Jennifer’s Body (2009)

Official trailer

Megan Fox plays Jennifer Check and Amanda Seyfried plays Needy Lesnicki, with Adam Brody as Nikolai Wolf, Johnny Simmons as Chip Dove and J.K. Simmons as Mr. Wroblewski. Amy Sedaris plays Toni Lesnicki. Diablo Cody wrote the screenplay. Twentieth Century Fox released the film in September 2009 to mixed initial critical reception and wide later reappraisal that’s positioned Jennifer’s Body as one of the foundational feminist horror productions of the late 2000s and early 2010s.

I had a great time with this movie. It’s nasty, funny and sadder than it has any right to be, and Seyfried’s Needy is the reason it works. The 8 carries one knock: Cody’s slang runs so thick in places that I can hear the screenwriter typing.

Jennifer’s Body has gone through a critical reappraisal as serious as that of almost any 2000s American film. The initial 2009 marketing campaign positioned the film primarily through Megan Fox’s sex appeal instead of through Diablo Cody’s screenwriting reputation or Karyn Kusama’s directorial credentials, with the resulting commercial under-performance producing the standard studio assessment of failure. Later home-video, streaming, and academic-cinema circulation have considerably reversed the original reception.

The film is now widely regarded as a major feminist horror production of its decade, with the marketing’s failure to position the actual content increasingly identified as the source of the original commercial disappointment instead of any limitation in the production itself.

Diablo Cody’s Screenplay

Cody’s screenplay was her second produced feature after Juno (2007). The script applies her Juno-era invented dialogue conventions to horror-comedy material with full commitment to the genre’s demands. Jennifer Check and Needy Lesnicki communicate through the heightened invented vocabulary that’s later been identified as Cody’s signature: ‘You’re killing me, Smalls’, ‘Move-on dot org’, ‘Salt and burn’, dozens of additional dialogue conventions that the film treats as established teenage idiom.

The screenplay’s distinct structural achievement is the central female friendship between Jennifer and Needy. The relationship is treated with real seriousness throughout the running time even as the supernatural-horror plot intensifies, with Needy’s gradual recognition that her best friend has become a literal demon operating as both horror-narrative engine and as real emotional drama. The female-friendship-as-actual-subject approach distinguishes Jennifer’s Body from most contemporary horror productions of its decade.

The friendship is what grabs me. Seyfried plays Needy’s slow realization with so much hurt that the horror nearly becomes secondary, and I think she gives the best performance in the movie.

Karyn Kusama’s Direction

Kusama had previously directed Girlfight (2000) and Aeon Flux (2005) before Jennifer’s Body. Her directorial approach handles Cody’s screenplay with considerably more confidence than the studio marketing positioning suggested. The horror sequences are real horror instead of comedy with horror trappings, with the practical-effects work on Jennifer’s possessed-form transformations carrying real weight.

The film’s particular aesthetic tone combines high-color suburban-realism with intermittent surreal horror imagery that reads as deliberate aesthetic disjunction instead of production inconsistency. Kusama’s commitment to giving the horror material full visual weight instead of only comic-undercut treatment is one of the production’s distinctive choices. The director would later direct The Invitation (2015) and Destroyer (2018) with major later critical attention.

Kusama is the one I’d credit most. She lets possessed Jennifer look like something that could hurt you, and those practical effects rattled me more than I expected from a film that was sold on its star’s looks.

The Reappraisal History

Jennifer’s Body’s reappraisal began around 2017, with critical retrospectives identifying the original 2009 reception as considerably shaped by the marketing’s positioning and the wider cultural moment’s treatment of Megan Fox. Later academic horror-studies writing has positioned Jennifer’s Body within the wider 2010s feminist-horror cycle that includes Raw (2016), The Babadook (2014), and It Follows (2014).

The film’s particular themes about teenage female friendship, male sexual predation, and the commercial exploitation of young women have aged considerably better than the 2009 marketing positioning suggested. The opening-act ritual sacrifice that the indie rock band performs on Jennifer is substantively serious commentary on the exploitation of teenage girls by adult men who benefit from their bodies, with the demon-possession consequences functioning as supernatural-genre rendering of that exploitation’s actual costs.

That sacrifice is the scene that angers me most, in exactly the way the film intends. A band of grown men treating a teenage girl as their ticket to success is uglier than any demon in it, and I think Cody and Kusama knew that.

Is Jennifer’s Body worth watching?

Jennifer’s Body gets its 8 from me, and the reputation finally caught up with the film, as it should. Diablo Cody’s screenplay, Karyn Kusama’s direction, Amanda Seyfried’s underappreciated performance and the friendship at its center add up to a horror film with far more on its mind than the posters let on.

The points come off for dialogue that sometimes strains to be quotable, and that’s my only real complaint. Any horror fan who skipped it in 2009 owes it an evening.

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