![]() ![]() In horror, girls and women do not have to be pretty, polite, chaste or even heterosexual - in fact, these characters are so terrifying because they willfully eschew gendered assumptions. This, I learned at 16, is where the true beauty of the horror genre lies. Watching “Jennifer’s Body” with a foot-long incision healing on my back, I was as drawn to Needy’s wretched, anti-medical mania as I was to Jennifer’s emo-worship. As a teenager, before I was wheeled into surgery, I had a panic attack so strong I was dosed with what felt like enough Ativan to fell a hippopotamus. She first appears in a psychiatric hospital, where she kicks a doctor and spits in her face. While Jennifer is sacrificed because of, well, her body, society scorns Needy - the only character who knows the truth about Jennifer - because of her mind. It is especially jarring to learn that the musician (or comedian, chef or actor) you once admired could see you as little more than a means to an end. Jennifer’s is a pain many women understand. The violence is heavily sexualized - Jennifer worries aloud in the band’s van that the members might be rapists, and there’s a longstanding symbolic relationship between stabbing and sexual penetration. And he victimizes her specifically because she is female. Jennifer is betrayed by the very artist she worships. The band’s frontman, Nikolai (Adam Brody), stabs Jennifer repeatedly while merrily singing. When rocker boys sacrifice Jennifer to Satan, the scene is absurd and chock-full of Cody’s signature quips, but it is also oppressively dark. I had helped carry a mattress across campus in solidarity with Emma Sulkowicz the year before. It was 2015, and it seemed the whole country was waking up to college rape culture. The virgin-sacrifice scene, which had barely registered to my teenage brain, now stole all the air from the room. For my 21st birthday at Smith College, my friends and I commandeered a classroom and projected the movie. In the last few years, female fans have reclaimed “Jennifer’s Body” and consider it a pre-#MeToo classic. After I saw “Jennifer’s Body” at 16, I searched for it on the review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, expecting to see my jubilance reflected back at me. Though it was written with a female audience in mind, sexist expectations marginalized the movie. Jennifer and Needy are both sexually active throughout the film, despite Needy’s mousy affect. The film also plays the “wanton” Jennifer and “virginal” Needy against each other to farcical extremes. It is one of the few horror movies where a teenage girl’s promiscuity actually saves her from her untimely end - if Jennifer really had been a virgin, there would be no movie. “Jennifer’s Body” satirizes gendered tropes. That is why it is my favorite genre, and one I return to over and over and over again for novel representations of women. Such subversive female derangement is mostly possible in horror films, where bullied, bloody girls burn down their schools and passive mothers sacrifice their children. Mild-mannered Needy must save her helpless boyfriend from Jennifer - and by the end Needy hunts down and kills the band that started it all. After an indie band murders Jennifer in an erroneous virgin sacrifice, she is reborn as a monster with a taste for male blood. But their path to oblivion is oddly liberating, as both girls forgo stereotypical feminine docility to don the roles of hero (Needy) and villain (Jennifer). By the film’s end, Needy and Jennifer are shells of their yearbook-picture-perfect selves. ![]()
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