Review: Jennifer's Body (2009)

Jennifer's Body (2009)

Rated R for sexuality, bloody violence, language and brief drug use (unrated version reviewed)

Score: 4 out of 5

At this stage, pointing out that critics and moviegoers in 2009 were completely wrong about Jennifer's Body is about as much of a hot take as saying that they were completely wrong about The Thing back in 1982. The story of how 20th Century Fox's short-lived youth-focused genre label Fox Atomic screwed over this movie's marketing because they had no idea what to do with it, and how their strategy of selling a very queer, very feminist horror-comedy as trashy softcore erotica aimed at the Spike TV fratbro set (as seen with the poster above) predictably backfired, is a long and sordid one that doesn't bear much repeating at this point. It's a movie that bombed badly when it came out and did lasting damage to the careers of both its lead actress Megan Fox and its screenwriter Diablo Cody, but went on to build its reputation on home video and streaming such that it's now talked about as one of the greatest horror movies of its time, and one of the greatest teen horror movies ever made. Lisa Frankenstein, a new horror-comedy written by Cody that comes out next month, is currently being explicitly marketed as "from Diablo Cody, acclaimed writer of Jennifer's Body," whereas if it had been made ten years ago, the trailers would not have even dared to mention her name.

I was one of the people who did see it when it came out, and even back then, I recall enjoying it and wondering why so much hatred was being hurled at a movie that was, at worst, pretty decent. Watching it again now, in 2024? It's a movie that it feels like it predicted every anxiety of young Americans, and especially teenage girls and young women, in the fifteen years to come, an incredibly smart, dark, gothic, stylish, and twisted movie whose comedic streak does little to take away from its scares and which is buoyed by a standout performance from Amanda Seyfried. Yes, it has its flaws. The jokes about Cody's too-cool-for-school dialogue at times becoming downright cringeworthy have been long since run into the ground (even if I think the problem is a bit overstated), and Fox was always a fairly limited actress even if this movie plays to her strengths. But on the whole, its problems, while real, are minor and not debilitating, and I had a blast watching it as both a straightforward teen fright flick and as a movie with more on its mind.

The plot is broadly similar to Ginger Snaps, a film with which this makes a great double feature, on a bigger Hollywood budget. Two teenage girls, Jennifer Check and Anita "Needy" Lesnicki, in the small podunk town of Devil's Kettle, Minnesota have been best friends since childhood, but while Jennifer has grown up into a beautiful cheerleader and the most popular girl in school, Needy has grown up into a dorky outsider who it seems is only still friends with Jennifer because they've always been friends (and perhaps... something more). One night, while heading down to a local bar to see an emo band called Low Shoulder, a fire breaks out and kills scores of people, with Needy and Jennifer escaping and Jennifer accepting an offer from the band to head home in their totally sweet, not-at-all-creepy van. Later that night, Jennifer comes to Needy's house looking like a bloody mess, eating rotisserie chicken straight out of her fridge, vomiting up black bile, and attacking her... only for her to suddenly come to school the next day looking no worse for wear and, if anything, both more beautiful than ever and an even bigger asshole than she was before. Needy suspects that something is up, and as it turns out, she's right: that night after the concert fire, Low Shoulder took the classic route to rock & roll superstardom and sacrificed Jennifer to Satan. Unfortunately, their victim wasn't a virgin like they believed she was, and so Jennifer came back from the dead possessed by a succubus who seduces her male classmates before eating them.

Both then and now, most of the discourse around this film has concerned its literal poster girl, Megan Fox. Having seen her in quite a few movies over the years, I've come to have a mixed opinion of Fox's acting. Hollywood did do her dirty for bluntly calling out the problems she encountered working in the film industry as an "it girl", but at the same time, she doesn't have much range, and even without the backlash, her career trajectory likely would've been less Margot Robbie or Scarlett Johansson than Jessica Alba (minus the business career that made her far more money than she ever did as an actress) or Bo Derek: a sex symbol whose roles would've slowly but surely dried up once she turned 30. However, while she is a fairly limited instrument as an actor, she isn't wholly untalented, and this film makes the absolute best use of those talents. It doesn't really ask much of her except to play a villainous version of her stock screen persona, a gorgeous, kinda haughty young woman who uses her body to get ahead in (un)life, and occasionally mug for the camera, and she absolutely nails it. Jennifer is a creative twist on the standard possession movie plot, one where the demonic shift in the possession victim's personality manifests in the form of her turning into a grotesque caricature of a high school "queen bee" like Regina George in Mean Girls, an utter shitheel who laughs at the suffering of her classmates even as they grieve the deaths of their friends. She may literally eat teenage boys alive, but the actions of hers that best reveal the depths of her monstrosity are those that feel all too human. Fox owns the part and makes it her own, such that I'm not surprised at how many of her scenes in this have been immortalized as gifs on Tumblr and clips on TikTok.

And it was watching the effects of that monstrosity flow through the lives of the people who knew Jennifer's victims that something clicked. One of the big things that retrospective analyses of this movie have focused on is its treatment of rape culture, especially as represented in Nikolai Wolf, the frontman of Low Shoulder. But watching the film again in 2024, I noticed something else. It's the feeling of helplessness that slowly but surely comes over the school, with everybody growing numb and fatigued to tragedy as the "cannibal serial killer" claims more victims right on the heels of the massive concert disaster while the adults are unable to stop any of it -- everyone, that is, except the one who treats it as one big joke and relishes in it like a troll. This may have been a movie made in 2009 about children of the 2000s, but even with its extremely MySpace-era emo aesthetics, it felt like a movie about children of the 2010s raised in a world of rampant mass shootings, religious extremism, resurgent bigotry, raging sexism, shrinking economic opportunity, and countless other social ills while nobody seemed to know how to fix it. Jennifer may be an iconic, catty, and sexy villain who gets many (though not all) of the best lines and scenes, but if you ask me, it's Needy, the one who finally says "no" and resolves to do what nobody else will no matter what it costs her, who's the reason this movie endures. Watching her fight Jennifer was like watching somebody throw down with every wiseass troll who thinks that school shootings, beheading videos, and tiki torch rallies are awesome as their sick way of telling the world that it's "cringe" to care about anything. Yes, it's clear watching this that Cody doesn't really know how teenagers speak, but she managed to capture how they think remarkably well.

