This essay stems from a reluctant affection for the 2009 Megan Fox extravaganza, Jennifer’s Body. Throughout much of my adolescence, I concealed my admiration for this film from the men in my life—boyfriends, friends, and male shopkeepers alike. I was always perplexed that those around me widely despised the film, and I was even more astonished when, in my early twenties, I realised it had become a cult classic, highly cherished by the gay womxn in my circle. I had thought I was the only one. The film sparked within me a bisexual emo yearning for a style of Americanised sapphic suburban horror that felt entirely alien to my rural Scottish surroundings. It perfectly encapsulated the quintessential gothic motifs of the recession following the 2008 financial crash, while the imagery and sound saturated the teenage realms of the internet and pop culture. Upon re-examination, I regarded the film as an ideal period piece, revealing something significant about feminine queerness and agency, which inspired me to write and explore.
I slide the DVD over the counter to the pubescent shop assistant. He looks down at the cover through unwashed, mouse-brown hair strings. A look of smugness unfurls across his would-be moustache.
“Have you seen this though?” he emphasises the verb, incredulous.
The shop assistant doesn’t address the question to me, instead past my right shoulder to my high school boyfriend, Austin. He clutches his second-hand copy of Half-Life, just purchased, and makes a noncommittal series of noises that sound something like, “Yeah, I know honestly…it’s well shit, I don’t know why she wants it…but she wants it, I guess…”, which trail off as he shrugs. Only then does the cashier look at me, still nodding in agreement with Austin’s statement.
“So, you seriously want this?” he laughs, the smile not extending to his eyes.
I don’t remember what I said next—perhaps a string of half-hearted rebuttals or just a hollow laugh to get the transaction over with. My face feels hot, and I don’t want to look at the cashier or Austin. I heap a handful of change onto the counter and stuff Jennifer’s Body into my backpack as the cashier begins a sentence that starts, “Well, Megan Fox is fucking hot, I guess, but…” Whatever he said it made Austin laugh and now we’re walking out of CEX and into Poundland next door. Making eye contact with discount soap powder, I am uncomfortable, and I don’t know why. I feel like I should be embarrassed, and I don’t know why.
CeX was a product of the recession, a shop in which you could sell CDs, DVDs, videogames, consoles, and electronics for cash or store credit. They then re-sold people’s discarded media for a severely discounted price. When city streets and shopping centres began to look more like art installations of plywood and whitewash, one could be sure that a CeX would be the only thing open. It was a treasure trove for media-hungry youth before the advent of streaming services. With a fiver, I could get 4 DVDs, maybe a CD too if I caught a BOGO sale. The less desirable the media, the cheaper the price tag. The 2009 teen horror comedy Jennifer’s Body was £1.50, on the lowest shelf. There were at least ten copies hastily rammed back-to-back. It was only a few years old at this point and was already disregarded as a trashy piece of shallow, try-hard shit.
***
The shot opens with a tyre swing outside a modestly large wooden house; the ghostly breath in the background is almost as unsettling as the over-enthusiastic noises of the workout tape playing tinnily from the TV. Whispers of green light dance on the misty credits at the bottom of the frame. A headless body picks at a scab on their arm. Our perspective searches the room. Jennifer enters the shot, placing a strand of hair between chapped lips, flashing stained teeth, languishingly on her white four-poster bed. Leg warmers up to her knees, tiny sports shorts, pale-faced and splotchy. She writes briefly in a diary, ignoring the elliptical demonstration now
shining from the television. From the corner of our gaze, Needy appears a phantom in the window and disappears just as quickly. The window rattles as the frame gets closer to Jennifer’s drawn face, thick red eye bags, plump, dry lips parted slightly. Children’s laughter filters in. The narrator opens:
“Hell is a teenage girl”.
***
Jennifer’s Body is my favourite horror movie. The plot follows the titular Jennifer (Megan Fox), the hot girl in school that everyone wants to be or wants to fuck, and Needy (Amanda Seyfried), the nerdy, quiet friend, and their very close friendship. Strange things start to happen when the small Minnesota farming town of Devil’s Kettle is hit with a tragedy. Melody Lane, a local dive bar, shines as it burns to the ground while an indie band called Lowshoulder play to the largely unenthused crowd, scattered by the chaos. Jennifer and Needy, having snuck out to the bar in typical small-town teen movie fashion, are split up by Lowshoulder, the lead singer insisting Jennifer come with them to escape the carnage. We later find out that Lowshoulder sacrifices Jennifer for fortune and fame, picking her, assuming she’s a virginal sacrifice. Unbeknownst to Lowshoulder, the audience is privy to the fact that she’s “not even a backdoor virgin anymore” after an interaction with a police cadet and a bag of frozen peas. The sacrifice backfires, and she returns as a demon hungry for the flesh of man. Or the flesh of men specifically. As local boys begin to be found animalistically slaughtered Needy tries to stop
Jennifer’s bloodlust before her golden retriever of a boyfriend, Chip, can be sucked into Jennifer’s jaws.
