Jennifer Bites Back
Jennifer’s Body is what happens when a movie is too clever to be understood as satire.
Megan Fox as Jennifer Check, floating over an abandoned swimming pool in her bloody prom dress in the 2009 cult classic Jennifer’s Body. Courtesy of 20th Century Fox. Available via Rolling Stone. © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
Back in 2009, Jennifer’s Body was dead on arrival. The marketing sold it like a horny slasher for teenage boys, critics trashed it, and audiences shrugged. But somewhere between Megan Fox vomiting black sludge and Amanda Seyfried stabbing her best friend in a pool, the movie planted a seed. What looked like a messy teen horror flick was actually one of the sharpest satirical comedies of the 2000s, a film that mocked the “evil high school queen bee” trope by turning her into a literal demon.
Jennifer Check isn’t your standard cheerleader villain. She’s what happens when Hollywood’s favorite archetype, the hot, mean, hyper-feminine girl, bites back. Literally. The classic “maneater” label takes the form of a hot girl who actually eats men alive. It’s parody and horror in equal measure, and it exposes just how ridiculous the trope has always been.
That was Diablo Cody’s intention all along. The Oscar-winning screenwriter wanted to twist the tired cliché of the one-dimensional mean girl into something darker, funnier, and way more layered.
“We all know girls like Jennifer because society creates Jennifer types. There’s something about an insecure girl that can make her become very intimidating and creepy,” Cody said in an interview with Slant Magazine. In other words, the monster isn’t Jennifer herself, it’s the system that rewards and punishes girls for being beautiful, sexual, and confident. By turning Jennifer into a succubus, the movie drags the archetype to its logical extreme, daring us to see how ugly those cultural constructions really are.
This movie is an insanely clever piece of satirical comedy. Instead of making Jennifer just an insecure girl who feeds off of male attention, they made her into an insecure girl who feeds off of men, period. She takes the stereotype to the next level and becomes an actual monster. She’s not punished for being sensual, beautiful and powerful; she hones those traits and uses them to her advantage and becomes terrifying precisely because those traits are exaggerated until they turn grotesque. The film is laughing at the very idea that femininity itself is monstrous.
Let us not forget about another tired horror convention that it manages to swallow whole and spit back out: the narrative that victims of sexual assault or violence who survive, come out the other side as a hollowed out version of themselves. Jennifer’s Body imagines what happens when the assault creates the monster in the first place.
Jennifer is sacrificed by a clueless indie band who think they’re killing a virgin to secure fame, but the ritual backfires. She comes back, hungry and vengeful, not as a victim but as a predator. The metaphor couldn’t be more on-the-nose: a culture that commodifies and brutalizes women inevitably breeds the nightmare it fears the most.
That’s why the movie resonates so much more now than it did in 2009. Fifteen years later, Jennifer’s Body has clawed its way out of the grave the box office buried it in. What people once dismissed as camp is now embraced as cult genius: a black comedy about rage, friendship, and what happens when the “hot, mean girl” stops playing along and bites back.
