Netflix's The Body: Watch an Exclusive Clip and Learn Everything You Need to Know

Halloween season will expand way beyond the end of October this year thanks to Netflix's The Body, and Teen Vogue has an exclusive first-look clip from the upcoming Catholic school thriller—plus plenty of intel from creator and showrunner Quinn Shephard, who also serves as a director for some of the episodes.

Described by Shephard as "a raunchy teen psychodrama," The Body is for the campy horror enthusiasts. Ahead of its November premiere, Teen Vogue can officially debut an exclusive clip from the show's first episode, which sees Eden Longname (Chloe Longname), Lisbeth Anderson (Geena Meszaros), and “Saint” Grace Franklin (Sofia Wylie) trying out for the Catholic school's all-girls dancing troupe, known as the Lions, before all hell breaks loose.

From the scene (and the trailer, which you can watch below), you'll be able to tell The Body will take us back a couple of decades. Instead of iPhones, probiotic sodas, and Alo sets, we have T-Mobile sidekicks, old Starbucks cups, and Von Dutch duffel bags.

Shephard tells Teen Vogue that the decision to set the show in the '00s was more than stylistic. "I feel like right now is a mirror to 2004 in every way—fashion, diet culture, war, the political swing back toward conservatism, slang," she says. “There are a lot of famous quotes about how if we want to make sense of our present we need to look at the past; I also think writing about the past allows us to create a sense of distance. We can talk about now without talking about now, you know? The distance makes it feel safer. Kinda like how by writing a show about teenagers, I can include really personal things about myself with a sense of distance that allows me to laugh and play around."

There's also another expected bonus: “We got to have a killer soundtrack,” Shephard teases, which is surely important when the main story revolves around a dance team.

Visually, you'll also notice some throwback sensibilities beyond the Y2K props. “It is aesthetically such an homage to every single film that influenced me as a filmmaker and made me want to be an artist," Shephard adds. “Movies like Carrie, Jennifer's Body, Heavenly Creatures, Donnie Darko, American Beauty, Heathers, Virgin Suicides. The list could go on and on. But probably most importantly, I was extremely obsessed with The Crucible and the Salem witch trials as a teenager, to the point that my whole first film is literally about a girl who is way too into The Crucible.”

If the exclusive first-look clip and Shephard's teasers have piqued your curiosity, below, we have compiled everything you need to know about The Body before it premieres—including some extra tidbits straight from Shephard herself. (Beware, though: the show is rated Mature Audience Only.)

What is The Body about?

The Body follows the story of a Catholic school all-girls dance squad after an initiation goes horribly wrong and the mysteries, guilt, supernatural phenomena, and mass hysteria it unravels. Netflix's teaser for the show reads as follows: “They pray hard and sin harder. After a dance-team initiation goes very wrong, the whole town starts asking the same question: What happened to Grace?”

The kicker? The story fitfully begins on Halloween night. “I love Halloween, I love dressing up, I love ghost stories, so I’ve always wanted to write a Halloween script,” creator Quinn Shephard tells Teen Vogue. “When an idea drops into my head it usually has a sense of time and place, and this show always felt like a Halloween show to me, with the leaves turning colors and bonfires and fog…. Honestly just a setting I could stay in forever.”

Shephard continues: “The theme that I wanted to explore when I started writing was: girlhood as a religious experience. I’ve always loved religious thrillers as a genre, and as I got older I think I realized that thematically these stories often centered on feelings of shame as well as feelings of ecstasy/desire, which happen to align very much with the queer coming of age experience. Realizing I was gay kinda felt like being possessed by a demon, so it was a perfect genre metaphor for me!”

That coming-of-age exploration is intrinsically linked to the project. In fact, Shephard began penning the script the year of her coming out. “I started writing this pilot when I was 20 or 21, and I developed it at a network in my early twenties,” she explains. “The pilot was almost identical but the series was very different. I was actually only ‘out’ to myself and close friends and family and not professionally yet at that time.”

