Women and Queerness in Horror: Jennifer’s Body

Warning: This Article Contains Spoilers for Jennifer’s Body.

Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts, both fictional and non-fictional alike. One thread has emerged in my preferences though. I like listening to women and queer people talk.

Generally, that’s a pretty apt blanket statement, but especially when it comes to horror. I feel like I’ve unintentionally cornered the market on horror here at Phenixx Gaming, but hey: they do say write what you know. Without further ado, then — and with a big shoutout to HorrorQueers and Attack of the Queerwolf! for keeping me so entertained the past few days — let’s crack open a wholly unsurprising but much loved queer, feminine horror movie: Jennifer’s Body.

This movie is fun. It’s messy, mean, sad, campy, and self-aware. Diablo Cody already blew me away with Juno, and the number of my interests that aligned in a smart, mouthy horror-comedy piece hinging on two queer girls being mean, miserable and tender while trying to consume each other? Really, it’s not fair. With all that in mind, it seemed like an obvious place to start this series off.

It bears mentioning that the marketing for Jennifer’s Body was deeply — and, I would say, dangerously — misleading, targeted toward someone who was not the intended audience. Diablo Cody has said in no uncertain terms that that’s not how she would have put together a trailer or promotional material for the movie if it had been up to her. Clearly, something got (perhaps deliberately) misplaced in translation between the screenwriting, direction, and promotional efforts.

Jennifer’s Body is not about Megan Fox being hot. This movie is not intended for straight teenage boys, trailer be damned. This movie is for women, queer folk, and perhaps most importantly queer women — and no, it’s not just because of “That Kiss,” though I definitely have some pretty major thoughts on that one.

Jennifer’s Body undoubtedly borrows a premise from rape-revenge movies, and can absolutely be read that way at first glance. What’s compelling about this movie, though, is that you soon realize that it is not what the film is actually about. What happens to the abusers in this movie is nearly an afterthought, laid over the closing credits. The emotional center or the beating heart if you will, of Jennifer’s Body is a messy, intense, codependent, twists-and-turns romance: between Needy and Jennifer.

Given the presumed audience for this website, I don’t think I have to defend that one against accusations of reaching. I’m probably not about to tell you anything you don’t already know, but hey: I’m already here. Might as well follow this one down the proverbial rabbit hole.

The initial scene that seems to be played for laughs of Needy heart-eye-ing Jennifer as she cheerleads, first of all, can and should be read straight. Anita “Needy” Lesnicki is deeply, messily, and totally gay for Jennifer Check. Sandbox love, indeed, never dies. It’s not an accident that that scene is paired with the Black Kids’ “I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance With You.”

Much of the rest of Jennifer’s Body is spent escalating the warped, hungry tension between the two girls. Meanwhile, Chip (Needy’s boyfriend) nearly exclusively falls into the role that is usually held by the girlfriend in a horror movie. Essentially, he’s either there to pose a problem for the tumultuous relationship between Needy and Jennifer. Alternately, he’s there to be rescued.

Early on in the movie, for instance, Chip stands a little helplessly by while the girls, giggling amongst themselves, enter into a play-pushing fight until Jennifer pushes Needy a little too hard. Everyone in the scene freezes for a moment as Needy collides with the door, and then moves on.

Instantly, at least for me, this was reminiscent of every stray remark about boys on the playground being mean and playing rough because they like you. Turning that on its head and applying it to a pair of girls already brings forth something messy and interesting about the nature and shape of desire between women, especially if one or both are repressing it.

This undercurrent of tension (or even hostility) soon is mirrored by Needy herself, when she accompanies Jennifer to the Low Shoulder concert at Melody’s Gate, Devil’s Kettle’s only (and very grimy) bar. She looks on uncomfortably as Jennifer plays up the role of the sweet, awkward, doe-eyed girl in the hopes of getting the lead singer’s romantic attention, and retreats until she overhears the band talking about Jennifer being a virgin.

Needy takes this as her cue to storm up to the band, taking on what looks to be a protector role, insisting that Jennifer is a virgin, which is something she knows to be untrue. She also insists that Jennifer is not going to sleep with a band of slimy scumbags. Amanda Seyfried’s delivery in this scene evokes more than a protective drive, though; there’s a current of jealous defensiveness lying underneath it.

She genuinely believes that Jennifer is “too good” to sleep with the members of Low Shoulder. She also resents, though, that Jennifer has clearly been considering it. She wants Jennifer to be considering sleeping with her, instead, though she may not know it consciously.

Later, when Jennifer grabs and squeezes Needy’s hand during the concert proper, Needy is appeased and even relieved. She smiles warmly, adoringly, over at Jennifer, much the same way as she had during the early cheerleading scene. Her smile only fades when she realizes Jennifer isn’t looking back at her, and only has eyes for the band. She releases Jennifer’s hand abruptly, and we see the fading white patches where Jennifer had gripped her hand too hard.