***
The water shines ribbons across the walls, waxy lagoon green. The coral reef mural on the abandoned swimming pool walls is thick with algae.
“I thought you only murdered boys”, Needy chokes out, backing away from Jennifer. Her eyes are huge in her face, streaked with dirt and miscellaneous goop. The pink prom dress made of fuchsia fondant is ripped and has fallen off her left shoulder. A gold heart with ‘BFFs’ engraved on it, catches light between her breasts.
Jennifer cocks her head and curls her smile.
“I go both ways.” She smirks, lunging forward.
Chip appears wielding a rusty pool rake, driving it deep past the white lace bodice into Jennifer’s heart. Blood pools crimson as Jennifer croaks out,
“Do you have a tampon?”
This was a very different kind of “horror” than that which graced the screens of the time. Campy, comedic, satirical, and feminine, Jennifer’s Body stood out against a backdrop of haunted house movies (Paranormal Activity), slashers with sex appeal (Sorority Row), and “comedy horrors” that largely revolve around a sad man finding a girl he likes against a background of carnage; Zombieland, Lesbian Vampire Killers etc. The mood was low, like the economy (only in the first dip of the triple dip recession at the time, so blissfully unaware); the post-9/11 public wanted gore and lots of it. Saw was on its 5th sequel already, and those who couldn’t stomach corn syrup blood were enraptured by the cartoon violence of Michael Bay’s machismo oeuvre. The Dark Knight and the Transformers took over the zeitgeist, with pyro effects, mecha robots, and men doing things with deep voices and determination. The general mood of the pop culture of the mid-2000s was masculine. There were set gender demarcations; action and horror were male, comedy was male. Romcom, or anything with a female lead, was female. Women, especially beautiful women, were secondary characters. And then there was Jennifer’s Body. I was captivated; my first year of high school spent pouring over the trailers and Wikipedia pages with no way to see the actual film. Too young for an 18+ movie, not yet internet savvy enough to pirate it. Tracing Fox’s legs over the poster like an eye exam was so appealing. The saturated colour, cool soundtrack with the Panic! At the Disco tie-in music video, the outfits, which ranged from 2000s grunge to emo, what would now be called a predecessor for Y2K and bimbocore, to the odd earth tone layers and skinny scarves that haunted the decade. I wanted to relish in the world, the paranormal American high school mystery fantasy! Yet I had no purchasing power, and looking at Megan Fox made me feel a special kind of uncomfortable in the bottom of my gut.
Written by Diablo Cody after her Juno success and directed by acclaimed director Karyn Kusama and starring two of the hottest women in Hollywood, Jennifer’s Body was different. Hot off the wheels of the success of the Transformers movie, Megan Fox was the It Girl of the mid-2000s and it had not escaped my attention or the attention of film producers. Written and directed by women, with only one male protagonist, it seems like an odd move, in retrospect, that 20th Century Fox tried to market this camp fest towards teen boys, with a sexy pin-up style promo poster with Megan Fox tantalisingly draping her legs over a school desk, and a trailer with long lingering shots of her lips on Amanda Seyfried’s. Unfortunately, the target audience was the target of violence in the film, something white, straight, teenage boys are not that used to, especially in the horror genre.
These men, regardless of categorisation are all self-serving to their own detriment, even, Chip, the rational one, is not immune. The horror and comedy of Jennifer’s Body come from the inversion of everything women are taught to fear from men. After she’s sacrificed (an act of male aggression and greed), Jennifer becomes the aggressor of the gender that used and abused her. Using a creepily sapphic kind of psychic homing, Jennifer stumbles bloody and broken to Needy’s house, “I woke up and found my way back to you”. After vomiting blood and black spiky bile, a blood-soaked Megan Fox presses soft, plump lips into the skin of Needy’s neck, whispering “are you scared?” with all the sexual tension of a first-time hook-up. Later we find out that Jennifer
just wanted to be near Needy in an animalistic sense, the only human thing left in her after the sacrifice. On the way to Needy’s we later learn that Jennifer kills her first boy; Ahmet, by approaching him on a dark country road from behind, lulling him into a false sense of security through her womanly wiles and female harmlessness, before murdering him brutally. This is the first instance where we start to see the traditional female warning of “don’t walk alone at night”, and “don’t trust someone you don’t know”, and “take pepper spray” start to become legitimate concerns for the men of this film.
