Sometimes, horror films need time to be properly understood. The Thing needed it, The Shining needed it and to a slightly lesser, extent, Jennifer’s Body needed it.
Released back in 2009, the buzz about Jennifer’s Body was fairly lively as both director Karyn (Girlfight) Kusama and screenwriter Diablo (Juno) Cody were seen as hot, up and comers with the latter especially hailed due to the numerous horror references scattered about the script. However, Jennifer’s Body ultimately flopped at the box office with an uncertain tone and weak horror aspects cited as the reason – but to take a look at the movie now, in the wake of the #metoo movement, it’s fairly apparent that the main issue here is that an admittedly flawed movie with a strong, feminist streak, was advertised primarily on how hot Megan Fox looked on the posters.
Time for a reassessment, methinks.
Located in the small, Minesota town of Devil’s Kettle, we find Anita “Needy” Kesnicki raising all kinds of hell as a violent inmate of a mental institution, but as her handy, inner monologue clues us in, things wasn’t always like this.
A quick jaunt back in time finds Needy as an insecure and nerdy high school student who has been friends since childhood with the sultry and popular Jennifer Check, a rather selfish, self-obsessed cheerleader despite them having precious little in common. One night, the two go to a local dive bar to catch a gig of indie rock band Low Shoulder, but while they play their set, the booze-sodden bar suddenly catches on fire and promptly burns to the ground with Needy, Jennifer and the band being among the few survivors. At the request of smug lead singer, Nikolai Wolf, a stunned Jennifer hops in the bands van and is spirited off much to the worry of her friend.
However, later that night, Jennifer shows up at Needy’s house covered with blood – probably hers – and after wandering about the place as if in a trance, gorges herself on a rotisserie chicken from the fridge, vomits up a bucket-load of black slime and leaves, but not before almost biting her friend on the neck.
In the wake of the fire, the town is in shock, but that isn’t the end of shock deaths in Devil’s Kettle as a few days later, a resident jock is found virtually hollowed out by a marauding killer – a killer, it turns out, that proves to be a demonically possessed Jennifer. After Needy’s spider sense is triggered by the fact that her friend is “evil” evil (as opposed to just “high school evil”), she finds that her treatment from a malevolent, succubus Jennifer isn’t that different from her treatment from the ordinary, non-possessed, Jennifer. However, as Jennifer’s hunger continues to grow, her victim list seems to suspiciously start to contain boys that Needy have a connection with.
With friends like these, eh?
While some of the criticisms leveled at Jennifer’s Body are admittedly warranted, there’s no denying that the curious, ahead-of-its time horror/comedy from Kusama and Cody was rather unfairly dumped. Thanks to the way Michael Bay aimed his camera at her during the entirety of Transformers, Megan Fox was hot enough to melt steel as so the ad campaign upped its efforts to highlight her vixen-like performance when the movie had far more going for it than just the tawdry seduce and destroy tactic of a movie like Species. While the posters seemed made to entice the average reader of the lads mags that were doing the rounds back then, the actual target audience would be something closer to Michael Lehmann’s pitch black teen comedy Heathers, which sought to harvest the darkest of laughs by skewering the viciousness of high school life.
Cody’s script is loaded with archetypes of the high school movie that not only paints the hellscape of your formative years as a battleground of bitter, disinterested snark, but even amusingly compares the everyday behavior of your average spoilt teen with that of an inhuman creature invoked by the most vapid indie band imaginable.
While its Megan Fox’s Jennifer who seemingly hogged the advertising campaign, the real gold her is Amanda Seyfried’s Needy, a complex and nuanced character who will no doubt be painfully familiar to anyone who has ever been in a toxic friendship. Cody’s script piles on gaslighting, casual comments designed to erode Needy’s confidence and even that tried and true method of boyfriend stealing (read: eating) and you feel that if it could have found an audience at the time, it would have been embraced just as much as other cult, teen sensations (if Heathers and Mean Girls can get musicals, why can’t this?).
However, among the colourful slang talk (the term “Freaktarded” is a noticable one) and gross out moments involving gushing demon vomit that could have come straight out of an Evil Dead movie, Jennifer’s Body never truly manages to cement its uncertain tone. Those looking for more traditional, biting, teen satire might be thrown off by the ravaged corpses and hard-edged violence and yet those looking for more extreme horror fare may probably walk away disappointed despite one corpse being described as looking like “a lasagne with teeth”.
And yet, despite its uneven, oddball nature, there is plenty to admire about Jennifer’s Body with some of the dialogue often displaying sharper teeth than the titular b-word herself.
“You’re killing people!”, exclaims a horrified Needy at one point, “No.” nonchalantly replies Jennifer, “I’m killing boys.”, nailing a reverse Uno card on traditional, unfair, sexual politics that’s personified by Adam Brody’s Satan worshiping indie crooner who further cements his douchebag credentials by convincing his buddies to commit to ritualistic homicide with a pointed “Do you want to be a big loser, or do you want to be rich and awesome like that guy from Maroon 5!”.
These days, Jennifer’s Body is finally starting to attract the notice it should have on its initial release, thanks to its skewed, cynical glance at abusive friendships and the fact that Jennifer has to be imbued with an actual demon to be able to justify having the same callous, predatory nature towards boys as men have towards women.
Yes it’s flawed – the climax fizzles out and the final edit just can’t quite strike that balance of hardcore horror and cynical smirks that Cody’s obviously shooting for, but even though Jennifer’s Body is small and imperfectly formed, it’s still one worth celebrating.
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