‘Jennifer’s Body’ at 15: How Diablo Cody Resurrected the Cult of High School Hell
[Editor’s Note: The below contains spoilers for “Jennifer’s Body.”]
Hell may be a teenage girl, but the occult taking over high school halls is nothing new. The 2009 film “Jennifer’s Body,” though, ushered in a new era of “female rage” being shown onscreen. And what better age to capture coming into power than being a teen?
Academy Award-winning “Juno” scribe Diablo Cody wrote the now-iconic feature, with Karyn Kusama (“Yellowjackets”) directing. The appropriately titled “Jennifer’s Body” hinges on how high school queen bee Jennifer (Megan Fox) wields her newfound sex appeal. Sure, she may look like a grown woman on the outside, but does teen Jennifer really know how to navigate adult situations? Not quite.
So when Jennifer sets her sights on seducing the lead singer (Adam Brody) of a band touring through town, it doesn’t totally go to plan. Turns out that the aforementioned rockers want to sacrifice a virgin, and Jennifer lies about having no sexual history whatsoever. Well, the ritual backfires, leaving Jennifer a half-girl, half-demon who has to feast on unsuspecting boys to survive. Oh, and her friendship with her best pal Needy (Amanda Seyfried) just might be the death of them both.
While “Jennifer’s Body” seemed to be the perfect blend of the sex-positive mean girl adoration of 1989’s “Heathers” with the high school occult practices of “The Craft,” the feature only broke even at the box office. “The Craft” spurred a sequel, and “Heathers” was an immediate cult classic, later landing a TV series and Broadway show. In contrast, it took years for “Jennifer’s Body” to even be considered a pivotal feminist horror film in cinematic history, let alone a “good” movie.
“Jennifer’s Body” felt familiar and groundbreaking all at once, so why didn’t it catch on?
Screenwriter Cody told Buzzfeed in 2018 that “Jennifer’s Body” was written specifically for “girls,” saying, “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. I think the fact that we were a female creative team gave us permission to make observations about some of the more toxic aspects of female friendship.”
The queer undertone of Needy’s obsession with Jennifer isn’t fully explored, but that is almost the point: While the audience is never really sure if Needy is concocting the lore surrounding an undead Jennifer, we do know that Needy is at least the victim of Jennifer’s allure. Or, rather, Jennifer is the victim of Needy’s thirst for affirmation as a way to stay closeted in high school. Jennifer’s sole betrayal of Needy is devouring her crush after flirting with him, but is that her own way of saying she, too, loves Needy?
Lead star Fox said that she was not a “sympathetic victim” of the misogyny surrounding the “Jennifer’s Body” marketing campaign. The ads for the film downplayed its horror elements and instead emphasized Fox and her…well, body. Fox said during “Eli Roth’s History of Horror: Uncut” podcast in 2020 that the film never “really stood a chance” to be taken as satire due to her “image at the time” following “Transformers” fame.
Director Kusama similarly told Buzzfeed in 2018, “I kept sort of reminding everybody, ‘Guys, we can’t market this movie to boys,’ and then have them go to the theater expecting one thing and then seeing Megan Fox not really take off her clothes but rip a guy’s intestines out and eat them. At the time it was awful, but now I’m realizing this is evident of the world at large.”
Kusama even revealed that one studio marketing idea was to have Fox host a show on an amateur porn site. Instead, the studio released a poster for the movie with Fox posing seductively. The tagline read: “She’s got a taste for bad boys.”
“Because of the way the film was marketed, people wanted to see the movie as a cheap, trashy, exploitative vehicle for the hot girl from ‘Transformers,’” Cody said. “That’s how people insisted on seeing the film, even though I think when you watch it, it’s pretty obvious that there’s something else going on.”
Now, 15 years later, “Jennifer’s Body” is finally getting its due — and may even earn a sequel.
Cody told Bloody Disgusting in 2024 that she is “not done” with the world of “Jennifer’s Body.”
“I want to do a sequel. I am not done with ’Jennifer’s Body,’” Cody said. “I just need to find…I need to partner with people who believe it in [sic] as much as I do and that hasn’t really happened yet. I need someone to believe in it who has a billion dollars.”
Celebrate the anniversary of “Jennifer’s Body” by streaming it on Disney+ or Tubi.
