Jennifer's Body (2009)
By 2009, the horror-comedy as a genre had settled into two fairly distinct camps: the broad parody (your Scary Movie franchises, disposable and cheerfully stupid) and the more considered hybrid that takes its horror seriously while allowing the comedy to grow organically from character and situation. Jennifer's Body plants its flag firmly in the second camp, pitching itself as a sharp, knowing piece about female friendship, small-town suffocation, and what happens when a predatory music industry and actual demonic possession collide in a single bad night for a small Minnesota community. The film arrived in the same year as Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, another 2009 release that married genre convention to something a little more idiosyncratic, though the tonal ambitions of the two films could hardly be more different. Jennifer's Body wants to be nasty and funny and feminist all at once, which is a genuinely difficult combination to pull off, and the cultural conversation around it has shifted considerably in the years since release. What was dismissed on arrival as a thin vehicle for Megan Fox's then-ubiquitous presence has since been reassessed, particularly by audiences who feel the film was mismarketed to entirely the wrong demographic.
The picture comes from director Karyn Kusama, whose debut Girlfight (2000) announced her as a filmmaker with a clear eye for physicality and female interiority. Jennifer's Body marked her first foray into genre territory, working from an original screenplay by Diablo Cody, who had arrived at the project fresh off her Oscar win for Juno (2007). That pedigree gave the film a certain cultural momentum before a frame had been shot, though it also meant expectations were loaded in specific directions. Fox Atomic, the now-defunct genre label of 20th Century Fox, co-produced alongside Dubiecki, Novick and Reitman Productions and Dune Entertainment, positioning it as a mainstream studio horror with a sardonic edge. The budget was not especially notable, but the marketing spend was, and the film's commercial underperformance on release is now frequently cited as a case study in the mismatch between a film's actual audience and the one a studio decides to sell to.
The central pairing of Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried is the engine the whole thing is built around. Fox plays Jennifer, the possessed cheerleader whose small-town queen-bee status curdles into something considerably more lethal, while Seyfried takes the role of Needy, her quieter best friend and the film's real moral centre. Seyfried, who had already shown considerable range in Mamma Mia! and Mean Girls, brings a grounded reliability to the part that functions as the film's anchor. Adam Brody, largely known at the time for The O.C., is noticeably against type as the slick, predatory lead singer of a band whose ambitions outrun their scruples, and he makes the most of the opportunity. Johnny Simmons and Sal Cortez fill out the supporting landscape in a town that feels genuinely small and genuinely trapped. For a companion piece in the horror space, see also my review of Candyman (1992), a film that uses its genre framework to say something rather more pointed about the communities it depicts.
Cinematographer M. David Mullen shoots the film in a palette that is simultaneously glossy and slightly sickly, the kind of colour-saturated small-town American aesthetic that feels one notch too bright to be comfortable. There is a queasy warmth to the daylight sequences and a more conventional blue-tinged menace in the night material, though Mullen finds occasional moments where the two registers bleed into each other to genuinely unsettling effect. Editor Plummy Tucker keeps things moving at a clip that occasionally works against the material, though the pacing of the horror set pieces has a propulsive confidence that the connecting tissue sometimes lacks. The score, composed jointly by Theodore Shapiro and Stephen Barton, sits in the background for much of the runtime but sharpens usefully when the film commits to its nastier instincts, leaning into a queasy, slightly off-kilter register that suits the horror better than the comedy. I also wrote about Ghost World (2001), another film that takes female friendship in a suffocating small-town context as its starting point, albeit to rather different ends, and the comparison is worth sitting with.
Jennifer's Body is, more than anything, a film of missed opportunities. There was a sharp, nasty horror-comedy to be made from this premise, and every so often you can see it flickering at the edges, but the finished film keeps falling short of it. Part of the problem, and I am sorry to say it, is Megan Fox. She is not a strong enough lead to carry the thing, and a film pitched this squarely on its central performance badly needs one who can.
The script lets her down too, mind. It is sold as a comedy, but I did not find much of it actually funny, and the plot never feels fully developed. It manages the odd trick of feeling both rushed and dragged out at once, hurrying past things that needed room while lingering on others that did not, and there are plot holes dotted throughout that a tighter draft would have caught. For something that so clearly wants to be clever, it is oddly careless.
What does work is the nastier, more visceral side of it. The gore and the special effects are good, with a gleeful relish to the horror that the rest of the film never quite matches. But good effects can only do so much, and they cannot rescue what is, when you stand back from it, a thoroughly average film. Two and a half stars. There is a better, sharper version of this buried in here somewhere, and it is a shame this is not it.
Jennifer's Body occupies an odd place in the canon now: a film whose reputation has genuinely improved with distance, yet whose rehabilitation perhaps flatters the finished product a little more than it deserves. The feminist reading is real, the craft is polished but unremarkable, and the premise remains fertile enough that you can see why audiences have returned to it with more generosity. The reassessment is understandable. Whether the film itself quite earns it is another question entirely, and one this review addresses without much ambiguity. Some films are ahead of their time. Some are just unevenly made. Occasionally, frustratingly, they are both.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2009 | Watched: 2026-10-14
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Jennifer's Body (2009) on YouTube
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