“Satan is Our Only Hope:” Jennifer’s Body and Making Women's Sexuality A True Monster

The week of Halloween has finally arrived! But since our definition of the Halloween Season starts September first, (when the weather drops below 65 degrees and a leaf somewhere gets just the slightest tinge of not-green), Remy and I got together a few weeks ago to rewatch the 2009 movie Jennifer’s Body for more reasons than just the wonderful soundtrack. One of those reasons is because it is a masterpiece cobbled together with themes such as sexuality, feminine rage, and friendships that develop into lust. 

In case you happened to somehow miss the movie that is quickly becoming a cult classic, allow me to recap (spoilers abound, proceed with caution): 

To begin, Diablo Cody, the amazing human being who also brought us Juno and, most recently, Lisa Frankenstein, wrote this raunchy, gory rollercoaster ride that shaped some of my formative years. The movie opens with our leading lady Needy already in isolation, living life in some sort of institutionalized setting. This delightfully quirky protagonist is played by Amanda Seyfried- already well known to the audience of the early 2000s (“she once asked me how to spell orange”). Needy talks us through her existence in the same way that Nick Carroway talks us through his experience living next to Jay Gatsby—with a sort of detachment that can only come when someone has hardened from the inside out. Once we get into the story—a glorified flashback—it soon becomes apparent why. 

Her name is Jennifer, played by Meghan Fox way before MGK met her, and she is every mean girl you ever met: perfect hair, makeup looking like it’s straight off of a magazine page. She talks in pop culture references, uses words that shouldn’t make sense, and, somehow, they make sense coming from her. She’s also Needy’s best friend, and at first glance, it doesn’t make sense as to why. Needy wears big glasses (much like the kind I wear every day). Her hair is frizzy and haloed around her head. Her clothes aren’t the most in style. She fades into the background while Jennifer shines. Needy is spending time with her boyfriend (nice guy Chip with a tragically terrible haircut), but has to cut it short to spend time with Jennifer, because Jennifer all but commanded it. Chip is disappointed, annoyed. But Needy doesn’t seem to notice. Or if she does, she doesn’t care. Jennifer beckoned, and her priorities are clear. In the small town of Devil’s Hole (yes, someone named the town in their queer-coded horror movie about a succubus Devil’s hole), there isn’t much to do, but when Jennifer finds something, Needy can’t say no.   

There’s a band she wants to see at the local bar. She thinks the lead singer is salty (that was a good thing in 2009). And she needs Needy to be her wingwoman. So without question, Needy bails on Chip, dresses the way Jennifer tells her to, and heads out to the bar.

Needy knows how it looks—we see another flashback within the flashback that features another classmate telling Needy that she’s “totally lesbi-gay” when she waves at Jennifer during a pep rally. But it’s not like that; Needy swears. She’s just waving to her best friend. God. What the hell, Charity.  

Jennifer sucks all of the energy in every room the second she enters, and that night at the bar is no different. The bar is rundown, smalltown at its best. It sells cheap beer, and Jennifer knows if she uses her body the right way, she can get free drinks without getting carded. We meet a police cadet (played by a very young Chris pRAT) who she (an underage girl) is dating. It’s uncomfortable, and it gets to be even more uncomfortable when the band, a group of generic looking emo band members led by the always delightful (even as the villain) Adam Brody, begins speculating if Jennifer is a virgin. 

Needy, always loyal, always ready to go to bat for her friend, giving off a little golden retriever energy that makes the viewer sad, steps up to Adam Brody and confirms, rather loudly, that Jennifer is indeed a virgin. (Spoiler: she is not). Adam Brody snickers at her a little bit, and then goes on to sing the catchiest non-song I have ever heard in my entire life (there’s a full internet thread on RIP-Twitter that agrees with me), and if you ever want me to sing the entirety of Through the Trees terribly offkey, I will be more than happy to do so. 

The show continues on and ends in flames. That’s not a metaphor. The bar literally catches on fire, and Needy and Jennifer escape through a bathroom window, Needy in the lead, pushing Jennifer to follow her, in control for once in their friendship. Adam Brody and his band of emo misfits also escape and appear again in the parking lot, casually drinking a beer while people are literally on fire around them, and then he convinces Jennifer to get into his totally not creepy van and leave with him and three other men. Because trauma bonding. 

Needy reacts the same way you would expect someone whose best friend just ditched them for a mediocre rock band after they had watched people die in a burning building; she runs to her boyfriend and instead of leading with news of the town tragedy, she opens with the headline that she lost Jennifer to a group of strange men in a van with guitars. Obviously, she’s concerned. She saw Jennifer last in an opening scene from a murder documentary, but there’s something underlying in her words, something almost… angry… in the way she tells the story. Jennnifer got picked by the big city musicians and abandoned Needy in the parking lot of trauma. But not only that… she picked the boys over Needy. 

Chip tells Needy pretty point blank that she needs to lose Jennifer. Who cares about her when half the town just burned up in a dive bar? 

