First 'Séance' trailer sets up a bloody boarding school mystery starring Suki Waterhouse

Girls participate in séance. Girls channel ghost. Girls ends up… six feet under. A chilling new trailer for Séance has just hit the web, and if there's a lesson to be learned in this creepy whodunit-cum-supernatural horror flick, it's don't go resurrecting the dead because they might come back to make school life deathly unbearable.

Séance centers on a group of boarding students at the prestigious Edelvine School for Girls who, when they're not bullying newcomer Camille, played by Assassination Nation's Suki Waterhouse, are secretly gathering by candle to conjure up the spirit of a girl who committed suicide years earlier.

Needless to say, things take a dark turn as the evil spirit they hath wrought knocks them off, and it's up to Camille to solve the mystery and stop the demonic killings once and for all.

Hogwarts this isn't (though perhaps we see shades of 1986's Witchboard?).

Séance is the directorial debut of horror scribe Simon Barrett, best known for penning horror hits You're Next, The Guest, and the recent Blair Witch reboot. According to the helmer, he was inspired not only by classic '70s and '80s slasher movies (1974's Black Christmas and 1982's The House on Sorority Row come to mind) and Italian Giallo films (1964's Blood and Black Lace and 1971's Black Belly of the Tarantula perhaps), but also by the murder mystery genre that Agatha Christie made famous and which Rian Johnson revived to great effect and boffo box office with 2019's Knives Out.

Barrett said in a statement via Gizmodo: "I have long wanted to make my own variation of this horror-mystery narrative, but with the added goal of weaving in supernatural elements, as ghost stories tend to be murder mysteries as well. This thought process led me to write Seance, a film that I hope pays effective homage to the teen slasher mysteries of my youth, while at the same time being its own unique thing,"

Séance, which costars Madisen Beaty, Ella-Rae Smith, Innana Sarkis, and Seamus Patterson, is set to haunt theaters and stream on-demand on May 21.