***
“I’m in my underwear Mom!” Chip shouts in response to a terse knock at his door, he stops flexing in front of his mirror, flanked with band posters and a small plastic skeleton and wraps a sad grey bathrobe around himself. Mom appears in an embroidered cardigan with pearls.
“I need to give you something.” She says. She gestures at him with a white cylinder covered in violent pink swirls, “PINK PANIC” emblazoned on the front.
“Ladies pepper spray?” Chip asks in reproach.
“there’s obviously a sicko out there who likes boys.”
“Mom, I can take care of myself, I’ve been using the Bowflex”, he responds, gesturing with a thin arm to the exercise equipment piled up in front of garish 70s yellow and brown wallpaper.
His mum looks at him, unimpressed, “Did you hear what Colin Gray looked like when they found him?”
A pause.
“Lasagna with teeth?” He responds begrudgingly.
“Oh, you heard.” Mom replies stoically, holding the pepper spray can out with renewed seriousness.
***
The feminine gaze is compounded in this film through aestheticism and pure camp ridiculousness. Firstly, the aesthetic. The set-dressing is immaculate; the four-poster bed with Fall Out Boy looking over the proceedings from a poster. Chip’s room has all the trappings of a 2000s “not like other boys” boy: band posters everywhere and what seems to be a unicycle leaning against the far wall, which reminds me of every male friend I had in high school and many of the men I dated later. The Americana of Melody Lane, with its jukebox and sticker toilet, burned to the ground. The larger aesthetic; the long shots of Jennifer swimming in a secluded lake like a siren, dipping in and out of glassy green-black, ghostly white and slick like a seal. The contrast of her pink nail polish and lip gloss lips against her pale face and slicked back hair, makeup still perfectly in place despite her impromptu dip. The way the gloss sat on the edge of her lips hit the soft forest light; I wanted to know if it tasted like cherry or strawberry. And the outfits. Goddamn. Needy is the quintessential mid-2000s plain girl. She rakes back her hair, her eyes are hidden through outdated glasses that look like they came from the NHS, and she layers excessively. Jennifer has a dazzling collection of outfits that would not have gone amiss on any girl group of the time, she could swap clothes with Regina George no trouble. The classic look she dies in, the white puffer coat, the tiny denim belt-skirt, with an actual belt that says LOVE in silver letters above her crotch, the red fishnet tights and the tiny t-shirt. The half-zipped-up red velvet cropped hoodie with little pink hearts on it. The half-zipped-up zip-up stripy top, the short denim skirt with butterflies on the ass.
But the camp, oh god the camp. Everything from the red, white and blue 9/11 tribute shooters that “turn brown” if you don’t drink them fast enough to the lurid couture, they all wear to the school dance (i.e. the final showdown). Jennifer floats over the murky green water of the abandoned pool in a white satiny number with long white opera gloves, while Needy takes the cake in a magenta meringue-looking gown with puff sleeves up to her ears, a very pink drag tribute to Princess Di. The pair of them fight, covered in blood and slime, over a boy in a bow tie. Complete nonsense. Everything about this film from the kind of outfits worn during extreme violence to the hyperbolic one-liners, is over-the-top, caricature. Susan Sontag asserts in Notes on Camp that, “camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a “lamp”; not a woman, but a “woman”. To perceive camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-role”. If we take this to the furthest reaches, all life becomes some form of performance or theatrical aesthetic. Jennifer is “girl”, the hyperbolic femme fatale, the hyper-feminine ultra-performance of dangerous femininity. All the boys become “boys”, the quintessential baseline of masculine urge and interest.
***
The forest is quiet as Jennifer kisses Jonas. His large lips bump ungracefully into her baby-pink kiss. Jonas starts, jumping away from Jennifer to gesture to a wide array of forest animals that have made their way to the vicinity. A deer cocks its head in their direction, a racoon scampers, a fox prepares to pounce. He has a look of pure incredulity while she surveys him as if he were a fish in a tank.
“They’re waiting,” she announces, unzipping her top to reveal her BFF necklace and creamy cleavage. She rips his football jersey off in one fell swoop. Working her hand down to undo his jeans, we are left to presume from his ecstatic expression that she holds him in her hand. She asks seductively, “Do you miss Craig?” his late friend, a victim of Melody Lane.