But Needy cares; she’ll always care. And although it’s portrayed as her downfall, it might just be her super power. 

As the movie progresses, we learn pretty quickly that whatever happened to Jennifer with those band boys (they’re not good enough to be called a boy band!), it left her different than she had been an hour earlier. For example, when she shows up at Needy’s house and eats a whole rotisserie chicken from her refrigerator and then vomits up black sludge, it sets off more than one alarm bell in Needy’s head. But when Jennifer then pins Needy to the wall, seductively licking her black goo-encrusted lips, we’re met with a voyeuristic little thrill as Needy doesn’t immediately push her away. In fact, it seems to ignite something in her, something she’d hoped for for a long while. When her brain catches up to her heart though, Needy recognizes that whatever has taken over Jennifer is strictly carnal—and maybe she also realizes that kissing Jennifer in this moment would be highly unsanitary (please watch out for my follow up blog post: When the Ace Writes the Movie Review About the Movie That’s Just About Sex). 

And this is the part where the movie becomes so much more. It’s no longer about the pretty popular girl, dragging down her nerdy best friend, drowning her in her popularity. It’s the two parts of a relationship meeting—the sexuality and the romance. It’s the puppy love, the butterflies, the cute picnic dates literally being shoved by the intimate, animalistic need to rip each other’s clothes off and kiss every inch of their body. 

Needy is the sweet, elementary school crush while Jennifer has evolved into feminine sexuality, which, by definition, is coupled with feminine rage. 

It’s important to note that Jennifer was assaulted. What happened in those woods (we find out later that Adam Brody and his Merry Band of Goths tried to sacrifice Jennifer to Satan to further their music career, because they’re not as good as Gerard Way and life is hard for mediocre artists (this is a C summary of the actual line which was too stupid to type here)) was not something that Jennifer walked willingly into. She begged and pleaded and screamed, but those men took what they wanted from her with no consideration to her as a person. To them, she was an object, a means to their end, and no matter how violent or messy it got, they would get their end. At one point Adam Brody even gags her, because he’s too annoyed by the noise she’s making. It’s not even out of self-preservation, a don’t-make-a-noise-so-no-one-hears type deal. It’s really just I’ve-had-a-long-night-and-my-hangover-has-already-started-please-be-quiet. It’s a horror movie, but it’s a scenario that too many women know all too well. The band, Low Shoulder, is convinced that if they sacrifice a virgin and donate some good ol’ virgin blood to Satan, they’ll be blessed with the kind of rockstar fame they had only dreamt about. 

This leads the viewer to truly dive deep into the meaning of virgin blood and sacrifice. The boys of Low Shoulder are determined to sacrifice the blood of a virgin to gain fame. And in the magical rules of this movie, the fact that Jennifer is definitely Not a virgin is a problem for the magic that they perform. But we need to sidebar for a brief moment here to ensure our readers know that this is historically (and philosophically) incorrect. Firstly, in these modern and incorrect interpretations of “virgin blood,” it’s always a woman who is being sacrificed. No one is slaughtering Max from Hocus Pocus on an altar to Satan (even though he is most definitely a virgin, as his eight year old sister keeps telling us.) Secondly, by definition, a sacrifice is freely given. It is an offering. Neither the boys of Low Shoulder nor anyone else can “sacrifice” a virgin without their consent. That’s just assault. Lastly, the idea of “virgin” blood, of “pure” blood, has been (ironically) corrupted over time by widespread forced adoption of Christian value systems. Christianity’s fixation on sexuality and sexual purity spilled over into the interpretations of rituals, painting the virginity of the blood in rituals as sexual in nature. In reality, the blood’s virginity likely meant that it was “fresh from the source, obtained directly from the person providing the sacrifice” or that it was “blood that had not been used in a ritual before”, thus making it “pure.” Regardless of the rules of blood magic that apply in the Jennifer’s Body universe, I am sure Jennifer would agree that nothing that some boy did to her changed her blood or her spirit in any fundamental way. 

In the movie, it’s deemed a problem that the boys set out to sacrifice a virgin and Jennifer is not a virgin. And it’s never quite addressed that the real problem is a group of boys running around stabbing girls in the middle of the woods. Anyway, because of this, instead of dying, Jennifer becomes the incarnation of the evil the boys tried to summon. It’s inside of her without being invited. That metaphor is pretty easy to follow.

It melds with her own mind to focus on one thing: revenge. Jennifer’s body wants what it wants, and what it wants is sex and blood and for all men to pay for the crimes that those three men committed against her. And she sets out to take it. When Jennifer feeds, she keeps up the appearance of being on top of the world. Her hair stays shiny, her eyes stay bright, her jeans fit just right. It’s when she gets hungry that the facade begins to slip, her hair turning dull and lifeless, her eyes hazy and clouded. She dresses the part too, wrapping herself in dark colored clothing that she swims in. A far cry from the Barbie doll perfection we saw at the top of the movie. 

