Reclaiming The Pieces of Jennifer's Body
An ode to Jennifer Check and female rage & revenge in horror.
Jennifer’s Body (Karyn Kusama, 2009) is a film that has all the makings of a cult classic: demonic possession, MySpace-era emo rock, deadpan black comedy, and an exploration of queer sexuality told through the lens of two female best friends. While widely panned upon its premiere in 2009, the film has surged in popularity in the last few years, largely in credit to Gen Z, who have come to identify with the film’s villain, the titular Jennifer Check. There is a general consensus that Jennifer’s role as a succubus, literal maneater, demon, etc., is wholly justified, a resounding “Good for her!” credited to Jennifer’s unapologetic killing spree. The campy portrayal of such actions certainly influences the younger generation’s embrace of Jennifer; the highly-quotable line, “No, I’m killing boys!” has prefaced the film’s perception over the last near-decade and a half. Audiences’ identification with Jennifer begs the question of why: is it because of the marketing of the film, which catered towards the male gaze in its objectification of Megan Fox? Or, is it the viewing of the film from a feminist angle, one that merits Jennifer’s actions despite them being condemnable? Could it somehow be a mix of both?
At its core, Jennifer’s Body is a story of female violence, rage, and revenge. Jennifer is a victim of human sacrifice, kidnapped and killed in a trade with Satan by male strangers, in exchange for fame and fortune. Her positioning in the film as the sexy, popular girl, the object of desire, leads her toward her demise. Once she comes back from the dead, now with a demon residing in her, she subverts the objectification she endured all her life, wielding it as a weapon against the male gaze. Her transition into the role of the monster functions as a method of retribution, as she kills and consumes the boys at her high school one by one to sustain the demon within. Jennifer’s duality as both victim and killer destabilizes her role as a hyper-sexualized object of male attention, thus earning the respect of audiences who identify with her radicalized pursuit of revenge in the face of male violence.
Jennifer is bound and gagged to a tree in the desolate woods. She has been kidnapped by the indie rock band Low Shoulder, who she and her best friend, Needy, go to see at their local dive bar, Melody Lane. A massive fire has just erupted at the bar, leaving Jennifer nearly catatonic as she stumbles into the band’s van in a state of shock. As she comes back to reality, slowly realizing that she is in danger, she asks, “Are you guys rapists?” One of the unnamed bandmates follows with, “Are you even sure if she’s a fucking virgin, man?” A tear is streaming down Jennifer’s cheek when a look of realization dawns on her, and she quickly responds with, “Yes. Yes, I’m a virgin, I’m a virgin. I’ve never even done sex. I don’t know how.” A hint of a smile has appeared on her face, alluding to her assumed prospect of being “saved” by feigning purity, as she suggests, “So, you guys should find somebody who does… know how.”
Little does she know, she has drastically misread the situation. Frederick Blichert1 expands on the paradox in which Jennifer finds herself trapped:
“It’s true that Jennifer’s killing spree could have been prevented if she’d been a virgin — though, of course, that wouldn’t have saved her. The rules in this situation are literally diabolical, and the dichotomy between pure and impure is fundamentally not the problem. The problem is how sex is used, abused, warped, and mapped onto people’s reputations to create an arbitrary, deeply sexist moral order… The scariest part of this horror film is not the demonic possession or (literal) man-eating, but a violent patriarchal world that sees girls as disposable, as tools to get ahead.”
Jennifer is dragged into the woods, screaming, sobbing, and pleading for her life as she learns that the band plans to sacrifice her in a deal with Satan, in exchange for wealth and notoriety. Nikolai’s ritual begins with, “We come here tonight to sacrifice the body of…” Immediately, Jennifer is reduced to nothing more than her body. The pure spectacle of a young girl about to be murdered ultimately outweighs her humanity. She begins to plead for her life once again, begging, “I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything you want,” still relying on the fact that, in their false belief that she is a virgin, what the men truly want is the prospect of sex. Nikolai and his henchmen completely ignore Jennifer’s pleas; instead, they drone on about how Satan is their only chance at making it big, and therefore, they will have to “butcher” and “bleed” her. We are forced to watch as she is stabbed to death by Nikolai in a slow-motion, erratic sequence, her screaming echoing throughout.
The scene is a poignant shift in the film, and the first time we truly see Jennifer’s vulnerable side, in contrast to the confident demeanor she projects from the beginning. This scene is shown in tandem with Jennifer confessing the events to Needy for the first time, confirming her suspicions that ever since that night, Jennifer hadn’t been the same. As Needy reaffirms that she was, in fact, murdered, Jennifer scoffs back (in her classic, dry humorous fashion): “I’m still here, aren’t I? I mean, they did go all Benihana on my ass with that knife and it should have killed me, but for some reason, it didn’t,” punctuated with a sly smirk. “Maybe it did,” Needy says, now crying as she and we, the audience, recognize Jennifer for what she has truly become: both dead and undead, a succubus tasked with sustaining the demon inside of her by eating humans—teenage boys being her delicacy of choice.