” Of course,” he responds, confused, taken aback.
She smiles like an alligator, still holding him in her hand “Well, you’re gonna see your buddy really soon.”
“What, you mean like in heaven someday?” he groggily strings the sentence together.
“Nope”. She slams him hard into a tree so hard his bones crunch.
Jennifer roars inhumanly, the sides of her cheeks splitting like torn fabric as her jaw descends past her shoulders.
***
The men are weak and bumbling, with friendships based on seemingly no more than convenience or clout. After the fiery death of Craig the football player in the collapse of the bar, Jennifer is able to lure another meathead jock, Jonas, previously distraught by his friend’s death to his death in the forest. She weaponises her beauty and the power bestowed on her by male desire to lure him in. Telling this boy that his late friend thought he and Jennifer “would make a totally banging couple” is enough to break through this man’s feeble emotional boundaries. He is overcome by the validation that Jennifer wants him and more so by the fact that other men would theoretically want to be in his place, including his dead friend, now seemingly in the back of his mind. Even when Chip, is eventually in Jennifer’s sights (how lesbian is it to want to date the man your best friend loves, just for her attention), despite his steadfast loyalty to Needy, his seemingly unbreakable resolve and imperviousness to the vapid social hierarchies around him, for a minute he is overcome by the fact that Jennifer wants him, and they share a kiss. Notably, he is hunted down in a dark park, at night, walking alone. The cultural clout of being with the woman all the other men want is just too powerful for these weak-willed men.
***
As the spring formal dance begins to rage, Needy stares at the floor in a shock of pink, like an 80s fashion model with power blue eyeshadow streakily on her lids.
Chip walks alone through the park. A dog’s bark turns to a sharp yelp in the background as Chip passes from the isolating beam of one lamp post to another. His scarf, bow tie, pique shirt and boutonniere, give the impression of an adolescent Tom Baker dressed up for a fancy occasion. The wind seems to whisper his name as a specter in white appears behind him. He looks back.
Looking ahead again, Jennifer appears directly in front of him, a white tule wrapped around her shoulders.
“Didn’t you hear me calling your name?” Jennifer gazes at him.
“Uhh you weren’t calling my name.” His eyes widen, black as the night that envelopes them.
***
Highschool sucks. The social politics, the burgeoning, pubescent sexuality, the small pool of people. High school sucks even more in a tiny town isolated by agrarian necessity. I grew up in a very small town similar to Devil’s Kettle in the sense that its main function was farming, everyone knew everybody, sports and drinking are king. Illicit relationships and anyone outside the norm are demonised and ostracised, and female sexuality is to be shamed and feared in equal measure. The only thing more taboo than being different is being queer. One of my first acts of queer rebellion was to put up a second-hand poster of Megan Fox, that one Rolling Stone cover where she’s in the black pleather bathing suit, on my wall. I knew I liked women and men and most other people from an early age. Bisexuality thrives on deniability, though, especially in the mid-2000s; it’s either a cover for being “really gay” or it’s a kind of for-men sexual performance, kissing girls at parties for male attention, etc. One of the ways queerness lives in you is a deep and profound “appreciation” for your close friends. Feeling chosen by a particularly popular friend, growing up with someone, playing house with them until you’re old enough to drink together in a dive bar. Awkward fumbling sometimes happens under the guise of experimentation, and hearts beat faster against sports bras. Lips flush with anticipation. The way Needy looks at Jennifer, needs Jennifer’s attention, follows her every move and whim. When a girl oozes sexuality as Jennifer does, it can be hard to reconcile appreciation from attraction. You want to be near her, feel the social benefits of being around her, even if other people can’t appreciate why she’d want to be friends with “someone like you”.
***
“Colin’s really nice,” Needy interjects after his failed date proposal to Jennifer.
“He’s into maggot rock and wears nail polish, my dick is bigger than his is.” Jennifer spits as they walk between the walls of lockers, clutching binders and books.
“Well, I think he’s really cool.” Needy responds.
“You do?” says Jennifer with an inquisitorial streak. She stops and peers at Needy like a particularly sumptuous piece of steak. She looks ravenous.
“Yeah,” Jennifer makes eye contact with Needy’s lips. Her head snaps behind her.
“Wait! Colin!” Jennifer calls after him.
