“I’m going to eat your soul and shit it out.”
Picture this: it’s 2009. One year prior, Diablo Cody won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay after her successful screenwriting debut with Jason Reitman’s Juno, and Megan Fox was thriving in the success of the Transformers franchise before her fall-out with Michael Bay. Sorry Michael, but Jennifer is so much more than just her body.
The miraculous idea of these two powerful women teaming up for a revenge-horror film would without a doubt be a majority of the internet’s wet dream today in 2019—but it wasn’t ten years ago. Jennifer’s Body was… polarizing, to say the least. Whether it was Diablo Cody’s controversial writing, Megan Fox becoming the ultimate victim of the male gaze (who knew that being attractive meant you can’t act?), or the fact that the film was simply just way ahead of its time, it didn’t do nearly as well as it should have. Any good reviews it got upon its release, mostly from women, were thrown under the radar by negative reviews, mostly from men, which unfortunately succeeded in throwing away how much of a classic it really is.
Over the past ten years, Jennifer’s Body has been minimized into your typical raunchy horror film when in fact, it’s actually quite the opposite—this film helped me come to realizations about my own sexuality, self-esteem and old friendships. If you look at it from the perspective that director Karyn Kusama intended it to be seen from, it’s actually a very in depth, endearing, and terrifyingly accurate depiction of what it means to be a teenage girl in high school (besides the boy eating, but how sure can you really be?).
Back in December 2018, Kusama and Cody spoke with IndieWire about how painful it was to see the film wrongfully marketed to teenage boys: “I wrote it for girls,” Cody said. “If a guy wrote a movie with the line ‘hell is a teenage girl,’ I would reject that. But I’m allowed to say it because I was one.” She also goes on to talk about how the creative team behind the film was horrified that 20th Century Fox was only interested in marketing the film by shoving Megan Fox’s sex appeal down everyone’s throat.
It was extremely unfortunate that the countless posters and few trailers for Jennifer’s Body were marketed towards a straight male audience, possibly excluding or preventing the proper audience it was intended for from learning about it until much later on—which was the case for many people. Improper marketing set expectations for this to be a pretty exploitative horror film made for men to gaze at, well, you know, Jennifer’s body. But even with better marketing directed towards the actual targeted audience, as much as I hate to say it, the film would still most likely fail to please all audiences. While horror is already a misunderstood and often clichéd genre, especially those horror films that have focused on the lives of women—stories that are usually ignored from the get-go—it also doesn’t help that female oriented stories don’t ever do nearly as well as their male equivalents.
Prior to viewing the film in its entirety, it’s definitely up to the audience to consider Jennifer and Needy (Amanda Seyfried) as your typical high school stereotypes—the popular girl and the nerdy girl. But it doesn’t take very long to realize that they are both so much more than that. Dealing with trauma, constant changing emotions and jealousy are just a few things that anyone who’s ever been in high school will connect with. Jennifer’s Body is not a masterpiece by any means (it has a whopping 44% on Rotten Tomatoes), but the film has definitely reinvented itself as a misunderstood cult classic and has gained quite a large following from the mid to late 2010s.
Before her feast begins, Jennifer is taken by a lame Indie rock group led by Adam Brody (who is wearing copious amounts of eyeliner, might I add) into the woods for a virginal sacrifice—they take her body and use it for what they need. I don’t know about you, but thinking about a woman coping with her trauma and assault by feeding on those who wronged her feels like something we should be absolutely losing our minds over—in a good way! Jennifer is a gorgeous girl who clearly has low self-esteem and has been taught her whole life that her self-worth is determined by her looks—it’s no surprise that her demon self wants to eat everyone who has messed with her.
Another great thing about this film is that it looks and feels so real—Diablo Cody has a talent for writing dialogue that actually sounds like the types of conversations that teenagers would have in real life, which is super refreshing. You can truly feel the female touch in the script—thankfully it’s not one of those films where you can tell that a middle aged man is writing dialogue for sixteen-year-old girls à la Riverdale.
Kusama directs her subjects and settings with care, allowing the over-saturated shots to bring a whole new breath of life to the story. There’s one shot of Needy during the climax of the film where she’s running through the forest in this huge, puffy, princess pink dress with her long, blonde locks blowing in the wind. It never fails to anticipate the viewer for the shitstorm that is the finale of the film. The color scheme in the pool scene is one of my favorites—all of the different shades of green and blue contrasting against Jennifer’s white prom dress covered in blood. There’s no going back to how her life was before.
It goes without saying, but Megan Fox as Jennifer is one of the smartest and most self-aware casting jobs of all time. You can tell that she gave herself completely to this film and she goes above and beyond with the material she was given. Megan’s performance really shows us both Kusama’s and her own understanding of the audience’s perception of her. To most people going into this film, she’s just the hot girl that’s cast to lure men in. In this film, she knows this and uses it to her advantage. Jennifer’s Body quietly—yet very intelligently—uses the element of horror and shock value to personify and amplify the power that women have over men.
I believe that with how things were in 2009 and how far we have come, that year was not ready for Jennifer’s Body, as it was a lot more intelligent than people gave it credit for at the time. It’s a dark comedy that possesses a lot of horror tropes, unpacking its baggage and making a captivating, creepy, and completely hilarious and scary narrative around it. It’s not only made and catered to all women, but to feminists as well. And after ten years and countless rewatches, Jennifer’s Body gets better and better each time I revisit it.