With this scene, Jennifer’s duality is established: she is both the victim and the killer, forcing the viewer to question their moral stance regarding her actions. Further, she is effectively placing the customary horror tropes of female vengeance into question. Learning of Jennifer’s murder, the viewer comes to realize that her character development within various stereotypes of the female lead in the Western film canon—the popular girl, the babe, the bitch, the whore, the villain—is merely a projection. Certainly, Jennifer relishes in her desirability: she sources her power from her looks and laughs at men who have the audacity to come onto her unprovoked. Yet, as we learn, her ego and sexuality will not save her; instead, they position her as a target for abuse, and she is punished for having the nerve to acknowledge her desires. To quote Linda Williams2: “The woman’s gaze is punished, in other words, by narrative processes that transform curiosity and desire into masochistic fantasy.”
Thus, Jennifer’s agency is stripped away from the moment she is kidnapped, her gaze no longer holding any semblance of the power she once knew. The plot of Jennifer’s Body, following Jennifer’s possession, echoes the horror film’s condemnation of monstrous female desire, while opening the door to a merging of killer and victim and presenting a complex characterization in the process.
Thus, her bloodlust is not inherent, but taught; she is, after all, a product of her environment…
Carol K. Clover writes, “To the extent that the monster is constructed as feminine, the horror film thus expresses female desire only to show how monstrous it is.”3 Jennifer as the monstrous feminine poses a fascinating approach to womanhood and the condemnation of such. Her transition from a high school villain to a demonic one is a manifestation of the abuse she endures from men. Imagining Jennifer as a femme fatale, perhaps the most widely recognizable version of the monstrous feminine, hints at the belief that a beautiful woman is secretly evil and out for blood, using her methods of seduction to lure men to their deaths. In Jennifer, we see glimpses of the femme fatale that reinforce her power, both before and after her transformation.
Surely, prior to her murder, her reputation as a “maneater” was well-established, for better or for worse. The difference with Jennifer’s characterization, however, was that she harnessed the cruelty of the femme fatale in seeking vengeance. After suffering through objectification all her life, reaching a peak when her life is taken from her in an act of misogynistic violence, she comes back to life with a mission to flip her mistreatment on its head. Thus, her bloodlust is not inherent, but taught; she is, after all, a product of her environment, radicalized to the point where murdering boys is her version of a feminist act.
After Jennifer is murdered—unbeknownst to anyone at first, including the audience—she arrives unexpectedly at Needy’s house. She stands in the middle of the kitchen, drenched in blood, staring at Needy with glazed-over eyes. After being asked what happened to her, a sinister smile slowly creeps onto Jennifer’s face. Without saying a word, she stumbles over to the fridge where she devours a rotisserie chicken and proceeds to vomit a spiky black substance onto Needy and the floor. The correlation to the abject is clear: Jennifer’s body—or, rather, what has become of it—arises a discomfort within the viewer that is difficult to place. Is it the blood? The fear of vomit? The uncanniness in her smile? Perhaps it is a combination of the three, conflating in the underlying awareness that we are seeing Jennifer’s body as an animated corpse.
She has become something almost unrecognizable, a thing revoked of her beauty, sex appeal, and charisma…
Julia Kristeva4, in an expansion of her theory of the abject, defines the corpse as “the most sickening of wastes, a border that has encroached upon everything… death infecting life.” In this scene, Jennifer is fully rejecting the hyper-feminine persona that viewers have become accustomed to. She has become something almost unrecognizable, a thing revoked of her beauty, sex appeal, and charisma that made those around her, and in the audience, unavoidably drawn to her in the first place. She is now the monster, and we all must reckon with the fact that the Jennifer we knew is virtually gone.
In human-Jennifer’s place is a human-monster hybrid, a zombie-like caricature that, in order to retain her beauty and status, must devour human flesh. As she begins her rampage on the teenage boys at her high school, Jennifer settles into tropes of the radically feminine, heightened by her insatiable appetite for both human bodies and sex. Jennifer’s transformation is defined in broad terms throughout the film. Needy, the only person with the ability to catch on to Jennifer’s behavior with a level of skepticism, determines in her research on the paranormal that “Jennifer’s evil… No, I mean, she’s actually evil. Not high school evil.” She loosely references demonic transference, though the exact parameters of Jennifer’s possession remain somewhat unclear.
