JENNIFER’S BODY (2009)

Few films have experienced such an ascent in public opinion as the horror-comedy revenge tale Jennifer’s Body. 15 years after a lacklustre reception in 2009, it’s now regarded not only as a cult classic but as a pop feminist juggernaut. It took that long for the film to finally find an audience that appreciates its boldness, its weirdness, and its reversal of gendered horror tropes.

From the film’s first moments, director Karyn Kusama (Destroyer) and writer Diablo Cody (Lisa Frankenstein) subvert the genre’s well-worn clichés. The camera tracks through a dark suburban backyard, a POV that suggests a predator hunting its prey, to reveal Jennifer Check (Megan Fox) alone in her pink bedroom, Fall Out Boy poster above her bed. This is the familiar territory of scream queens and final girls, of women meeting violent ends at the hands of murderous men. But when the camera reverses, we see another girl staring in through the window. In moments, the audience is prepared to expect the unexpected.

The film’s central premise is simple: after the bar where Jennifer and Needy are attending a rock show burns down, Jennifer is swept away by the lead singer and returns home a succubus with an insatiable hunger for the flesh of her male peers. Though Jennifer is the titular character, she is not the protagonist. That would be her mousy and loyal friend Anita “Needy” Lesnicki (Amanda Seyfried), who tells this story in a flashback from behind bars in a mental hospital. It was her face we saw leering in through Jennifer’s window. Over the next 102 minutes, we will watch Jennifer and Needy go from best friends, to rivals, to enemies; as Jennifer transforms into a monster only Needy can stop.

Needy’s first line of narration, “Hell is a teenage girl”, states the film’s purpose from the jump, a prime example of the transparently self-aware style that didn’t jive with critics at the time, but has endeared scores of fans since. At its core, Jennifer’s Body is about the treacherous nature of the friendships between teenage girls, and the nefarious ways love, jealousy and hormones can tear those previously iron-clad bonds asunder.

It’s also about the perils of womanhood. Before Jennifer can victimise the boys of Devil’s Kettle, Minnesota, she herself is made a victim. The first 30-minutes of the film are full of light moments and teenage carelessness, as Jennifer is. She baits Needy into attending the Low Shoulder concert with her, hoping to catch the eye of the “extra salty” lead singer (a sinister Adam Brody). But once the bar burns down and Jennifer is pulled towards their van, we get our first taste of real horror. Needy begs her not to go, but she does anyway. As the van door slides shut, the girls share one last glance, one filled with a fear we know too well.

It’s not until well past the halfway point that we learn the full truth of what Low Shoulder subjected her to. Thanks to the internet, they decide a virgin sacrifice to the devil is their best shot at fame, and they believe Jennifer’s body will facilitate this transformation. But, since she “hasn’t been a virgin since junior high” as Needy tells us later, their violence against her transforms her into a violent entity dead set on revenge.

This sets up the film’s clearest rebellion against the horror genre’s historically flat treatment of its female characters. We would expect a girl like Jennifer to be running from the film’s monster, not to become it. The fact that she uses her sex appeal to hunt boys highlights the film’s commentary on the power dynamics that young women find themselves flung into against their will.

Today, this reads as a repudiation of the male gaze on multiple levels. Megan Fox was fresh off her star-making turn in Transformers (2009), and her career seemed destined to remain in hot girl hell for years to come. The choice to cast her in the role is a brilliant one, though I would argue it was also the source of the film’s failures at the time. Had some other femme fatale been cast, it may have been easier for audiences to accept a horror story with such a clear feminist agenda. But at the same time, looking back, there was no one better for the part.

It’s not so much that the film was ahead of its time, by 2009 there were ample examples of horror movies that capitalised on flipping the script on gender norms such as Alien (1979), The Craft (1996), and Death Proof (2007). But casting Megan Fox as Jennifer, and giving her top billing, baited audiences with the promise of her sex appeal and then asked them to reconsider how they viewed her.

This was further complicated by her approach to her fame. By that time, she had developed a conflicting reputation as an enigmatic firebrand who wouldn’t comfortably align herself with any political affiliation or cause. She was openly bisexual, and expressed a disdain for the patriarchy, but would not describe herself as a feminist. She acknowledged her status as a sex symbol and claimed to use that perception to foment greater personal agency, but her ability to do so was limited by the roles she played. So, by the time Jennifer’s Body was released, her participation in such an unapologetically feminist project confused audiences and critics.

Hindsight paints her in a more compassionate light. Everyone’s views and desires evolve and the public eye is extremely unforgiving, particularly in regards to young women in Hollywood trying to balance their sense of self with the self the industry is selling to audiences.

Today, the consensus is that the film’s disappointing reception was due to a sexist marketing campaign that pitched it as a sexed-up Megan Fox vehicle with some vague murder and mayhem. Diablo Cody herself has stated that she believes part of the reason the film failed to find an audience was that the studio marketed too heavily towards a young male audience eager to ogle Megan Fox, without really taking the film’s content or themes into account.

Critics at the time were largely unimpressed with the film’s concept and unamused with its ironies and wry humour. The Los Angeles Times said it “held promise, but it’s decidedly more self-possessed than possessed”. It made a profit, clearing $30M at the box office on a budget of $16M, but was largely regarded as a missed opportunity.

A simple Google search today offers countless essays and think pieces passionately defending the film and castigating the short-sighted misogyny of the media for mischaracterising it. Especially in the years after Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo movement, the film’s thematic ambitions continue to beguile intrepid viewers looking for an outlet for the rage that often comes from living under the patriarchy.

But, as often happens when a woefully misunderstood film begins to be appreciated for its merits, its flaws are underplayed. Jennifer’s Body has many excellent qualities, there is no question that the film was wrongly panned, but it is not a perfect film. To truly appreciate what makes Jennifer’s Body superlative, we cannot smooth over the moments that snag.

A deft Diablo Cody, fresh off her Academy Award-winning screenplay for Juno, does some of her strongest work here. The dialogue is punchy and dry, full of the acerbic one-liners and invented slang. But the humour can distract the audience in key moments, lending a self-aware and borderline self-satisfied air that seems more grounded in the writer’s aesthetics than in the character’s world. And there are several painfully tone-deaf moments—almost always about the film’s few characters of colour.

Thankfully, Karyn Kusama approaches Cody’s script with confidence and affection. She expertly handles the humour and tension in Jennifer and Needy’s relationship, depicting their underlying attraction to one another with care and tact. Her strong command for and respect of the horror genre shines in the scenes of Jennifer’s killings, and most poignantly during the sequence that depicts her attempted murder.

Kusama chose her collaborators well, and the supporting cast is superlative, with notable performances by J.K Simmons, Amy Sedaris and particularly Johnny Simmons who plays Needy’s sweet and naive boyfriend Chip. A killer early-2000s soundtrack centres the film in its era and provides a clear emotional tone and energy to this story of bloody teenage angst.

But the spectre of gender-based violence is the sinister undercurrent that ties the film together. It’s the cracked foundation on which the writer, director, and lead actors create the film’s most lasting legacy as a prime example of the perils of girldom. Remarkably, they manage to create space for both comedy and tragedy in this dark and twisted world, without losing sight of their audience. After 15 years, their audience has finally caught sight of them.

USA • CANADA | 2009 | 102 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • SPANISH

Cast & Crew

director: Karyn Kusama.
writer: Diablo Cody.
starring: Megan Fox, Amanda Seyfried, Johnny Simmons, J.K Simmons, Amy Sedaris & Adam Brody.