by Jamie Calabria and Matthew Crump

What do you get when two badass women join forces to tell the story of a thinly-veiled bisexual succubus seeking revenge exclusively on her male abusers? A queer cult classic. Diablo Cody & Karyn Kusama’s horror-comedy Jennifer’s Body was a rare and valiant effort to capture the complexity of female relationships and methods of coping with male abuse within the horror genre at a time well before #MeToo.

The 1962 classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? showcased a dynamic between sisters, Carrie (1976) provided a look into a mother/daughter relationship in a cycle of abuse, but until Cody and Kasuma concocted the plot of JB in 2009, there were very few mainstream horror narratives that attempted to define an intimate female friendship. Sure, there’s the occasional outlier that showcases lady friends (See: The Craft or The Descent), but even so, major plot lines and dynamics seem to be so wrapped up in men that it would be difficult to prevent a Bechdel-related eye roll. In JB, men take a major backseat—usually located somewhere in Jennifer Check’s digestive tract.

Written and directed by Cody and Kusama respectively, the film follows childhood best friends Jennifer (Megan Fox) and Needy (Amanda Seyfried) through the hardest part of every young person’s life: high school. When a city-based alt-rock band comes to their small-town local bar, popular, sexual and beautiful Jennifer drags nerdy, glasses-wearing, virginal Needy to see them perform. The all-male band is, of course, evil, and happens to have the perfect ancient demonic ritual that requires a virgin sacrifice to bring endless fame and fortune. Unfortunately, Jennifer is not quite the untouched butter queen they were looking for and the sacrifice goes awry, turning Jennifer into a succubus who kills and eats the boys in town. 

Despite Jennifer using her BFF Needy as a crutch, toy and confidante throughout each and every kill, Needy somehow remains relatively unscathed. It’s almost as if the original female subconscious operating underneath the new demonic possession is protecting her for some reason (spoiler: they’re in love). While neither Diablo Cody or Karyn Kusama has ever outed themselves as queer, they repeatedly make films about the plight of women and the queer lives they live. JB and Cody’s 2018 thriller Tully have bisexual themes, about bisexual main characters, with bisexual actresses playing the leads (Megan Fox & Charlize Theron). The major difference in success between these films lies in the intended audience versus the audience that actually received them. 

Jennifer’s Body was made for women, by women. Kusama has argued that this film speaks to women and their relationships with other women in a way that men do not understand; it unabashedly shows the way female friendships so often have intimate overtones. Cody has also confirmed multiple times that there was intended sexual tension written between Jennifer and Needy. 

The iconic make out scene that had young closeted queers quietly lusting and straight male Megan Fox fans squirming in their seats is perhaps the crux on which the debate of JB’s creator’s true intentions rests. Were the women scantily-clad, done up to the 9’s, with a sultry tune blasting in the background, it would certainly be arguable that the scene was included solely for the male gaze. Okay, so yes, Jennifer is a scantily-clad solid 10, wearing a somewhat modest panty brief and Needy’s Evil Dead t-shirt. But that’s just who Jennifer is. Needy, on the other hand, is her normal nerdy self, wracked with the terror of unexpectedly finding Jennifer in her bed and having to cope with her repressed sexuality. After making a sexually-charged, nostalgic comment about their childhood sleepovers, Jennifer pushes up Needy’s glasses, plays with her golden hair and moves in slowly for a kiss. The camera cuts in close and there’s nothing but silence. In a film with a soundtrack chocked full of angsty, Myspace-fueled bands of the era, the director opted for total silence in this tense moment. What follows is a kiss for the ages, one teeming with the universal queer experience of what it’s like to be in love with a best friend, enduring the tourture of it as well as all its euphoria. 

The production company, Fox Atomic, classically missed the irony of the film and the way that Cody turned so many man-made tropes on their heads. Instead of marketing to the wider audience JB was intended for, Fox Atomic marketed the film to a straight, white, male audience in order to capitalize on the over-sexualized, cultural abuse Megan Fox was being subjected to during that time period. After being harassed for months as Hollywood’s newest sex-symbol following her Transformers performance, Megan Fox was stalked by a paparazzo on the set of JB during a nude, swimming scene she was already on the fence about. “The last thing I had that was mine, the last bit of privacy that I had was my body and I didn’t want to show it. I felt so violated,” Fox told Variety. “I wanted to keep that for myself and it was taken from me.” 

No one behind the actual creation of JB was unclear about what their central message was—not Kusama, not Cody, and especially not Megan Fox herself, saying, “The movie wasn’t about that. The movie was actually about mis-marketing, about people focusing on something and missing the point, about sexualizing somebody who doesn’t want to be sexualized… about powerlessness as young girls and women and nobody was ready to hear that.” Despite the protests of the women making the film, production company Fox Atomic was relentless, going as far as suggesting a porn site centered around Megan Fox’s tabloid sex appeal. With each and every severely mistargeted marketing ploy that Fox Atomic actually did wind up employing, Cody and Kusama were cut to their cores. It also brought all the wrong people to the theaters.

It was then that many (straight) critics began to misinterpret the film as heterosexual girls gone wild type action, completely disregarding the fact that these were woman who were almost explicitly written as bisexual. Case and point: “I go both ways” - the iconic quote spoken by Jennifer at the climax of the film. While the film is working to provide a window into the intense relationship between Jennifer and Needy, both are exploring themselves through each other, not for the male viewer, but for the female viewer who can relate to the passionate love that can develop between two women experiencing something tragic together at the hands of greedy men. 

It was the blatant difference between what the creators wanted and what the marketing team peddled to the general public that caused the movie to flop before audiences. The film caused an uproar by male critics which was fueled by the fact that they didn’t understand women, Cody and Kasuma were even receiving death threats from confused and unhinged men.

Even in its newfound queer cult status, JB still only holds a meager 44% on Rotten Tomatoes. Despite the lens most critics used to deem the film’s irrelevance in 2009, the movie that was actually made is as relevant now as it always was. The intricate past of male abuse, hetero normative societal pressures, and complex dynamics between Needy and Jennifer dares to show the way women truly interact with our world and each other. “From the outset, I always felt like this is a horror movie about toxic friendships between girls. And on a larger scale, it’s about how these alliances between girls get distorted and corrupted by the patriarchy,” defended Kusama in an interview with BuzzFeed. 

Toxic friendships, the confusion of growing up with conflicting attractions, small-town claustrophobia, men who use their privilege to take advantage of young women: these experiences are almost universal to queer people at some point in their lives. Contrastingly, the desire to hunt, murder, and eat men only resonates with some of us. The themes of this film appeal to the LBGTQ+ community not because of the outstanding bisexual content, but because of the experiences so many of us share at a core level with the main characters.

Despite the box office flop the film saw during its initial release, in recent years JB’s cult status has grown and been garnering enough momentum in the queer community to at least give it retroactive recognition. Much in the style of Buffy the Vampire Slayer—a movie that bombed during its initial release but found a second life on a smaller screen—Cody has expressed interest in a TV adaptation of Jennifer’s Body with it suddenly being in its revival phase. Now that’s something we as queer, feminist, lovers of good horror would kill to write about.