boustany take high school stereotypes — the popular girl, the outcast, the queer teen who’s accepting less than she deserves — and imbue them with gripping pain and intensity. Anya and Elise’s troubled on-and-off relationship rings especially true, becoming the series’ emotional heart and a metaphor for how the show’s characters are pushed to hide their true selves.

Lisbeth’s transformation from unpopular nerd to a Spandex-clad Lady Macbeth isn’t always fully supported on the page, though we see Lisbeth and Leo’s brutal home life with their unhinged, abusive mother (Louisa Krause), it’s never totally clear why Lisbeth’s chosen to go Bond villain-level evil. But Meszaros fully inhabits the show’s most complex character, bringing us into both her most vicious plotting and the moments when she’s in painfully over her head.

In the supporting cast, Shirley Chen especially stands out as the fragile Maddie, who evolves from passive follower to bold religious seeker as the show goes on. Marcel Ruiz, whose druggy Tyler exists purely to supply much-needed comic relief, is a delight, as is the Greek chorus of dance team members, most notably the deadpan Bella Neuspiel and the perpetually tearful Sarah Abbott.

‘The Body’ Pays More of an Homage to the 2000s’ Darker Coming-of-Age Stories

Image via Netflix

The show’s oppressive, moody vibes are fed further by its dark, sinister cinematography, which at its best evokes Bring It On as shot by David Fincher, and at its worst had me repeatedly adjusting the brightness of my TV. The show’s production design also manages the neat trick of using Y2K cultural detritus — a pair of rhinestone-covered short-shorts, a flip phone, a Kelly Clarkson needle drop — to evoke the era’s cultural claustrophobia and lack of options for young women, rather than any throwback warm fuzzies.

Though the show has moments of fun with its 2000s setting (including a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it homage to Mean Girls and a running gag about Clarisonic skin brushes that will bring a smile to the face of anyone who was a teen girl during the G.W. Bush years), it mostly uses its retro setting to make a point about how that era, now celebrated as our last moment of freedom before Big Tech, actually wasn’t so free for a lot of people. In a time of seemingly endless nostalgic cash grabs, it’s effective and refreshing to see a show engage with the fact that while the recent past was different, it wasn’t always better.

The Body‘s deepest connection to the 2000s might actually be that it feels like part of that era’s run of dark coming-of-age cinema. While it may take visual cues from campy classics like Legally Blonde or Jennifer’s Body, it feels more of a piece with 2000s indie films like Thirteen, Mysterious Skin, or The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, which were unafraid to treat adolescent misery with gravity and respect.

The Body is like nothing else on television, in both good and frustrating ways. With tighter plotting, it could have been the year’s best new show; as it is, it’s more like Buffy on psychedelic drugs or a CW adaptation of The Virgin Suicides (complimentary). But its riskiness and rawness will appeal to anyone who’s sick of formulaic TV thrillers — or anyone who just remembers the glory and horror of being a teenage girl.

The Body is now streaming on Netflix.

The Body

Netflix’s new supernatural horror series will appeal to anyone who’s sick of formulaic teen psychothrillers.

Release Date

November 11, 2026

Network

Netflix

Showrunner

Gina Gammell, Quinn Shephard

Cast

• 

  Kristina Bogic

  Anya Butler

• 

  Geena Carling Meszaros

  Lisbeth Anderson

Pros & Cons

• Phenomenal acting across the entire cast.
• A unique and thoughtful take on Y2K-era nostalgia unlike anything else you’ve seen.
• The show’s atmospheric, character-first approach is largely a joy to watch.

• The plotting can be underwhelming, with some payoffs hitting less effectively than they should.
• The ending doesn’t necessarily feel earned.