For your reconsideration: a second look at Jennifer’s Body
Sometimes it takes a while for films to get the reception they deserve. As long as there has been film there have been movies that were poorly received when they first came out and have since gained a better reputation. Sometimes they end up as cult favorites, like Showgirls or The Room, and sometimes just plain favorites, like The Shining or Psycho. Often these movies do something unusual or new and it takes a while for people to come around to the changes. In an era of reboots, remakes, sequels, and prequels, appreciating films like these is a reminder that originality still has a place in the hearts of filmgoers. With this in mind, I’d like to suggest a revisit to a movie that has never gotten the love it deserves: Jennifer’s Body.
Released in September of 2009, Jennifer’s Body grossed $31 million worldwide against a budget of $16 million and currently sits at 43% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. The film was not a success. But, if you asked fifteen-year-old me at the time, I never would have known that. I loved Jennifer’s Body. It was cool, it was funny, it was horror, but it wasn’t so scary that I couldn’t convince my friends who refused to see the Saw movies to come see it with me. When I wasn’t at the local theater watching the movie, I was listening to the soundtrack (which, by the way, is still awesome). My friends and I quoted from this movie, we referenced it constantly, and the words that Diablo Cody wrote and Megan Fox said became our own inside jokes. I can’t say I knew a lot about film at the time. I wasn’t really evaluating everything I watched critically, but I knew what I liked. I knew that in Jennifer’s Body I had found a movie that got me on some level. The supernatural and horror elements were fun, but for me the movie was about the friendship between Fox’s Jennifer and Amanda Seyfried’s Needy. The insecurity, the toxicity, the complexities that I saw in their scenes together felt, to my over-dramatic teenage self, real. Sure, the movie can be pretty exaggerated, but at its core, I think it gets teenage girls in a way that few films do.
One of the moments that has always stood out to me happens after Melody Lane, the local bar that Needy and Jennifer are watching a band at, burns down. The band members find the girls outside and convince Jennifer to get in their van. Earlier, lead singer Nikolai (Adam Brody) was overheard by Needy discussing the fact that he thought Jennifer was a virgin. The film slows down as Needy watches her best friend, tipsy and in a state of shock, be taken away in a van by this group of guys. It’s the last time Needy sees Jennifer while she’s still human, but of course Needy doesn’t know that yet. She only knows the fear of possibility, of what these men could do to Jennifer, of what Needy is unable to save her BFF from.
After this, the film takes a supernatural turn. Mistakenly believing Jennifer to be a virgin, the band tries to sacrifice her to Satan, but it backfires. Jennifer becomes possessed by a demon and starts eating the boys in school. Once Needy realizes this, every aspect of their toxic friendship that has been building since childhood reaches a boiling point and Needy has to learn to confront Jennifer once and for all. Even when going down the horror route, the film never loses the teen girl friendship at the heart of the story. In my experience, realizing when a friendship has turned toxic and knowing when to cut people you once cared about out of your life is a difficult lesson to learn. When Needy discovers that Jennifer is possessed by a demon and has killed people, she sill struggles with her feelings toward her best friend. My hope is in recommending that people revisit this film, others might find that beneath the sexy horror/comedy, there is a lot of unexpected emotional resonance that still holds up after eight years.
Recently, after reading an article from last summer by Nico Lang at Salon, “The growing gender divide over “Ghostbusters”: Why movies starring women get slimed by male critics,”I was looking over the Rotten Tomatoes reviews for films made by and starring women and, like Lang, I picked up on something. Men, by and large, don’t like these movies as much as women do, and Jennifer’s Body is no exception to that. Of course, there are men who love this movie and have written fantastic reviews of it. But I noticed over and over that in reviews, men brought up the fact that Megan Fox isn’t naked in the film as a negative point. In addition to this making me want to burn my computer, it also made me realize something about the film that I hadn’t before (so, I guess in a way, thanks assholes?).
In horror movies, women are usually the victims and men the killers. Much has been written in academia and popular culture about phallic symbolism in horror films. From Leatherface’s chainsaw to Freddy’s knife glove, there are plenty of weapons in horror that promise violent, penetrative deaths for female victims. But Jennifer doesn’t use a weapon, she is a weapon. When she attacks men, she rips them apart with her teeth and bare hands. Her killing of men is frequently linked to her sexuality. She lures them to the woods or abandoned buildings with the promise of sex. In one scene, after she has killed Colin Gray (Kyle Gallner), his dead body lies on the floor while Jennifer crouches over him and cups his blood in her hands, which she then licks. She is, in a sense, literally eating him out. Instead of offering up her naked body to the men of the film and the audience, she goes in for the kill before she consummates the sexual relationship. This flips the usual horror set up of women being the passive victim of the penetrative act of violence and men being the active perpetrator who gains pleasure from the kill. The pleasure men seek from this film, Jennifer being naked, is never given to them, instead Jennifer’s pleasure in satisfying her craving is fulfilled.
Jennifer’s Body is not a perfect movie, but it has wit, heart, and originality. As Karyn Kusama continues to show her incredible talent when it comes to horror as seen in The Invitation and the anthology film XX, I hope more people revisit Jennifer’s Body. The film brought a new kind of monster to horror. Jennifer defies the conventions of women in the genre and this change didn’t make the film popular at the time of its release. More and more I am finding that horror fans, especially female fans, are recognizing this movie as a hidden gem that is not only made by brilliant women, but also brings up some complex feminist themes. There’s nothing I would love to see more than for Jennifer’s Body to reach serious cult status and become a midnight movie staple where fans have a venue to gush about how much they adore the film. Until then I’ll just have to keep recommending it to everyone I know. Not everyone is going to love Jennifer’s Body, and I wouldn’t expect them to. But if you can’t accept that Kusama, Cody, Fox and Seyfried made something that isn’t just another dumb horror movie, then frankly you’re lime green Jell-O and you can’t even admit it to yourself.