Now 31, of course, The Body has gone through a transformation, one that helped nail its campy mix of horror and humor. “The show was a serious drama when I first wrote it, because all of the themes were still very very fresh for me,” Shephard says. “It feels crazy to reflect on now because it feels so recent, but I remember being like, ‘I have never seen a teen TV show with a romance between girls at the center.’ Now I’m making this show in a very different world. I have way more distance, and I really discovered the comedy when I revisited it with my co-showrunner Gina Gammell before we brought it to Netflix. We were reading all these dramatic moments I wrote at like 21 and we were just laughing so hard because, as we all know, comedy is just tragedy plus time. I love the more playful version of the show we ultimately found. It was like giving my younger self a hug and permission to laugh at myself.”

When does The Body come out on Netflix?

The Body comes out on November 11, 2026, only on Netflix. All eight episodes of the show will drop at the same time so plan your watch party accordingly.

Who is in the cast of The Body?

The main cast of The Body is comprised of Kristina Bogic (Playing Gracie Darling) as Anya Butler, Sara Boustany (PEN15, Hello Beautiful) as Elise Zakaria, Geena Meszaros (Wayward) as Lisbeth Anderson, Nnamdi Asomugha (The Good Nurse, Nanny) as Father Samuel Franklin, Louisa Krause (Superman, The Dive) as Catherine Anderson, Shirley Chen (Dìdi, Slanted) as Maddie Delaney, Jackson Kelly (The Pitt, Chucky) as Leo Anderson, and Sofia Wylie (HSM:TM:TS, The School for Good and Evil) as Grace Franklin.

Recurring cast also includes Kyra and Phallon Pierce as Bailey and Brit Bradley, Marcel Ruiz as Tyler Santos, Orlando Norman as Steven Maxwell, Gabby Windey as Coach Miller, Ashley Madekwe as Theresa Franklin, Motell Foster as Michael Franklin, Finding Her Edge's Cale Ambrozic as Benji, Anna Tierney as Melanie, Chloe Longname as Eden, Sarah Abbott as Olivia, Emily Roman as Claire, Michela Luci as Amy, Bella Neuspiel as Katie, Julia Lowe as Blair, and Christine Solomon as Salma.

Working with such a massive ensemble is no small feat, but Shephard can't sing their praises enough. “There are not proper words in any language to explain how special this cast is to myself and Gina,” she tells Teen Vogue. “The ensemble came together from all over, with all different levels of experience, and every one of them stepped up to the plate with such commitment and openness.”

Shephard adds: “Every one of our actors brings something so essential and so uniquely ‘them’ to the show, which we really tried to lean into in our process—embracing improv, encouraging the actors to make moodboards or playlists that ultimately shaped the characters, having the girls create their own AIM screennames, etc. They're all so brilliant and have so much perspective that enriched the show. We were all working together for about five months and let me tell you, when there are ten Lions on set it is simply impossible to be in a bad mood, even when you are so, so tired. I love them, I feel like they’re all our children, our coven.”

Also, the multitudinous element of the dance group lent itself to more than just hilarious horror hijinks. “Dance lets us explore groupthink,” Shephard says. “The ‘body’ requires every part to work in synchronicity. We use dance to put ourselves in the bodies and emotions of our lead characters; we feel their ecstatic highs and lows. There's such a physical intensity and intimacy to dance. And I really loved the concept that dance could take us beyond reality cinematically in the show as well!”

Is there a trailer for The Body?

There is indeed! If the exclusive clip and all of Shephard's comments have you wanting more, the trailer, which you can watch below, will have you wishing you could time travel to November 11. Set to Yeah Yeah Yeahs's 2013 song “Sacrilege,” there's devil summoning, dance drama, fiendish partying, mysterious syncopes, and ungodly confessions. The best part? It's not even everything that's in store.

“There are so many things in the show that we were doing in the writers room where I was like, ‘Uhhh is Netflix really gonna allow us to do this?’ And then we’d get the notes and they’d be into it,” Shephard teases. “There was really no censorship with our scripts, which is crazy rare in this industry, so you get to see exactly what we wanted this show to be—which is a bit deranged, dumb, and horny, but hopefully still manages to cut deep!”

Are there any first-look photos for The Body?

In the lead-up to the show's release, Netflix has released a handful of photos from The Body giving us a closer look at the characters, which you can see sprinkled throughout this article. You can also see more stills and what episode they correspond to in the scroll gallery below.

This post will be updated as news about The Body breaks.