Colin spins on his heel, facing them with trepidation. His black and red striped scarf falls to his knees, where a bandana and chains clatter harmoniously around his legs. Dog tags jingling, wrist bands stacked, kohl-lined eyes wide with expectation.
***
The best example of the male folly of Jennifer’s Body is my beloved Colin. The quintessential emo boy, with long dark hair, piercings, eyeliner, and too many accessories, Colin is seen earlier in the film to be interested in Needy. They discuss their interest in literature together, and they seem to not only have shared interests but a genuine connection (highly resented by Chip, who asks, “Doesn’t he hang around with the dead girls?”). However, even this bastion of small-town counterculture, instead of pursuing the girl he can have a conversation with, he instead asks out Jennifer. No men are immune to the desire to see and be seen with Jennifer. She acquiesces, for she’s hungry. Aside from being too close to comfort for someone who grew up with “alternative” boys who only ever wanted to date the “popular girls”, it shows that this desire and fallacy ultimately get men killed. An extension to this is that no man has the wherewithal to stop Jennifer. They cannot fend her off or defeat her; they are only prey. Only Needy can kill her. Seems pretty gay to me.
This concept of using fear and desire against men was unheard of, especially in mainstream film distribution. Some reviews compare it to the 2007 horror Teeth wherein a young woman discovers she has teeth in her vagina and utilises this physical abnormality to bring down her rapists. Others still want to make comparisons to the rape-revenge thriller I Spit on Your Grave, where a woman systematically kills her rapists. I think it’s ironic that both these films are praised by men. In both films, the rapists actually do rape the protagonists, and therefore, the audience can bask in a self-righteous morality throughout the incurring carnage. In Jennifer’s Body, the men never get to defile Jennifer before she kills them; the offering of sex is just the ruse by which she can separate and kill these boys. The men in Jennifer’s Body are, instead, victims of their own short-sightedness, masculinised socialisation, and their own weakness or choices. And yet, I think they still seem to deserve what they get because they cannot comprehend Jennifer as a threat. And frankly, I don’t think the male viewer/reviewer in 2009 could deal with that.
The boy’s deaths are meaningless, to sustain Jennifer, just aesthetics for the film. Women’s bodies have been used and abused in the mainstream horror movie for generations; It’s the reason horror movies are sexy; the reason Marion Crane gets murdered in the shower, the reason Ripley fights the Alien in a vest and pants, the reason women have to get raped in a horror movie to justify their murder of men. Jennifer’s Body, the title alone points to the idea that it is the physicality of Jennifer that is the object and subject of the film, and while the men of Lowshoulder abuse her, she never seeks to kill them in a revenge fantasy, it is Needy who kills them (again, killing the men who turned your bestie into a demon smarts of saphicary). Jennifer’s body is the downfall of the men; it’s simply too much for them, and now they are consumed by it, in service to it. Even the men who sacrificed Jennifer don’t get what they want, for she was never the virgin they took her to be. One of the stand-out bits of dialogue in the film, “I’m not killing people, I’m killing boys”, is the kind of feminine joke that makes girls and gays squeal with delight and makes straight cis men irate. Maybe this was one of the first mainstream movies that actually made jokes about men’s personhood, in the vein that women are completely and utterly desensitised to.
***
Jennifer perches on Needy’s bed, wearing her Evil Dead shirt, white socks and small blue boxer shorts with stars. Making large bedroom-eyes she says,
“Come on Needy, let me stay the night! We can play boyfriend-girlfriend like we used to”.
Needy turns away to face the door, hands on hips, unimpressed. Jennifer’s gaze falters, and a sadness comes across her face before she swings her legs around the bed to put on her jeans. “See you at school.” She jumps out the second-story window, vanishing into the night.
***
The first time I realised I was in love with my best friend was during “massages”. She says, “My back hurts”, or maybe she said, “Let’s give each other massages”. In a room in her grandmother’s Bed and Breakfast, she was shirtless, wearing only a garish leopard print bra from Primark, lying face down on the starch-white bed sheets. I run the lotion over my hands, smaller than hers. I am only 13. She’s 15 and cooler than me. She smokes cigarettes sometimes, dyes her hair, and, crucially, has breasts big enough for a bra. I am actually quite good at massages. I’ve had her and many people since remark on that, and when she tells me, I glow inside and press on. With an air of nonchalance, I say, “You should take your bra off so I can get your back and sides more effectively”. She takes the bra off, still lying face down. I try to look at the tartan carpet, why is there always tartan carpet in BnBs. I work the shoulders, like malleable marble and we talk about something my brain didn’t think was important enough to remember. I say, “you should turn over”, and inexplicably she does, bra perched precariously on top of her chest, which she steadies with two firm hands. “You can just take it off”, I hear myself say. I don’t think I fully understand what that means but it comes tumbling out. She laughs. Oh god why did she have to laugh. She makes a noise of disgust and says, “But then you’d see my nipples”. “So…I don’t care”, I say, again, my words falling out faster than I can form them. “But I do!” She says with much more resolve and reaffirms her grip on her breasts. I am mortified, only just realizing the gravity of what I said. I keep going with the shoulder massage. I don’t remember anything else about that day, just her on her front, undoing her leopard print bra. It took me years to realise I was in love with her. We were just really close. Super close. Best friends.
