Jennifer’s Body, reconsidered
Dismissed on release in 2009, Diablo Cody and Karyn Kusama’s horror comedy has since been rediscovered as one of the sharper genre films of its decade.
Few films have had their reputations turn around as completely as Jennifer’s Body. When it opened in 2009, it arrived with a lot of attention and left with very little goodwill. Reviews were mixed, audiences were small, and the film quickly became shorthand for a misfire. A decade later it was being written about as a cult classic and a film that had been ahead of its time.
The film itself
The setup is simple. In a small Minnesota town, the popular Jennifer, played by Megan Fox, becomes the victim of a ritual gone wrong at the hands of an ambitious indie rock band and returns as something hungry and inhuman. Her childhood friend Needy, played by Amanda Seyfried, is the only one who sees what is happening and the only one who can stop it.
The screenplay was Diablo Cody’s first after Juno, which had won her the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. It carries the same ear for invented teenage slang, but turns it towards horror. Karyn Kusama, known then for the boxing drama Girlfight, directed. At its heart the film is less about a monster than about a friendship that has curdled: possessive, competitive and still affectionate, the kind of relationship that teen films rarely took seriously.
Why it misfired in 2009
The most common explanation for the film’s rough start is its marketing. The campaign leaned heavily on its star’s image and seemed aimed at young men expecting something glossy and simple. The film it was selling was something else: a dark comedy about female friendship, with a satirical streak and a central character who is as much a victim as a villain. Viewers who came for the advertised film were disappointed, and viewers who would have enjoyed the actual film often stayed away.
The reappraisal
The film’s second life came through home viewing and online discussion, as a younger audience found it on its own terms. Around its tenth anniversary in 2019, a wave of essays argued that its themes, including how girls are used and discarded and how anger gets turned into horror, had been missed or mocked at the time. Its stars’ performances, particularly Seyfried’s, were reassessed too.
Seen today, Jennifer’s Body is not flawless. Some jokes are pitched to the moment, and the tonal shifts can be abrupt. But it is distinctive, funny and much more knowing than its reputation once allowed, and it now sits comfortably in conversations about the best horror comedies of its era.
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