Jennifer’s ability to embody the abject lies in this realm of the unknown and her ambivalence towards her actions works to reinforce this strange in-between. She maniacally smirks at football player Jonas Kozelle before bearing her deranged fangs and disemboweling him in the woods. She lures everyone’s favorite emo boy Colin Gray to an abandoned house, her smile alluding to intense gratification as she breaks his limbs, announcing, “I need you frightened, I need you hopeless,” before turning him into “lasagna with teeth.” And with her last kill—Needy’s boyfriend, Chip Dove—she drains the blood from his neck, defending her stance by delivering the legendary lines, “And now I’m eating your boyfriend. See? At least I’m consistent.”
Until the end, Jennifer remains unwaveringly persistent, driven by rage, and desperate to reclaim any remnants of the humanity that was stolen from her. Ultimately, her was taken from her with no remorse—who’s to say she shouldn’t do the same? After all, we watched her be innocently butchered at the hands of men; her retaliation is only “part of the pleasure” of watching her come back to life—almost, that is. Isabel Cristina Pinedo5, in a brilliant analysis of women in slasher films, cites that there is a level of satisfaction that comes from watching a character like Jennifer wield her possession into a form of female rage, a rage that typically only exists in fantasy. Bringing such to life, she writes, “enable[s] women to experience taboo emotions (be they rage or sexual arousal) and vicarious actions (be they killing or fucking) without the onus of guilt.”
Watching the film, it is easy to forget that Jennifer was a victim of violence. Her characterization at the beginning, while founded in confidence and charisma, also makes her somewhat unlikable: she’s openly rude and demeaning towards Needy, primarily dismissive of the men who give her attention, and visibly self-centered. Jennifer is nowhere near a “perfect victim,” but this does not disregard the fact that she endures violence in multiple forms, the most physical being her death. The conditioning of women to silently undergo pain is unavoidable in Jennifer’s tragedy, and those aware of the pervasiveness of male violence may find a source of identification in Jennifer’s enactment of her revenge.
In the final scenes of the film, we see Needy take on her own revenge against Jennifer for eating her boyfriend. She crashes through Jennifer’s window, wielding a box cutter as a weapon as the two friends wrestle in mid-air, trying to defeat the other. Jennifer bites Needy’s shoulder, transferring the demonic powers to her, and Needy rips off Jennifer’s “BFF” necklace, a symbolic breaking of their psychic bond. As Jennifer crashes onto the bed, Needy stabs her, in the heart, ending her rampage once and for all. Needy, in her desperate attempts to save her best friend, has no choice but to kill her, and Jennifer becomes a symbol of tragedy once again. We watch as she dies for the second time, the color in her face slowly coming back and spreading through her body; she reassumes her human form.
Enhancing the tragedy is the fact that Jennifer and Needy shared an undeniable romantic connection, one that would be remiss to not note. Numerous instances in the film hint towards the fact that neither character is “straight,” per se, culminating in an infamous kiss shared between the two and the iconic lines:
“I thought you only murdered boys.”
“I go both ways.”
And still, even after Jennifer’s killing spree finishes by eating her boyfriend and threatening to kill her next, Needy still holds love for her, unable to let their connection go. She understands, beneath her grief and anger, that Jennifer was a victim, acting only as she was conditioned to. The transference of (certain) demonic powers to Needy is oddly a blessing in disguise: after being institutionalized—assumedly after being caught by Jennifer’s mother in the act of killing her—Needy manages to escape, plotting to track down and kill the members of Low Shoulder. She hitchhikes to their hotel, breaks into their room, and, in a legendary end-credits sequence, brutally stabs them to death with the same murder weapon used against Jennifer. It is a rather cathartic ending, as Needy avenges Jennifer in carrying out the mission that she never got the chance to.
There is simply no denying the power that Jennifer Check holds. In her flagrant acts of murder and her arrogant displays of deflection, is a character who loves to be hated. Her role as a succubus is a manifestation of the anger held against the cruelty of men, one that is indicative of the fantasy of female rage harnessing the potential to become a reality. One can identify with her because they know what it feels like to have that inexplicable anger within—she is just one of the only characters willing to carry out her revenge. The destabilizing of the tropes that plague women and sexuality in the horror genre pervade the entirety of Jennifer’s Body, forcing the viewer to question how they have viewed female killers in the past, and how they may see them differently when faced with their victimization. Wildly misunderstood and perhaps finally getting her due, Jennifer is a character that horror desperately needs, a reimagining of the monstrous feminine that has the potential to rectify generations of silenced women in horror — even if it means killing a handful of teenage boys in the process.
Blichert, Frederick. Extra Salty: Jennifer’s Body, 2021.
Williams, Linda. “When The Woman Looks,” 1984.
Clover, Carol K. “Her Body, Himself.” Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, 1992.
Kristeva, Julia. “Approaching Abjection,” 1982.
Pinedo, Isabel Cristina. “…And Then She Killed Him: Women and Violence in the Slasher Film,” Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing, 1997.
Love this range and the Clover reference and other texts as critical context.