***
Sitting in the high school cafeteria, Needy wears a homemade beanie that flattens her hair. Chip looks intently at her as the school’s football trophies are displayed in the background. Needy takes a deep breath:
“Jennifer’s evil.” She states plainly.
“I know.” Says Chips with the look of someone who has just been told water is wet.
“No, I mean she’s actually evil. Not high school evil. I’ve been through the occult section at the library five times.”
“Our library has an occult section?”
“It’s small.”
***
Upon harbouring a desperate secret love for this film for years from my early teens, when the option came to watch this again with peers; women and queer people of my age, my good friends, the power of demographic came into sharp relief. Crammed onto a small sofa like a lesbian homage to the Friends intro, we watched, rapturously. The target demographic was not considered a viable demographic for commercial or artistic success or prowess in 2009, that demographic being colloquially, the girls and the gays. It seems no wonder to me that this film is now considered a “cult classic”, which generally means, “it has been well loved for years but the commercial and mainstream capital wasn’t enough”, in the decade and more since its release, the viability of mainstream queer cinema has seen an uptake. Here it is important to note another excerpt from Sontag’s Notes on Camp, “time liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to the Camp sensibility . . . Another effect: time contracts the sphere of banality. (Banality is, strictly speaking, always a category of the contemporary.) What was banal can, with the passage of time, become fantastic.” This idea of banality turning into the fantastic could see the increased popularity of Jennifers’ Body as a symptom of its campness, it just needed time and perspective to come to the correct audience to appreciate the sheer ridiculousness of it all.
I think the biggest commercial failing of Jennifer’s Body was that nobody accounted for the feminine gaze. Looking at this like a “typical” (here, read as “masculine” cis-het) horror movie, one understands why the likes of the Irish Times called the screenwriting “lazy” and claims the film has “no concern for the accumulation of tension”. SF Gate proclaims there to be “not a single scare” in the whole film, alluding to the failure of the film to perform critically as a “horror movie”. However, I don’t think any middle-aged male reviewer understands the insane tension that can be created by two queer womxn, completely unable to make a move. The longing glances, fluttering lashes, softly placed hands. Aside from that, this seems a ridiculous medium of measurement however, many scenes utilize the tension-building of any typical horror movie. The noises in the dark, the home-alone teenager who has to go adventuring in her house to find a horrific monstrosity in her kitchen, the creeping sensation of going into abandoned places, how it feels to be snuck up on in the dark, how it feels to be taken advantage of. I also think that if we narrow horror down to “scares”, something about the cerebral effect and personal perspective on the films is lost. A jump scare is scary in the moment, sure, but something that eats at you, something that sits in the dark, will scare you long after the jump scare has passed.
***
There is something essentially mid-2000s about Jennifer’s Body. From the CeX I bought my DVD in, to the tone of the film itself, I would posit that this is the best example I can find of post-recession Gothic. If gothic is the aesthetic of decayed and ruined abundance, then that existed in droves post-2008. The dot com bubble had burst, we were deep in a forever war, and 9/11 and terrorism pervaded Western anxieties. Previously bustling town centres were dying in the wake of online shopping and the cost of living. The housing market was non-existent. People were angry and distrustful. We walked around towns and cities, straining to hold onto an assemblance of cosmopolitanism in the face of pawnbrokers, CASH4GOLD adverts, deadstock shops, and bookmakers. Where I grew up, there were no jobs, and the ones left were hard, physical labour. In many ways the fictional setting of the film, Devil’s Kettle, a fictional agricultural town in middle America, was the perfect “everytown” stand-in of the time. Needy’s mum works multiple jobs, only appearing briefly, as does Jennifer’s. The most mid-decade Gothic scene of them all comes with Colin, the Emo boy’s, death. We follow Colin as he listens to a bad punk cover of “I can see clearly now”, and drives into a bizarre landscape of abandoned, half-finished new builds. These homes, clearly needed and financially viable at one point, have been erected like doll houses on the edge of town, a symbol of development and prosperity. These have since been abandoned, mid-construction, the money ran out, the interest dried up, and the prosperity unattainable. In horror movies of the time, we were used to the decaying Victorian mansion, the classic Psycho haunted house on the hill. We were used to the white suburban mansion, with manicured lawns, into which the middle-class middle-American white family of four move, with the Ford F and the moving van, only to find out the house is bitterly haunted.
