Following the success of Girlfight and Æon Flux, Karyn Kusama released Jennifer's Body into the world in 2009, creating a sleeper hit that would finally receive the acclaim it deserves more than a decade down the line as an important “Good For Her” flick exploring feminist themes still prevalent.
Written by Diablo Cody and starring Megan Fox, Amanda Seyfried, Johnny Simmons, Kyle Gallner, Adam Brody, and Chris Pratt, the possession teen horror follows high school popular girl Jennifer Check (Fox) and her best friend Anita “Needy” Lesnicki (Seyfried) who exists solely as Jennifer's shadow in an almost unbearably toxic friendship.
After the pair witness a raging fire at their local dive bar while watching indie group Low Shoulder, Jennifer disappears with the band and doesn't return the same. It soon becomes clear the teen is possessed, and the unassuming maneater has taken the phrase to a whole new level as the bodies of boys from their school begin to pile up.
At the time of its release, Jennifer's Body was sold as a steamy teen movie with the marketing focusing heavily on Fox and her sex appeal. This led to the whole plot and point of the movie getting overlooked, and the target audience the narrative would speak to being missed entirely in favor of attracting droves of young men on the promise of seeing Fox and Seyfried kiss.
The witty dialogue, feminist themes, and stellar performances fell on deaf ears and a generation of film fans forgot about Jennifer's Body. That is, until Gen Z embraced the bloody horror with open arms, and it became a cult classic, adored by many for its initial intention.
The film offers an intimate portrait of female relationships, Queer coming-of-age themes, and varied representations of women and female rage in the face of abuse and revenge that still speaks to audiences in 2025. Fox herself has spoken on the resurgence of Jennifer's Body, telling Who What Wear: “I'm really surprised at the cult following. I don't even know if it's cult anymore. It's grown so, so much. It keeps having a new resurgence and a new rebirth. Teenage girls now are just discovering it and are in love with it. It's more relevant now, I think, than it was then when it first came out.”
Hell Is A Teenage Girl
Jennifer's Body subverts the idea of women in a horror narrative as hopeless damsels in distress punished for their sexuality and overt femininity. From the beginning of the film, Jennifer is portrayed as sexually active and an object of the male gaze, to the point that it is easy at times to forget that she is meant to be a teenager attending high school. She frequently talks about sex and is seen flirting with men to elicit sexual encounters just for pleasure, rather than to foster a relationship. Often in horror films, this behavior is punished while virginal women go on to survive the night.
Jennifer, both before and after her possession, never renounces her sexual promiscuity or feminine appearance; rather, she embraces it and uses it to her advantage to punish the males around her who reduce her to a sexual object with no bodily autonomy. From a situation in which she was made a victim, Jennifer becomes our strong, female antagonist who overpowers multiple boys at her school who are physically larger and stronger than she is.
The notion of the female gaze is turned on its head as we see Jennifer revel in her role as a black widow, and aligning viewers who flocked to the cinema solely to objectify Fox uncomfortably with her victims.
Rather than be punished for her sexuality, Jennifer's sexual nature is her saving grace as it becomes the reason she does not die when sacrificed by the members of Low Shoulder. Needy, meanwhile, is positioned to be the virginal friend renouncing her femininity to survive the film as she is given a gender-neutral name, dressed in stereotypically masculine clothes, and frequently disengages with Jennifer's sexual behavior.
However, we see Needy engage in sex onscreen with her boyfriend Chip (Simmons) while never changing how she dresses or behaves, further subverting common stereotypes of females within horror, also seen in the likes of the slasher classic Scream where Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) maintained her androgynous name and attire while also embracing femininity and sexuality.
Needy is not only a sexualized character, she is seen as smart and resourceful as she is the only character within Jennifer's Body who deduces what has happened to her best friend while mustering up the courage to thwart the succubus, rather than being reduced to a female in peril saved by her male counterparts.
Male characters in the narrative, meanwhile, are accepting of Jennifer's treatment of them as nothing more than sexual objects. Colin (Gallner), Roman (Pratt), and Chip are all perceived as non-threatening.
At the same time, Low Shoulder vocalist Nikolai (Brody) is seen as a criminal as we learn he attempts to sacrifice Jennifer to the devil in pursuit of fame. However, as he fails to correctly ascertain whether Jennifer is a virgin, his inefficiency is revealed, and – despite his murderous tendencies – he appears less threatening than Jennifer, who never fails in her attempt to kill and consume a boy.
Men in Jennifer's Body do not drive the narrative other than being there for Jennifer to feast upon, while the film focuses on the relationships of women and women's issues told solely by the female characters.
I Go Both Ways
Jennifer and Needy have become bisexual icons as the film has been reappraised, with Jennifer's Body tackling various Queer coming-of-age themes which have resonated with LGBTQ+ viewers. As the film begins, Jennifer and Needy's friendship appears classically toxic as Jennifer frequently puts Needy down and exerts control over her quieter, more laid-back friend.
However, as the friends watch Low Shoulder perform in the dive bar, it seems the reason their friendship has not ended is that Needy wishes for it to become romantic as she holds her hand during a song's emotional chorus and gazes at her longingly.
When Needy and Chip have sex, it is immediately noticeable she is not into it at all, so she begins fantasising about Jennifer and the recently deceased Roman to get her off. And, let's not forget the much-marketed scene in which Jennifer and Needy passionately kiss on Needy's bed. The film paints a picture of the complexity of coming of age as a Queer person, particularly in an era less accepting than in 2025 leading the women to suppress their desires and identities.
Though their friendship appears one-sided, Jennifer somewhat reciprocates Needy's emotions as she begins hunting boys that Needy likes, potentially because she wants to clear the competitors out of her way or stop herself from harming Needy.
It could be argued that her decision to slaughter boys is not one driven by sexual desire or revenge, but to embrace her blossoming Queer identity and fight against heteronormative relationships. In the closing scenes of the film, Jennifer states that she goes “both ways” when Needy says she “thought [she] only murdered boys,” solidifying her status as a bisexual character.
You're killing people? No, I'm killing boys.
Despite being positioned as a villain, it is hard for audiences to solely be aligned against Jennifer as many of us can sympathise with her. Women and girls are sexualized and objectified from a very young age, and this behavior continues throughout our lives. According to RAINN, one out of every six American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime. Startlingly, they found that nine out of every 10 victims are female, with their data accounting for a shocking 17.7 million American women from 1998 to the present day.
Jennifer's Body can be seen entirely as a revenge fantasy that centers on the exploitation of Jennifer and the sexual assault that is alluded to in the opening scenes of the film as she seeks to take back her power. Her sacrifice occurs after she is coerced into getting into a van with strange men while reeling from the trauma of seeing many people she knew die in a fire.
These men are taking advantage of her body without her consent, and what's more, they seem unaffected by the gravity of what they are doing to the young girl as they sing along and repeatedly stab her, dehumanizing Jennifer further. She only tells Needy what happened to her and what she had become, alluding to the fact that survivors of assault often have to overcome hurdles to be believed, even by those closest to them.
Despite killing Jennifer in revenge for killing Chip, Needy breaks free from her institution and hits the road to hunt the members of Low Shoulder, avenging Jennifer for what happened to her.
Jennifer's Body offers up a cathartic fantasy in the face of trauma and violence, which was way ahead of its time. In it, we see two strong female leads wreak vengeance upon the men around them who have sexualized and objectified them for far too long while secretly lusting after each other.
Far from the sex fantasy it was marketed as, Jennifer's Body is grounded in the emotional truth of codependent relationships, burgeoning Queer experiences, living in the aftermath of an assault, and the whirlwind female experience.
