Murder, Mean Girls, and Mediums: Welcome to Edelvine
If Seance proves anything, it’s that girls’ boarding schools should come with hazard pay and an exorcist on retainer. Simon Barrett’s 2021 supernatural slasher takes the classic “elite academy with secrets” setup, spikes it with urban legend horror, and then gleefully stabs it in the neck with a light bulb. It’s not interested in reinventing the genre so much as polishing all its favorite toys—masked killers, bitchy cliques, cursed scholarships—and arranging them into something sharp, stylish, and surprisingly charming for a movie with this many corpses.
Edelvine Academy for Girls (and Ghosts, and Liars)
Edelvine is the sort of place where tuition is high, emotional support is nonrefundable, and your classmates might literally kill you to get ahead. The school’s urban legend—Alicia Kane, the tragic student-turned-Edelvine-Ghost—is exactly the kind of folklore that would thrive in a building full of stressed teens and bad lighting. Barrett leans into that “cursed institution” vibe without drowning us in lore dumps. Instead, the myth hums in the background, giving every giggle, hallway, and sleepover a faintly rotten edge. You know something awful happened here. You just don’t know how many times it’s happened.
Kerrie, Pranks, and the High Cost of Being the Target
The opening prank on Kerrie is a perfect tone-setter: mean girls, a fake haunting, and the sickening shift from stupid joke to real tragedy. The scene captures how casual cruelty can tip into something irreversible with just one extra shove. Kerrie’s death feels sudden but not cheap—it lands like the first domino in a chain we can already sense stretching far into Edelvine’s past. Her fall from the window is both the inciting incident and a thesis statement: at this school, “just messing around” comes with a body count.
Enter Camille Meadows: Transfer Student, Possible Problem
When Suki Waterhouse’s Camille arrives to take Kerrie’s place, she looks like the usual horror-movie new girl—quiet, observant, slightly detached—but there’s something off about her calm. She walks into this nest of toxic teenage energy and handles it with a patience that feels… practiced. Camille’s dry, almost bored responses to Alice’s clique are delightfully suspicious. She doesn’t have the wide-eyed “what’s happening to me?” energy of your average final girl; she has the vibe of someone mentally taking notes and occasionally checking off a list. By the time we learn she’s not actually Camille at all but Kerrie’s avenging friend in disguise, it feels less like a twist and more like confirmation that our instincts were right: this girl did not come here to make friends.
The Mean Girl Coven and Their Spectral Side Effects
Alice and her crew—Bethany, Yvonne, Rosalind, Lenora—are exactly the kind of glossy, weaponized popularity monsters that horror loves to put in uniforms. Their harassment of Camille and Helina is petty, nasty, and depressingly believable. The decision to hold a séance in detention is pure teen logic: bored, guilty, and convinced they’re untouchable. When the séance actually seems to work and a spirit promises murder, they’re shocked in the way only very privileged people can be shocked that consequences might exist. Their gradual elimination isn’t just slasher fodder; it’s karmic cleanup with a sharper edge.
Ghosts, Masks, and the Scholarship from Hell
Seance has a lot of fun dancing along the line between supernatural horror and Scooby-Doo logic. At first, we’re never quite sure how much of the Edelvine Ghost is real and how much is theatrical terror with good timing. But then bodies start piling up, strange symbols appear, and there’s that lovely cross-over between urban legend and real-life atrocity. The reveal that Bethany and school handyman Trevor are behind the murders—covering up plagiarism, scholarship fraud, and an old child-murder—is gloriously petty and grim. All this bloodshed over a stolen essay and a quarter-million dollars. Honestly, it feels disturbingly on-brand for academia.
Bethany, Trevor, and the Art of Overcomplicating Evil
Madisen Beaty’s Bethany is a particularly delicious kind of villain: the overachiever who decided that cheating, murder, and spirit-faking were all acceptable line items in her college-prep strategy. She didn’t just steal Kerrie’s essay; she engineered a whole séance charade to keep everyone scared and distracted while bodies disappeared. Trevor, meanwhile, is the human embodiment of “this man should not be allowed near children or power tools.” His history with Alicia Kane—the original “ghost”—ties Edelvine’s mythology neatly to his personal creep factor. Their big reveal in the library plays like the world’s worst scholarship interview: here’s your future, kids, lie hard enough or die.
Camille’s Revenge and the Final Girl Who Came Prepared
Once Camille drops the façade and admits she’s an infiltrator out for justice, Seance truly kicks into gear. She’s not stumbling into a mystery; she brought one with her. Watching her team up with Helina to outmaneuver Bethany and Trevor is immensely satisfying, especially since the film doesn’t suddenly turn her into a superhuman action heroine. She survives by being clever, stubborn, and just ruthless enough—decapitating Trevor with a bookshelf is both brutal and weirdly poetic. The girl came to Edelvine with a plan, and by the end, there is very little left standing in her way. Or standing at all.
Helina, Queer Subtext, and Ghost-Assisted Closure
Helina starts as the quiet, nervous outsider, but she quietly becomes Camille’s moral anchor. Their bond grows from wary partnership to genuine affection, and the kiss at the end doesn’t feel tacked on—it feels inevitable. There’s something darkly sweet about the way Camille admits everything to her: the stolen identity, the revenge, the fact that she ultimately cared enough to not just burn everything down and walk away alone. Kerrie’s ghost gently herding Helina to the library to free Camille and Alice adds a nice supernatural nod: the dead girl making sure her living friends get their shot at survival. It’s touching, if you ignore the trail of bodies.
Final Grade: A Bloody, Bitchy, Clever Little Haunter
Seance doesn’t pretend to be a prestige horror masterpiece, and that honesty is part of its charm. It’s a stylish, nasty, witty little ghost-slasher hybrid that genuinely likes its heroines, loathes its institutions, and enjoys tying its mythology and murder mystery together in a neat bow of blood. The dialogue has bite, the pacing rarely drags, and the mix of teen melodrama, sapphic tension, and supernatural mayhem feels like a very specific, very fun genre cocktail.
If you like your horror with private-school uniforms, messy girls, fake séances that turn uncomfortably real, and an avenging final girl who shows up already angry, Seance is absolutely worth enrolling in. Just don’t sign up for any study groups, accept any scholarships, or sit too close to the windows.
