JENNIFER’S BODY 2009
44%
Directed by Karyn Kusama
Written by Diablo Cody
Starring Megan Fox, Amanda Seyfried, Adam Brody
Synopsis
Jennifer is a pretty cheerleader, and Needy is an introverted nerd, but they’re high school best buds whose childhood friendship is on its last legs. When Jennifer becomes possessed by a demon hungry for boy flesh, shy Needy must step up and battle for both the girls’ souls.
Why We Love It
This groundbreaking film was so revolutionary that critics weren’t yet clued in to how slyly subversive director Karyn Kusama and writer Diablo Cody were being. Instead, they assumed the filmmakers’ divergence from—or awkward embrace of—horror tropes was merely accidental. Kusama’s foray into big-budget Hollywood filmmaking had already been sabotaged when final approval over her sci-fi action film Aeon Flux was taken from her before the direction-less picture eventually flopped. Jennifer’s Body was going to be her comeback, and Cody—having attained power seemingly overnight with her breakout hit Juno—hand-selected Kusama to helm the film. Unfortunately, Jennifer’s Body was born into a world that was not yet enlightened to mainstream feminism, and its marketing was an embarrassment.
In interviews, Kusama explained that the marketing team wanted Megan Fox to do video interviews with sex workers to promote the film, despite the fact that her character is an underage teen and the movie has nothing to do with sex work. The final posters depict Fox clad in a sexy skirt and heels, lounging alluringly on a school desk, and while Fox is indeed a sexual being in the film, she also plays her character naïve, hopeful, hilarious, and vulnerable. Message boards lit up with disappointment when they realized Fox wasn’t making a porno but an astute satire of high school femininity and horror villains. And some critics savaged her performance. Michael Phillips, writing for the Chicago Tribune, said, “in the middle of [the film] is a thinly conceived antagonist played by Megan Fox. Honestly, she’s a pretty bad actress. She doesn’t seem to get Cody’s sense of humor. At all.”
Respectfully, we disagree. To make it even worse for those who expected Fox to just sit and look pretty, she delivers an excellent, layered, comic performance—still her best yet.
The problem with this film is that people didn’t want it to succeed and certainly didn’t want Fox to succeed as a comic actress, forcing people to treat her with respect rather than as the easy butt of a Transformers joke (Fox has since spoken out about the pure meanness people threw at her at the time). Some genre fans wanted their negative opinions of Kusama and women directors confirmed, and Cody, who’d gotten so big so quickly, was an outsider woman with a little too much power for some people’s comfort. Jennifer’s Body has now become horror canon, having gifted a memorable and realistic depiction of relationships between girls and proven that high school is, indeed, hell.