Halloween is coming up, and that means our attentions are turning towards all things horror. This century has seen a brilliant revival of the genre, with Midsommar, Get Out, Parasite, Hereditary, Us, Split, The Witch, Train To Busan, 28 Days Later, and Under The Skin all offering something different. I'm not writing about any of those though. I'm just a girl, standing in front of a gamer, asking them to watch Jennifer's Body.
That's it. That's all there is to it. Jennifer's Body is the best horror film of this century, and everybody needs to go watch it. The numbers are not kind to Jennifer's Body. It sits at a 5.4 on IMDb, a 47 on Metacritic, and grossed $31.5 million off a $16 million budget. That's largely because Paramount had no idea how to market it, and struggled with the idea of a movie with two female leads that was not a The Devil Wears Prada-style female focused flick. The lesbian scene between Needy and Jennifer dominated the marketing, even though the film is barely about that at all, and any trace of the ironic violence, the witty dialogue, and the inversion of slasher tropes - the best inversion of these tropes since Scream - was entirely absent from any promotion. It was that film where Megan Fox kisses Amanda Seyfried, except it was so much more.
Jennifer's Body is The Lost Boys meets Mean Girls, by way of The Craft. It's a fantastic horror comedy, and one that is actually frightening when it needs to be, all while sprinkling in jokes. To watch it today, you might think it has aged badly - you would be incorrect. It is so firmly planted in the late '00s that all of the references, all of the emo soundtrack, all of satire is so perfectly of its time. At just 12 years old, it's hard to call it a classic, but Desperately Seeking Susan has not 'aged badly' because it's so totally '80s. Jennifer's Body is 2009 in a bottle, and that's an inescapable part of its charm.
The best part about its humour is it's so real - there are very few jokes in the whole script. Written by Diablo Cody, best known for her similarly realistic humour in Juno, the film sparkles with a constant sense of two very real teenage girls just talking to each other. The whole reason Jennifer becomes a demon is because when choosing which girl to abduct and sacrifice, the cult choose Jennifer, the hot cheerleader, over her bookish, nerdy friend. They assume the hot girl is actually the virgin, and there are several layers of inversion going on here.
Firstly, the assumption that the pretty girl is the virgin and the nerd has had sex is itself a comment on the way men view women, especially young women, as commodities. The nerd will be more desperate while the pretty girl can maintain higher standards, therefore she must be the virgin. Turns out this isn't true, and while usually being the slut will get you killed in horror films, here it saves Jennifer's life - she's not presented as 'a slut', but it's a clear riff on this trope, especially when you think that when Needy overhears this conversation, Jennifer scoffs, telling her friend she's not even a "backdoor virgin," and that she missed flags the next day to sit on a bag of frozen peas.
The girls, Jennifer especially, discuss sex openly, yet unlike most girls in horror films, this is not the cause of their demise nor is it held up as a moral failing or grounds for humiliation or mockery. It just... is. The film has far more to say about the peop🍸le who judge young women for their behaviour than it does about young women themselves.
Away from that, the lines are stellar but also very real. Jennifer telling her friend she had to sit on peas is funny, but not presented as a joke or one liner. It's the same when Jennifer turns down the Rocky Horror Picture Show because she doesn't like "boxing movies," or when one of the murder victims is described as "lasagne with teeth."
Jennifer's Body seems to have come just too early for the horror comedy trend to hit it, too. While it has a decent cult following these days, Netflix is pushing a lot of original horror comedies like The Babysitter, and Jennifer's Body feels like a Netflix Original through and through. Every teenage girl horror comedy inversion uses Jennifer's Body as a roadmap, so that shouldn't be surprising.
Jennifer’s Body seems to have been relegated to cult status, to ‘so b൩ad it’s good’ level, to the meme tier. It shouldn’t be. It’s a fantastic horror movie in its own right that understands exactly what it is, even if the marketing never did.