“The Boy-Run Media Makes Us Seem Crazy”: A Tribute to Jennifer’s Body

Prompt via Bright Wall / Dark Room’s June 2019 issue “Thirst Traps”— “Sometimes what looks like a mindless good time can have a surprisingly audacious filmmaking style…sometimes what looks like a goofy comedy can surprise you with its heart and soul…sometimes what looks like a typical slasher can pull the rug out from under you with subversive satire…from the sexy to the sublime, we want to celebrate cinematic thirst traps and all the ways they can ensnare, shock, and delight us.”

Nothing says “thirst trap” quite like Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body (2009) — a movie that enticed audiences with the promise of Megan Fox flaunting her curves and locking lips with Amanda Seyfried, and left viewers ensnared in an intricate web of themes exploring female sexuality, assault, revenge, trauma, and the power dynamics at play in patriarchal societies. Jennifer’s Body is both wildly entertaining with its catchy one-liners, and — upon a closer watch — thought-provoking, with its biting social commentary. The film challenges norms around female sexuality, reverses stereotypes around female leads in horror films, and subverts the male gaze in a way that was ahead of its time.

Our titular character Jennifer (played by Megan Fox) is quite literally a thirst trap herself, using her not-so-covert sex appeal to lure boys at her high school to their untimely death. But here’s the catch: She’s only doing so because a satan worshipping, guyliner wearing indie band, thinking she is a virgin, attempts to sacrifice her, seeking fame and glory in return. Jennifer is not a virgin though, and the ritual goes horribly wrong, leaving her inhabited by a demon that must feast on the flesh of men to sustain her beauty and energy. It becomes an ode to a battered woman, who then reclaims her body and uses it as a weapon of revenge against the gender that has sexualized and preyed upon her.

A large part of the reason for the “thirst” in the thirst trap of Jennifer’s Body is how grossly it was mismarketed. When returning to the trailer and promotional posters — featuring Fox in sexy schoolgirl outfits, curves exposed, licking her lips — it’s clear that the irony of the movie slipped right over the marketing and publicity teams heads. The trailer begins with a shot of Fox, hair wet and slicked back, lips pouting, fiery eyed, swimming toward the camera, clearly nude under the water. The shot then fades to her strutting down her high school hallway, wearing low-rise jeans and a tiny pink hoodie covered in hearts, tossing her glossy hair. The trailer teases games of seduction, girl on girl action, cheeky one-liners about sexuality, and campy horror. And yes, Jennifer’s Body is campy. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t clever and, more importantly, subversive.

It’s no surprise that a film exploring the way female bodies are fetishized by patriarchal societies ended up suffering — due to the film and the main actress being hypersexualized and not taken seriously. It was a development that wouldn’t have surprised Jennifer herself. At one point in the movie, she remarks to her best friend Needy (played by Amanda Seyfried), “PMS was invented by the boy-run media to make us seem crazy.” A movie meant to garner an audience of teenage girls who could relish in its relatability instead ended up attracting a young, straight male audience that couldn’t look past Fox’s sexual appeal to understand the deeper themes behind the movie. It tanked at the box office, received plenty of unfavorable reviews, and only later began to emerge as a feminist cult classic. Jennifer’s Body was ahead of its time; during its initial release it wasn’t able to break free of the sexualization around Megan Fox and the stigma of the horror genre.

Our first look at Jennifer and Needy’s friendship is telling. We find our female leads in their high school gym — with Jennifer at the center of the court, twirling a flag in a tiny cheerleading outfit that hugs her curves. She’s glowing, smiling — clearly the center of attention, with the other cheerleaders staged around her and directing the spotlight toward her. As Jennifer waves the flag, Needy — the polar opposite, in her glasses and modest cardigan — watches adoringly from the crowd. Needy is also our narrator and remarks to us as she watches, “People found it hard to believe that a babe like Jennifer would associate with a dork like me.” The divide is immediately obvious between them — from their clothes to their looks to their social roles to the way they carry themselves — but so is their connection, or at least in one direction: Needy’s devotion to Jennifer. It’s pretty clear, even before a girl behind Needy in the crowd leans over and says to her as she fawns over Jennifer: “You’re totally lesbi-gay!” that Needy’s feelings for Jennifer go beyond friendship.

This ambiguous relationship between Jennifer and Needy isn’t simply queer baiting. As the movie plays out, we see their relationship as a very real and relatable example of jealousy and power dynamics in female friendships, the way that women are boxed into one-dimensional categories by their image and social status, and how female friendships can be distorted and corrupted by patriarchal influences, and ultimately become toxic. Needy seems to long for everything Jennifer possesses — confidence, boldness, and spontaneity. She needs very little convincing to blow off her boyfriend Chip (the classic, oblivious, “nice guy” prototype) at the last minute to do whatever Jennifer wants to do. Chip notes that Needy does whatever Jennifer tells her, and that the two actually have nothing in common.

One of the first things we can see about Jennifer is how much power her sexuality allows her. The boys of her high school drool over her, and she has no problem, in turn, objectifying them. Jennifer flips the male gaze on its head, with her shamelessly vulgar comments about men and the way she sees them as disposable objects. “They’re just boys, just morsels. We have all the power, don’t you know that?” she remarks to Needy in one scene. She subverts the norms of the popular pretty girl being all sugar and spice, and seems impervious to the attention of the boys of her town, whom she views as lesser than her.