When it came to Needy, this movie needed a world-class actress, and fortunately, it found one in Amanda Seyfried. The film practically acknowledges the ridiculousness of trying to frame her as "unattractive", but she manages to pull it off anyway. Watching the intro flashing forward to her locked up in a psychiatric hospital (letting us know early on that this is not going to end well), then jumping back to two months prior when we see her as a meek, bespectacled nerd looking longingly at a still-living Jennifer during a pep rally to the point that one of her classmates thinks she's a closeted lesbian (which, as we later see, may very well be the case), it's hard to believe that they're the same person, but Seyfried manages to make Needy's transformation from a cute girl next door who looks awkward in "alternative" clothes when heading to the concert to a hardened, shell-shocked survivor feel genuine. With Jennifer serving mainly as a monster and a symbol more than a character after she dies and comes back, it's largely on Needy to carry the film's emotional core, her heartbreak at watching one of her closest friendships turn toxic, and I bought every minute of it. This, as much as Mamma Mia!, was the movie that should've indicated that Seyfried was going places as a gifted and genuinely fearless actress, and I'm not surprised that her career would ultimately outlast the hype she first received in her youth.

Most of this film's comedy comes from its supporting cast, a who's who of both contemporary teen stars and older comedy actors. J. K. Simmons plays the science teacher Mr. Wroblewski about as far from his iconic J. Jonah Jameson performance as he can but still managed to make his dry, stern authority figure amusing. The clique of goth kids led by Kyle Gallner's Colin is a hilarious parody of the "edgy" youth counterculture of the era, a group of kids whose obsession with the aesthetics of death and misery seemingly makes them better suited than anyone else to live in the hostile world Jennifer creates with her murders, only for it to create some serious blind spots not just in their interactions with Jennifer but also in their sense of good taste. In the unrated cut that I watched, Bill Fagerbakke steals the show playing the father of one of Jennifer's victims, utterly devouring the one scene he's in where he mourns his son's death and swears vengeance on his killer in one of the most creatively graphic ways I've ever heard -- all while using the same voice he uses when playing Patrick Star on SpongeBob SquarePants. Johnny Simmons (no relation to J. K.) makes for a likable romantic partner to Needy as her boyfriend Chip, enough to make up for a fairly underwritten part, less like a character and more like a gender-flipped version of the stock "girlfriend" characters you see in movies with male heroes. Chip and Needy get what may just be the cutest and most awkward sex scene I've ever watched, one where neither of them really knows what they're doing but each of them wants to make sure that the other is having as much fun doing it as they are. There's definitely a sense of idealization in his character, like Cody was writing the kind of boyfriend she wished she had in high school.

Finally, we come to Adam Brody as Nikolai, the film's secondary villain and the man responsible for everything that goes wrong. In hindsight, the idea of a sappy emo musician who, behind the scenes, is as much a depraved rock star as any classic metal god, which originally came off as a joke, is one that turned out to be shockingly prescient of what a lot of Warped Tour emo, pop-punk, and scene bands were actually like behind the scenes. Not only do he and his band kill Jennifer after they're initially presented as "merely" rapists (and even after, the metaphors aren't exactly subtle), he ruthlessly exploits the aftermath of the concert fire to ever-greater heights of fame and fortune, implicitly the work of the Devil holding up his end of the bargain, all while casually insulting the town where it happened and, by extension, the memories of the victims. Low Shoulder's hit song "Through the Trees" is heard throughout the film to the point where it feels like it's taunting Needy, the one person who knows the truth about their "heroism" during the fire, how they in fact left dozens of people to die instead of trying to save them and how it's implied that the fire was, in fact, their fault (whether it was negligence or malice, it's never stated). Jennifer may have been evil, but the things that had been done to her to turn her into a monster made her a tragic villain nonetheless. I felt no such pity for Nikolai, with Brody playing him as a swaggering and spiteful bastard who I wanted to see suffer.

Karyn Kusama's direction, when paired with the visual design and the 2000s aesthetics dripping off this film, gives it a tone that I could perhaps best describe as gothic. Not just in the fashion sense of certain characters, but also in the heightened, old-school approach it takes to staging many of its scenes. It felt like she had been very informed by classic horror in a manner almost akin to Tim Burton at times, albeit with his brand of whimsy swapped out for black comedy. This is an incredibly moody film even in its funnier moments, serving to underline the grim nature of a lot of the humor here and lend it a dark edge. It feels sexy without feeling sleazy, perhaps best evidenced by the famous lesbian kiss scene, which puts the focus squarely on the characters' faces and plays the situation as something disturbing. Yes, you're watching Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried passionately making out for a good solid minute or so, but you're also watching Jennifer manipulate Needy and exploit the feelings she has for her in order to torment her that much further. At every step of the way, this is a film that knows what it's doing, and it does it well.

The Bottom Line

It does have its minor annoyances, but this is still a movie that deserved the reevaluation it's received, and one that stands the test of time as a classic of teen horror, queer horror, and feminist horror even if its fashions and soundtrack are carbon-dated to 2009.