Seance(2021)

Submitted by Evan B

Pooper:
Bethany and Trevor killed Kerrie and the other girls to prevent them from turning Bethany in for plagiarizing her scholarship-winning essay. “Camille” stole the identity of the real Camille so she could infiltrate the school and get revenge on Kerrie’s (her best friend) killers. “Camille” kills Bethany and Trevor before fleeing the school. Kerrie’s ghost does haunt the school but only was helping “Camille” to avenge her death.

Long Ending:
Alice (Inanna Sarkis) is the head of a clique of mean girls at an elite boarding school. Alice and her friends Bethany (Madisen Beaty), Lenora, Rosalind, and Yvonne love to engage the occult (i.e., hold seances, try and conjure ghosts) and play mean pranks on their fellow students. One night, they prank a student named Kerrie to trick her into thinking they successfully conjured a ghost known for haunting their school. Later that night, Kerrie sees what she believes to be the ghost in her room. Minutes later, a scream is heard and Kerrie is found dead, having fallen out the window of her dorm room.

Soon thereafter, a new student named Camille (Suki Waterhouse) who was waitlisted after an earlier application transfers to the school. She quickly befriends fellow student Helina (Ella Rae Smith) and the school’s maintenance man Trevor (Seamus Patterson), who is the son of the headmistress. However, her willful defiance of Alice’s demands leads to a fight between Camille and Helina vs. Alice and her friends. They are all assigned to detention by the headmistress where Alice convinces all of them to engage in a seance to try and contact Kerrie and find out what really happened to her. To the girls’ surprise, Kerrie responds (using a homemade Ouija board) and states that she was murdered, but doesn’t reveal the identity of the murderer. Later that night, Camille sees the ghost of Kerrie in her room. Meanwhile, an unseen figure abducts Lenore in the woods just outside the dormitory.

As the girls investigate Lenore’s disappearance, they become more convinced that something supernatural is occurring. They become more distraught when Rosalind ends up dead in the bathroom. The remaining girls hold another seance to reach out to Rosalind. During the seance, Rosalind’s spirit says that Camille is the one that killed her. Camille vociferously denies this, but Alice and Yvette don’t believe her and send emails to loved ones saying that if anything happens to them, Camille is to blame. Later that day, Yvette is stabbed and killed after a dance practice. Meanwhile, Camille again sees Kerrie’s ghost and is finally convinced that her room is haunted.

Late at night, Alice gets a text from Lenore’s phone to meet her outside. Camille hears Alice leaving the dorm and follows. Both girls are knocked unconscious. When they awaken, they are tied up in the basement by two masked figures. The abductors remove their masks to reveal that they are Bethany and Trevor. Bethany explains that she stole an essay from Kerrie and plagiarized it to enter a contest for a huge college scholarship. When Bethany’s essay won, she realized that Kerrie and the others would realize it had been plagiarized so she decided to kill all of them so that they wouldn’t turn her in. Knowing that the other girls believed in the supernatural, she used various tricks to fake the supernatural events (i.e., manipulating the ouija board). Trevor is secretly her boyfriend and also a psychopath. He is helping out since he loves both murder and Bethany. Trevor used crawlspaces throughout the school to sneak into the various rooms and committed the murders (the ghost Kerrie saw before her death was actually Trevor in a costume). They now plan to frame Camille for killing Alice as well as Lenore (who they confirmed they killed), Rosaline, and Yvette. Meanwhile, Kerrie’s ghost wakes up Helina and gets her to realize that Camille is in trouble in the school’s basement.

Camille surprises the killers by revealing that she is not in fact Camille. Rather, she is Kerrie’s childhood best friend. She stole the real Camille’s identity to gain access to the school and investigate her friend’s death. After this revelation, Helina ambushes the killers and knocks out Trevor. Helina rescues Alice while “Camille” stays to get revenge. She takes out Bethany by slitting her throat with a fluorescent lightbulb. After Trevor recovers and chases “Camille,” she manages to break his leg and pushes a heavy bookshelf onto his head that decapitates him. “Camille” meets Helina outside where the pair kiss before “Camille” explains that she is going to flee from the police. They also both acknowledge that Kerrie’s ghost was real, but was just helping them. The film ends as “Camille” waves goodbye to both Helina and, standing behind Helina, Kerrie’s ghost.