The male gaze is subverted throughout Jennifer’s Body — and here the film gains depth and at the same time rises above the typical B horror genre, where most women are either victims or vixens. Jennifer remains in charge of her sexuality. There’s a moment where she emerges, in classic movie fashion, from the water, dripping wet, naked, in slo-mo. Except that we don’t see her performing for men. No one is there to watch her. She appears intoxicated by her own power, even without the male presence that viewers have been trained to expect. Later, we see her soaking in her newfound power: “I feel so scrumptious,” she says as she stares at herself in the mirror.

Another moment of male gaze subversion shows Needy running in slo-mo in a prom dress, but it’s not a moment of feasting on her body (as moments of women jogging in slo-mo in movies so often are). It’s a get-shit-done moment of heroism, as Needy ditches her high school prom to save Chip from Jennifer’s clutches at the end of the film. This moment says a lot about the movie: in a reversal of typical gender roles in actionpacked movie moments, it’s the women who drive the doing in the film, and the men are merely props. There’s even a moment when — as the town is in the throes of the mysterious deaths caused by Jennifer eating boys — Chip’s mom hands him a can of pepper spray, saying, “There’s a sicko out there who likes boys!” It’s a reversal of what we usually see in horror movies, where women and girls are the ones in danger of the male serial killer ravaging a town.

One of the most interesting choices of the film is that we don’t know why Jennifer suddenly has a thirst for human flesh until we’re an hour into the story. We know that she and Needy attended a concert together in the beginning of the movie at a local bar, which then burned to the ground, killing many people in the small town. We know that Jennifer wanted to seduce the lead singer of the band (Low Shoulder) prior to the fire, and that after the fire, she got into the back of the band’s van and rode away with them into the night. That’s where we leave her. We follow Needy after that and have no insight as to what happened to Jennifer that night, only that she returned to Needy covered in blood and spewing black goo. Following the tragedy of the fire, Jennifer is painted as totally selfish, completely unconcerned about what has happened, lacking even a glimmer of tact or empathy. It’s not until the hour mark of the movie that we learn about how the band members of Low Shoulder attempted to sacrifice Jennifer as part of a satanic ritual and how it led her to develop a need for human flesh to sustain her.

Our breakthrough into the dimensions of Jennifer finally occurs after seeing the flashback of the men of Low Shoulder shrieking with laughter over Jennifer’s screams and pleas while they repeatedly stab her. “We come here tonight to sacrifice the body of Jennifer,” the lead singer of Low Shoulder recites, stabbing her. It is in this moment that the title of the film comes together — Jennifer’s body and the way she uses it is a double-edged sword. It empowers her in society because she can use it to seduce men and get what she wants from them, and simultaneously leaves her vulnerable to being objectified and tortured by men. Her body and sexuality are both her downfall and her strength, what makes her the hunted and the huntress — her body is first the victim, and then the assailant. We see Jennifer on her back in this flashback moment, terrified, nothing like the unflappable Jennifer we’ve been shown to that point. We see in this moment that, despite how unlikeable a person she can be, she’s still a teenage girl, being ravaged and mutilated by a group of men.

After the flashback scene, it becomes all the more satisfying to see how Jennifer reclaims her power by using her body as a weapon of revenge. Just as the men of Low Shoulder used Jennifer’s shock following the fire to lure her into the van with them, Jennifer then uses the townspeople’s grief around the fire to lure them into her hungry clutches. An unforgettable moment is when Jennifer, before tearing one of the boys at her high school to shreds, says, “I need you frightened. I need you hopeless.”

Jennifer’s Body touches upon trauma in a way that feels relevant now more than ever, given recent events in the media like the #MeToo movement that has begun to expose prominent male figures in the entertainment industry for assault and abuse. The men of Low Shoulder get away with their attack on Jennifer and become more famous than ever. Since they were at the club the night of the fire, they’re hailed as heroes and one of their songs becomes the small town’s anthem, with people rallying behind it as a song of hope to overcome their grief. It’s an uncanny look at how so many powerful, rich celebrities are able to not only escape jail time despite crimes of assault and abuse against women, but continue to have successful careers, fan bases, and blind support.

The film also touches on what it calls a “tragedy boner” — a crude term for what is actually a very real and disturbing phenomenon in which society sensationalizes and exploits tragedy. Needy remarks after the death of one of the boys Jennifer has killed, “They did a big memorial assembly for Colin, but nobody seemed to care anymore. Sorrow was last week’s emotion.” It brings to mind today’s American news cycle of mass shootings — the immediate outrage, the insistence that things must change, the outpouring of thoughts-and-prayers tweets, and then on to something else until the next tragedy rolls around.

At the end of the film, Needy stabs Jennifer in the heart, destroying the demon that has been inhabiting her, but killing her in the process. When Needy is discovered on top of Jennifer’s dead body, she’s taken to a mental asylum. Using the superhuman powers she’s manifested from being bitten by Jennifer during the struggle to kill her, Needy breaks out of the asylum. She hitchhikes to where Low Shoulder is playing their next gig, and murders them. In doing so, Needy reinforces the theme of traumatized, battered women getting revenge on the men who have wreaked havoc on their lives. It is a satisfying, badass moment of heroism and feminism, in which, despite the often jealous and toxic dynamic between Jennifer and Needy, Needy comes through for Jennifer and avenges the deadly wrong that, in the end, has been done to both of them.