Jennifer’s Body is one of a number of horror films that are sort of teen charmers. They're coming of age horror films like Prom Night 2 and The Craft, Scream, Warm Bodies, Fright Night, The Final Girls, The Faculty, Freaky, even Tragedy Girls, which we covered in season 3 at Scare U. These are films that are often tonally light until they're not, that are tinged with comedy, punctuated with a wink, but they pack a wallop when it counts. They're often heavy on gore and heavy on irony and maybe on message, and this one has a feminist message. Perhaps it's more subversively exploitative than the Teeths or Ready or Nots, but its title comes from a song by Courtney Love and Hole and it has a feminine monster and that monster has two heads, or at least has two halves like a best friend's necklace from a kiosk at the mall. But these two are a little more magnetic and they exert kind of a surprising pull on each other. One half is all powerful. And later she's imbued with even more power and the other half is needy. And also later imbued with power. And the needy part really kicks ass and everything else.

I think Jennifer's Body rides a lot of lines. It's a little nostalgic in terms of its tone and its story. It's a little post-modern though in its execution. I think the characters reflect and refract one another. There's sort of a kind of “reverse menstruation” idea at work. And there's an exploitation of the fear of female or feminine power and empowerment. It's got a view of high school that's so saturated with meta-commentary that it seems like it has been made by a team of artists who probably barely survived high school and then really triumphed afterward. It's loaded with enough 80s satanic panic service that it tells us that the filmmakers who made it were just old enough to be aware of its hold over the country's consciousness, but just too young to have actually spray painted a pentagram on a train trestle themselves.

I think that Jennifer's Body channels its influences to create a unique world for some unique and fearless female anti-heroes to live in. It has a unique vernacular, like Clueless and Mean Girls. This gives us moms who date men who own ham stores, which is so off-kilter and surprising that it might as well be lifted from something like Strangers with Candy. I think that it's really carefully packed with visual metaphor and symbolism. I mean, Needy is a butterfly. She's stuck in a cocoon and her walls are covered with butterflies making crazy shapes. The men in this movie are really clearly written by women, by which I mean that they sound smart, even when they're petulant or self-serving, which most of them are. And I think it asks questions like, How do you become yourself when you're in the social milieu or miasma of post-adolescence, but pre-college? Do you need to have a little bit of the devil inside you, or does he kind of need to be in your best friend for you to have a full-tilt Muriel's Wedding moment before you're out of your teens? How can you be a small town girl who doesn't fit in, but is about to really stand out? Virtually every character we meet in this film is tinged with a little bit of sadness, and their small town is also judged very harshly by almost all of the characters.

But the girls, especially when they start acing demonometry, are irreverent and tough, strong and surprising. It becomes, fairly early on, a film about the horror of obiectification, when objectification is divorced from our expectations and reflected back on itself. Because the male gaze here doesn't start off as irrelevant, but it becomes irrelevant. Men become salty morsels for these powerful and power-hungry women to level up. The men are fragile. And they use women in this film to make them better and more successful, but they fail. And then the men carry pepper spray and they cry after the fire at Melody Lane.

All of this makes Jennifer and Needy, especially in the horror genre, uniques. I love them and I love the film because they are proto-Vassar girls. These girls are the ones who go to towny strip clubs. They're in Devil's Kettle, they're just a little unsophisticated, even though they're really worldly. And Jennifer says, “We have all the power. Don't you know that?” to Needy, and you know what? She is a hundred percent right.

In addition to all of this, it's got a production design that's excellent and detailed. It's got great practical effects enhanced, though they may be, with some digital magic. It's got a soundtrack that's fun and essential to our enjoyment of this film. And I would say that the cast are pretty uniformly excellent, which is no surprise considering that it is jammed with movie stars and other boldface names and recognizable faces. And while the film may wink occasionally, the cast does not.

To hear our take on Jennifer’s Body, click here.

Bradford Louryk