Of course, as horror movies often do, things rapidly go downhill from here. A bloodied, maimed, nonverbal and snarling Jennifer staggers over to Needy’s house in the middle of the night, desperate and hungry. Though Jennifer is unable or unwilling to communicate in words what’s happened to her, her physicality is speaking volumes. This is clearly a nod to both physical manifestations of trauma and a reference to women in horror movies (and in real life) who can’t talk about what’s happening to them for fear they won’t be believed or understood.

This scene doesn’t just ratchet the scare needle up, though; the sexuality meter comes with it, as Jennifer narrowly resists the urge to bite Needy on the neck as they’re hugging. Unavoidably, the camera angles and the way it’s acted makes the near-miss look more like kissing. Then, Jennifer pushes Needy away at the last second and leaves. Jennifer is unable to express or act on whatever degree of desire she feels for Needy, whether to seduce her or to kill her, and storms out in silent frustration.

Jennifer and Needy’s desire for each other is messy, ugly, dangerous, hungry, and complicated. It’s undoubtedly stretched thin over a tumultuous friendship between teenage girls, but more than that, it speaks to the fraught, at times consumptive nature of attraction between young women. Our sexuality is weird and intimate and incidentally kind of terrifying in ways that sleeping with straight men often isn’t — and, at least in this context, it has nothing to do with futurity or procreation in the “conventional,” hetero-normative sense.

Though Jennifer uses sex as a lure through which to eat her male victims, there are repeated hints throughout the film that tell us what she really wants to be doing is consuming Needy. She doesn’t though. Instead, though Jennifer begins the transformation into a demon as an opportunistic creature, simply eating the most conveniently available boys, her pursuits quickly become more targeted.

For instance, Colin — the local emo kid — asks Jennifer out on a date. When she rejects him, Needy comes quickly to his defense, insisting that she thinks he’s “really cool.” The moment Needy expresses this interest in or liking for Colin, even if it’s not romantic, Jennifer abruptly changes her mind and decides to pursue him. Meanwhile, Needy looks on with the same mixture of jealousy, confusion, and annoyance she’d held watching Jennifer talk to Low Shoulder.

The clever, and decidedly uncomfortable, intercutting of scenes between Jennifer seducing Colin and Needy’s sweetly, clumsily earnest sex scene with her boyfriend, not only further entrenches the queer back-and-forth between the girls. It also confirms a bordering-psychic connection between them, as Needy flees — in the middle of having sex with Chip, no less — to try and track Jennifer down, realizing that something is deeply wrong. This frantic search only results in a series of scares, after which a frightened, tearful Needy returns home to find herself alone… or so she thinks.

By the time she finally crawls into bed, she finds Jennifer already there in the bed with her — a Jennifer who, I’ll add, is wearing one of Needy’s shirts. Understandably startled, Needy leaps out of bed and immediately demands that Jennifer leave. Jennifer, unfazed, responds, “But we always share your bed when we have slumber parties.”

The fraught, confusing tension of the scene leaves Needy still more vulnerable, and responsive when Jennifer kisses her. In a 2018 article for Vox by Constance Grady, she analyses the resulting kisses thusly: “the much-hyped kiss between Jennifer and Needy is less steamy girl-on-girl action served to the male gaze on a platter than it is an awkward, confused act of manipulation between two girls bound together equally by affection and ego-driven codependence.”

I’d absolutely agree with this assessment, but I might take it one step further. The kiss was misleadingly marketed as titillation alone, perhaps primarily for teenage boys, but — despite the lingering close-ups on the girls’ mouths — it was always more sad than sexy, for me. Until fairly recently, I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain why.

Certainly, it’s easy to read Jennifer as the manipulative party, as she instigates the kiss. I don’t think that’s inaccurate. She has begun realizing her newly-paranormal power over boys, and, to whatever extent she’s aware of Needy’s feelings for her, she wants to continue feeling in control of the relationship. That’s sad enough on its own. There is a somewhat frantic clutching for control over anything and everything in the wake of a bodily and emotional trauma that Jennifer hasn’t been able to fully process.

More than that, though, there’s a particular, peculiar desperation radiating from both girls in this scene. Not just in their attraction to each other, but in (forgive me) the specific neediness. As before, they don’t have or can’t use the words to express what’s happening, but they are talking with their bodies plenty. Each, in their own way, is trying to say, “Stop. Stay here. Be with me.” Jennifer wants Needy to understand, to be closer, to be part of what she’s doing. Needy wants Jennifer to stop what she’s doing, to come back to her, to be her “BFF” again.

Of course, since both girls are approaching this moment from such diametrically opposed positions, it can’t last. Needy pulls herself away, remembering suddenly all that happened before she found Jennifer in her bed, and demands an explanation.

Megan Fox imbues Jennifer with an unexpected, exhausted vulnerability held under a thin veneer of brittle indifference as she explains the trip in the van out to the woods, and the sacrifice. She rounds off her story with a fragile display of intimacy and affection: “I don’t really remember what happened after that. I just know that I woke up and I found my way back to you.”

