The Body Creator on the Finale, Sexuality and Whether Grace Is God

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for “The Body,” now streaming on Netflix.

If you’re looking for clear answers about whether or not God is real in the world of “The Body” — Netflix’s spooky new drama series about mass hysteria originating from a Catholic school dance team — you’re not going to find them.

“If we ever fully defined it, it would break the rule of the show,” says creator Quinn Shephard. “The show is meant to mimic faith, so there’s people who believe, there’s people who don’t and there’s people in the middle, like me, who are like, ‘I don’t know.’”

But regardless of whether it’s the big man upstairs or just some devious teenage girls pulling the strings, “The Body” has a lot to say about faith and its role in the lives of young and sometimes queer girls. Shephard is a proud lesbian who was raised in the church and has stepped away from it without fully rejecting it, and the show’s up-and-down relationship with God is a product of that.

At the beginning of “The Body,” a devout Catholic named Grace (Sofia Wylie) is the clear standout at dance team tryouts, much to the chagrin of some of the team’s more senior members, who roll their eyes at her rule-following innocence. Thus, she’s put through a bit of hazing: At a Halloween party at an abandoned convent, she’s pressured to take Ecstasy by Elise (Sara Boustany), the team’s co-captain and resident badass, as everyone jokingly perform a ritual meant to sacrifice her soul to the devil. But the devil doesn’t seem to know that they’re joking. Anya (Kristina Bogic), who is Elise’s co-captain and the most popular girl in school, notices that Grace has wandered off alone. Alongside Lisbeth (Geena Meszaros), an awkward new girl who got rejected from the team in favor of Grace, she finds Grace on the ground, convulsing until she passes out. Anya and Lisbeth decide to take her to a hospital, but on the way, Grace appears to die. Because Anya supplied the Ecstasy, she’s terrified she’ll get in trouble. Lisbeth sees this as her way onto the dance team and into Anya’s good graces, and takes charge. They take Grace’s body back to her own house and tuck her into bed, then use Grace’s phone to text a friend that she got home safe, giving themselves plausible deniability. But at the end of the first episode, Grace takes a breath.