Critics postulate this to be a symptom of anxiety over home ownership and middle-class mobility, the struggle to maintain a family and a respectable way of life. However, these unfinished new builds are a physical reminder of the disappointment met by a decade that started with 9/11 and ended with a recession. Colin meets Jennifer in a room made largely of chipboard and clear industrial plastic wrap, decorated ominously with tens of dripping pillar candles. As Jennifer sidles menacingly towards him, he says through an awkward grin, “This is not really your house, is it?” yet he stays rooted to the spot. Perhaps it doesn’t matter if the most beautiful, popular girl in school hides out in creepy half-built homes; she’s the most beautiful, popular girl in school. As Jennifer’s disarticulated jaw moves to Colin’s jugular, the scene jumps between Needy lying beneath Chip. The silhouette of Jennifer, having mounted Colin, moving back and forth in a gory parody of sex, while the entrails rip from his body and blood spatters the walls, is juxtaposed with Needy and Chip having sex for the first time. The awkward teen humping in a bedroom plastered with Four Year Strong posters is only slightly less disturbing than the macabre puppet show before it. The sapphic, psychic link kicks in again, so Needy, while being penetrated by her pubescent boyfriend, is getting flashed with images of Jennifer. When she starts to scream in horror, Chip asks excitedly, “Am I too big?” betraying elements of his own boyish ignorance. Both Chip and Colin were far too distracted by their own desires to see what was truly happening.
This film is particularly “of its time” in terms of pop culture references. One of the things that makes this film such a staple of queer culture is the insanely emo soundtrack. One review notes snarkily that they think they spent all the special effects budget on song rights, but perhaps the amount of fake blood and fire is less significant than getting a Panic! at the Disco title track, and an album with features and special covers with the likes of All Time Low, Dashboard Confessional, Hayley Williams, and Cute is What We Aim For. Even including some heavier screamo with It Dies Today, the soundtrack is a perfect blend of the popular culture, and emo/internet culture that permeated 2009, creating a world of teenage melancholy. This is even alluded to in the line, “a puncture wound? That’s so emo!” Jennifer yells as she kills Colin, adding another layer of ridiculous teenage musing to the whole affair. It seemed as though in 2009, this film was made for people who could see themselves in the world of Jennifer’s Body, the school life, the small town, the typical people, the beauty queen, as if through a funhouse mirror that gives the beauty queen teeth like a shark. The everyday horror of teenage life is also demonstrated and perpetuated throughout, with images of the dead fetal pigs in jars ubiquitous in biology classrooms and the maddening misunderstanding of adults around you. The teacher mistakes the cries of the dying jock in the forest, for the screams of teenage mourning the tragedy in Melody Lane. This movie brings the language and feel of horror to the teen arena of high school, fumbling love and developing friendships. The drama and tension come from the hormones alone, delivered with blood and a disarticulated python jaw, in conjunction with the trials of dating, learning, and attending school dances.
***
Jennifer saunters like a model in heart printed velour jacket through the halls of the school, beaming as the indie soundtrack plays melodically. Needy narrates.
“To the rest of the world, we were famous. We were saints. Our town’s only bar had burned to the ground and our star linebacker was someone’s snack pack. The whole country got a huge tragedy boner for Devil’s Kettle. And God the press! They couldn’t get enough of our little world of shit.”
Front pages with dramatic headlines cross the screen before melting into a candlelight vigil at the charred remains of Melody Lane, a thin chorus of voices makes up the chorus of Lowshoulder’s song. Jonas’s shrine is shown, flanked with bunches of flowers that wither and die as the chorus of the song kicks in “I’m still here breathing now, I’m still here breathing now.”