After all that, though, Needy begins to doubt Jennifer’s story and pokes holes in it anyway. Feeling her control — and her closeness to Needy — slipping, Jennifer reaches for the nearest easy target. She nearly immediately responds by trying to make Needy insecure about her relationship with Chip, suggesting that Chip is “having second thoughts about [her].”

This is the first, but not the last, effort of Jennifer’s to drive a wedge between the couple, and doing so right on the heels of an attempted romantic overture is hard to read any other way than wanting Needy for herself. Indeed, she extends another — admittedly less tender — approach, quipping, “Come on, Needy, let me stay the night. We can play boyfriend-girlfriend like we used to.”

This obviously tells us that spending time together in romantic “play” isn’t new for either girl, first of all. More importantly, though, perhaps, is Jennifer’s reaction when Needy rejects her again. She turns away and moves to the window to leave, and doesn’t even look at Needy when asked what she’s doing. Her tone speaks volumes, though; this is the first time in the confrontation that Jennifer sounds genuinely hurt and stung before she disappears into the night.

Fast-forward to the high school spring formal. Needy has broken up with Chip, allegedly in an effort to protect him from Jennifer. She seems to have, at least unconsciously, picked up on the fact that Jennifer is trying to get her alone, by hurting the boys that are “in her way.” Needy then heads to the formal on her own, though she doesn’t dance, and barely touches the punch or snacks on offer; far too occupied keeping an eye out for Jennifer.

Meanwhile, off in the woods, Jennifer foils Needy’s plan and further convinces Chip that Needy cheated on him with Colin. Having summarily separated the two from each other, she proceeds to seduce Chip, intending to kill him. We see here the resolution of the thread that began with Colin.

While, as I said before, Jennifer starts off by consuming whichever boys are available to her in the moment, she rounds it off by setting her sights on eating boys that Needy has cared about, liked, or was intimate with. In essence, she can’t consume Needy, so she’s consuming boys that have been part of her in some way, all while trying to get Needy entirely alone so she can have her.

Despite the context of Jennifer’s Body as a horror movie, these intercutting sequences were immediately reminiscent to me of so many teen rom-coms where a girl goes to the dance and spends the entire time hoping her (male) crush will show up. The cut of Needy’s dress and the way her hair is styled also reminded me instantly of that ballroom scene in Labyrinth, much of which is spent on Sarah weaving and pushing through the crowd, just like Needy does, looking for Jareth.

“Okay, Zoe, now you’re reaching a little.” I honestly don’t think I am. Karyn Kusama is very self-aware about the media she’s referencing in her direction, and I don’t think any of these choices are incidental. I also think there’s a particular “in” here for queer audiences in the form of the many metatextual and self-referential remarks Jennifer’s Body makes.

As pointed out in the second episode of the Horror Queers podcast — in which they were discussing the first Scream movie — there’s an attraction among queer horror fans to exactly these kind of metatextual threads. We’re quite used to listening for the beats between words and the more subtle implications with which we might speak to each other in mixed company, and metatextual references in media play a similar role.

Jennifer’s Body puts a queer horror twist on straight rom-coms by having Needy trying and failing to find Jennifer at the dance, or “chasing after the girl” when she fears she’s missing her chance to find her. This is immediately recognizable territory if you speak Cody’s and Kusama’s language, which we do. Needy climbing over brambles and vines to find Jennifer and Chip in the abandoned swimming pool evokes fairytales like Sleeping Beauty, too, and I don’t think this is accidental either.

At the climax of the film, Needy confronts Jennifer armed with a box cutter — leading to an acerbic little double-entendre on the slang meaning of box, and Jennifer quipping that Needy buying her murder weapons at Home Depot is “so butch.” This is also the scene in which Jennifer finally bites Needy at the join of the neck and shoulder, while they’re fighting in Jennifer’s bed. The bite isn’t lethal, though, and it clearly wasn’t intended to be.

I’ve watched this movie several times, and I’ve always wondered if Jennifer somehow instinctively knew that Needy would get some of her power from being bitten. If so, that changes the framing of the scene a lot and hearkens back to the kissing sequence from earlier in the movie. “Stop. Stay with me. Be with me. Share this with me. We can do it together.”

By this point, though, the final confrontation is too far gone, culminating in Needy firmly tearing Jennifer’s “BFF” necklace off her throat and throwing it to the floor. Curiously, Jennifer seems to lose a lot of her power in the moment of that ultimate rejection. There’s a moment of freezing before Jennifer falls — the camera lingers on the girls’ hands slipping apart — and as Jennifer collapses to the bed beneath her, she looks genuinely hurt and vulnerable at being shut out for good.

The outcome, in essence, is that Jennifer pretty much lets Needy kill her. Unable to be with or consume the target of her affection, she lets go — and is almost smiling, looking nearly relieved, as she dies, very nearly in Needy’s arms and under her weight. As murders go, that’s pretty intimate if you ask me.