This continues for a bit, the endless cycle of Jennifer munching on her male classmates after having sex with them, and the movie makes it clear that, although the boys are dying in the end, they’re not altogether unsatisfied. Because if a woman can’t make them finish before she kills them… well, that makes their death all the more tragic. The anger that Jennifer carries with her hides under her Abercrombie clothes, slathered in make-up, but it’s not unnoticeable. She tells Needy straight out, “I only kill boys,” making the definitive line very clear. There are them, and then there are us. There are us, and then there are the monsters who hurt us in the woods, even after we say no. Why listen to them when they beg for their lives? A man or a bear? The question hasn’t changed in fifteen years. 

Needy can’t wrap her mind around it. Something is wrong with her best friend. Obviously. She watched her crouch on her kitchen floor and scarf down an entire chicken, and her best friend doesn’t eat meat. But it has to be a logical explanation. Depression. A stomach flu. A hundred other things that people in horror movies ask themselves while the audience screams at them to get their shit together and watch more horror movies. It isn’t until Needy herself has sex with Chip that she truly sees what is going on. In this sense, sex is used as some sort of mystic doorway: Needy cannot see all she needs to see, cannot unlock the secrets of the universe, until she herself has gone through the transition from virginal nerd to sexualized woman. That’s when she sees a vision, clear as day, of Jennifer killing yet another classmate, Colin, who looks like he could be the long lost member of Green Day, if Green Day was in the practice of hiring zombies to do their guitar solos. 

That’s when she confronts Jennifer, and Jennifer kind of laughs it off, in a very nonchalant “the world is so much better without them” kind of attitude. Which is interesting, because at the beginning of the movie, Jennifer is all about salty boys. But now, she just wants to see them suffer in the most horrific ways possible. Needy, with her eyes wide open now, sees Jennifer for what she is and vows to stop her. But when she warns Chip to stay away from Jennifer, Chip responds the way most straight white men in horror movies do when a woman tells them the exact plot of what they are living. He tells her she’s sick, which, you know, gets Needy a bit riled. As a woman who has been told this many times in her life, I felt her rage right alongside her.

In a nod to Carrie, the climax (no pun intended) of the movie takes place at a high school dance, with Needy wearing a very reminiscent pink dress, which becomes soaked in the blood of her peers. Like Carrie, Needy just wanted to have a boyfriend and her best friend and a goddamn normal high school experience, and she has had everything but. Instead, she is shadowed by a literal demon who is now seducing and killing her boyfriend in the gym, drowning him in the high school pool (side note: can we talk about how gross high school pools are, whether they’re used regularly or closed for storage?). When Needy confronts Jennifer in all of her shoulder-padded-glory, the scene truly lives up to its horror movie status. It’s all bloody disasters and witty one-liners. With years of pent up feminine rage, Needy goes absolute ham on Jennifer, stabbing her with a metal pole, which creates a gaping wound in Jennifer’s chest, right where her heart should be. 

“You got a tampon?” Jennifer asks in her breathy, flirtatious voice. 

Needy is past being charmed by her former best friend. All the years she spent in her shadow, all the years she didn’t get the date, all the years she was seen as less than, she pours them out in this fight, which weakens Jennifer (mostly because it takes her by surprise that Needy has grown a backbone), but it doesn’t destroy her. Not physically at least. Once she takes stock of her own disadvantage, Jennifer flees the pool, running through the woods, conjuring pictures of stories past, women dancing in the forest. This just leaves Needy and Chip alone in the pool house, covered in each other’s blood, and Chip’s life quickly draining out of his eyes. 

The final showdown, fueled by rage felt only by a teenager whose best friend got turned into a succubus and killed her boyfriend, takes place in Jennifer’s bedroom, in Jennifer’s bed, reminiscent of a slumber party, complete with pastel pinks and crappy infomercials on the television. This is when Jennifer and Needy share a deep kiss, one that Needy has obviously been pining for for years while Jennifer admits she’s just fooling around. A lot of the dialogue here not only toes the line of being sexual, but actually barrels over that line and then dives right into the deep end. A personal favorite of mine is when Needy pulls out a box cutter and says to Jennifer, “This is used to cut boxes.” It’s crass and vulgar and absolutely hard-hitting as she plows the blade right into her best friend’s chest. 

And that’s how Jennifer dies, in a puddle of blood on her bedroom floor, her best friend on top of her, and her mother screaming in horror, in anguish, in confusion, in the doorway. The scene seems reductive. In another life, at another time, a viewer can almost picture Jennifer’s mother scolding the girls, “you were raised better than that,” as if sapphic affection is the worst crime they could ever commit. 

All in all, Jennifer’s Body is basically an onion. It’s a little funny looking on the outside, but has many juicy layers underneath the goofy outer shell. Also, if exposed to it enough, you might cry. For the Halloween season, it does its job of giving autumnal vibes and great music choices (again, if you would like me to serenade you with eight hours of Through the Trees just @ us on any social or send a carrier pigeon to my house). But it also keeps us alert. It keeps us angry.

And it keeps us fighting.