Jennifer’s Body Deserves an Apology 🧟♀️❤️
“You’re killing people” … “NO! I’m killing boys”
Jennifer's Body hit theaters in 2009. The same year as Poker Face, Glee, and Jersey Shore. Not a good year for a Feminist horror film to become a smashing success. Megan Fox is the star, but it’s her comedic timing, not her body, that steals the show. People are bludgeoned to death, but it’s not the pretty girl in the first 10 minutes of the movie, rather some boys that the viewer feels no sympathy for. And two girls kiss, but not to attract male attention, rather as a statement about female friendship. It had all the components of a fabulous horror film, and it was a fabulous horror film but its feminist lens and female gaze, amongst other things, led to its demise.
Problem 1: The marketing. Watch the trailer, a video speaks a million words
After watching this trailer, the target audience seems to be teen boys, correct?
Not convinced, lets take a look at these promotion pictures.
If you’re a group of teen boys expecting to go see a movie starring Megan Fox of bikini Transformers fame, you’re not going to get what you expected. You’re going to get a movie that tells the story of a victim's revenge, of female friendship. You’re going to get an intelligent horror film that reeks of camp. And not camp in a bad horror movie way, camp in a smart, nuanced, you’ll get the joke 30 seconds after it was said to cause of how deep it cut way. By marketing to teen boys it entirely missed its target audience… teen GIRLS.
Teen girls would have eaten this movie up at the time. Just as we are doing now. A story that makes us feel seen in all of our angsty, annoying, dramatic glory. A story that represents women the way we see ourselves. A story that's real, well as real as a story about a flesh-eating demon teenager could be.
Problem 2: MEN rule the movie industry, so duh they didn't like this movie very clearly made for the female audience. And so, Jennifer's Body was thrown away into Chick-Flick no-mans-land with other great films like Mean Girls and Legally Blonde. All of these films (and many more) feature women being funny, the center of attention, and when they do feature men, it's usually in a bad light or to make a larger point. Men don't like that, so they throw them out. It's not rocket science, it's misogyny. You do the hard math.
We’re in a renaissance of previously looked-over works that feature women in a nuanced light, and Jennifer’s Body is coming back to life.