School Spirits

The Purgatory of the Unfinished

The "dead girl" is one of pop culture’s most exhausted tropes. From *Twin Peaks* to *Pretty Little Liars*, the female body is so often reduced to a puzzle box for the living to solve—a silent object around which the narrative orbits. *School Spirits* (2023), created by Megan and Nate Trinrud, intervenes in this lineage with a clever, if melancholic, subversion. It grants the dead girl a voice, agency, and, ironically, a life. By trapping its protagonist in a literal high school purgatory, the series transforms the metaphorical feeling of teenage entrapment—that suffocating sense that these hallways will last forever—into a supernatural reality.



The series introduces us to Maddie Nears (Peyton List), a caustic, cynical senior who wakes up in the boiler room of Split River High only to discover she is dead. Or, at least, that’s the working theory. Unlike the glamorous, neon-drenched nihilism of *Euphoria*, *School Spirits* adopts a visual language that is refreshingly unvarnished. The cinematography, established by pilot director Max Winkler, favors a grounded, almost indie-film aesthetic. The school isn't a stylized playground of vice; it is beige, fluorescent-lit, and inescapably mundane.

This visual drabness is crucial to the show’s atmosphere. The "afterlife" here isn't a clouded heaven or a fiery pit; it is simply the cafeteria during fourth period, forever. The ghosts are shot with tight eyelines and center-framing that emphasize their isolation, layering them over the living world like decals that refuse to peel off. We feel the claustrophobia of their existence—they are forced to watch their friends grieve, move on, and forget them, all while being unable to leave the campus grounds. It captures the specific, aching loneliness of adolescence: the feeling of being present but entirely unseen.



At the narrative's heart lies Peyton List’s performance, which anchors the show’s fantastical elements in genuine emotional weight. List plays Maddie not as a tragic victim, but as a furious, confused young woman who was robbed of her future. Her chemistry with Kristian Ventura, who plays her living best friend Simon—the only person who can still see her—provides the series with its emotional spine. Their interactions explore the selfish nature of grief; Simon’s refusal to let go mirrors Maddie’s refusal to move on.

The show uses its spectral ensemble, an archetypal *Breakfast Club* of dead students from different decades, to dissect the concept of "unfinished business." Whether it’s the closeted jock from the 80s or the beatnik from the 60s, these characters represent the suspended animation of trauma. They are frozen at the moment of their worst pain. The series suggests that high school is a place where we are all haunting ourselves, trying to rewrite the endings of stories that have already concluded.



Ultimately, *School Spirits* transcends its YA mystery trappings by asking a more profound question than "Who killed Maddie Nears?" It asks what it means to truly live when you feel invisible. While the first season’s final twist recontextualizes the genre from a murder mystery into something far more psychological and disturbing, the show’s strength remains its empathy. It is a thoughtful, surprisingly tender meditation on the way trauma arrests our development, trapping us in the hallways of our past long after the final bell has rung.