***
In contrast with the soundtrack, there is something sneakily interjected about American consumerism, or perhaps the commodification of disasters. Everyone around Needy holds Lowshoulder in high esteem for helping the town through the tragedy of the fire. Only she knows them to be the satanic force they truly are. They are seen as “American Heroes” as a classmate says, for helping people out of the wreckage after the fire (this same classmate insists at the opening of the film that Needy is totally “Lesbigay” for Jennifer). She insists it’s true, “it’s on Wikipedia”, even though Needy and the audience know otherwise. They donate 3% of the earnings from their hit single to the people of Devil’s Kettle. The single only became a hit because they were deified for their bravery in the space of tragedy. It is a parody of the tragedy cycle. There is a strangely aesthetic and distinctly American kind of carnage at the bar, the fire is first set by a slowly burning stars and stripes rosette that falls from a ceiling covered in sports memorabilia and hunting trophies. We’ve just seen our protagonists indulge in the “9/11 tribute shooters” to which Jennifer pouts “the left tower is short!” and now the night has ended in satanic ritual abuse, a classic night of American urban teenage drama in the post-satanic-panic world.
***
Pink light surrounds the frame. With a pink flip phone pressed against her ear with one manicured hand, and the other with bright nails, Jennifer holds the fiery tips of a lighter to her tongue. The soft pink skin of her tongue blackens and chars, making a crackling noise like wet sticks on fire. She lets go of the lighter and the flame recedes. She flicks her tongue in and out of her mouth, where it was blackened and dead, morphs back into its previously rosy complexion. Good as new. As Needy comes back on the phone from on hold and announces she needs to go, Jennifer makes direct eye contact in the mirror, deep blue-green eyes she states, “I am a god.”
***
High school can feel like battling a hell beast in an abandoned swimming pool; Jennifer’s Body demonstrates that perfectly. The horror, self-pity, and shame that comes with keeping up appearances and maintaining damaging friendships. The first time I ever got to kiss a girl, it was another very close friend. Best friend. In the bathroom of a recreation centre in the same sad town as the CeX I bought Jennifer’s Body from, we pressed against one another slowly. Her teeth grazed my lip; the only sensation I can remember is warmth. It was no writhing on a bed with Megan Fox, running smooth hands over one another’s even smoother backs, but it was still electric, buzzing throughout my extremities. She also jumped away from the kiss, as does Needy, exclaiming “what the fuck is happening?” in a perfect parallel, but that doesn’t change the memory of electric warmth.
***
Needy crashes through the window into Jennifer’s room, slamming a weapon deep into the Fall Out Boy poster above Jennifer’s head. Livid, Jennifer’s eyes bore into her. Wrestling Needy onto the bed, Needy ends up on top, hands wrapped around Jennifer’s throat as they pant and writhe together on the four-poster bed.
“Best friends forever huh?” Jennifer pants out beneath Needy’s weight.
“You killed my fucking boyfriend, you goddamn monster, you dumb bitch!”
Jennifer bites her lip seductively and pulls Needy towards her mouth, sinking her teeth deep into her.
Pulling back amidst more panting and moaning and writhing, Needy asks, “Do you know what this is for?” brandishing a box cutter high above her head. “Cutting boxes!” she slams it down before Jennifer can catch it right above her face.
Jennifer sneers, “Do you buy all your murder weapons at Home Depot? God, you’re so butch!”
The pair grapple and quip, until Jennifer floats, Needy still straddling her, high off the bed. They fight midair, twirling and screaming until Needy snatches the gleaming gold of Jennifer’s BFF necklace from her porcelain clavicle. The pendant clatters to the ground in sickening slow motion as Jennifer and Needy descend back to the bed. Needy draws her arm back once more, and as she lands on Jennifer, she plunges the box cutter deep into her chest.
“My tit!” Jennifer croaks through a mouthful of blood and surprise.
“No…your heart.” Needy retorts.
They stare into each other’s eyes as the light leaves Jennifers.
A pause.
The light flicks on, and Jennifer’s mom enters.
***
Vampires, succubae, and demons have always tended to have a queer-coded element to them in film and Jennifer’s Body is no exception. All these entities produce asexually through a penetrative element of biting or consuming, and Jennifer’s last act of power over Needy is to bite her, a love bite of demonic proportions that transfers an aspect of Jennifer’s power to our previously unremarkable protagonist. The Needy we see at the end, can summon all her intellect and might to break out of the detention centre where she’s being held for Jennifer’s murder to kill Lowshoulder. This was never Jennifer’s goal, at least not explicitly. Still, this symbolic revenge of the transformed plain Jane into a self-possessed revenge killer ending the men that ended her friendship with her best friend seems like the only logical conclusion to the film. Needy is a “murderer” now, in the same way Jennifer was a “Girl”, necessity and performance.
