Niche Film Writings

Hell is a Teenage Girl: Megan Fox as Jennifer Check in Jennifer's Body. Courtesy of Fox Atomic. Karyn Kusama's Jennifer's Body is a sharply witty horror-comedy with all the ingredients for a genre film success. It follows a high school girl, Amanita 'Needy' Lesnicki, whose best friend, Jennifer, becomes possessed by a demon and starts preying on and eating fellow high schoolers, and was written by Diablo Cody only two years after she received an Academy Award for best original screenplay for her 2007 film Juno.  Starring Amanda Seyfried and Megan Fox, both fresh out of box office blockbuster hits ( Mamma Mia! grossing $615 million in 2008 and Transformers  grossing $709 million in 2007, respectively), Jennifer's Body should have been a successful Halloween-time release for Kusama, a relatively unknown director looking for a chance to break through. Horror films are infamous for their money-grabbing, superficial tendencies, doing anything for a quick prof...

Evan Alex, Lupita Nyong'o and Shahadi Wright Joseph as Jason, Adelaide and Zora  Wilson  in Us. Courtesy of Universal Pictures. Warning: This article contains major spoilers for Us  (2019). Jordan Peele's second film, Us , begins as a benign home invasion movie, following the Wilson family on holiday as they are stalked and attacked by their doppelgangers (or as the film calls them, the tethered); however, it quickly becomes much more. Though Us tackles many themes with dexterity and nuance, the familial unit is front and centre, bringing particular attention to the relationships between family members and challenging our expectations of what a family should be in a horror film. When not neglected from the narrative entirely, horror film families are fragmented, abusive and sources of trauma; conflict tends to arise from within the family unit as a result of external forces (such as in The Shining, Pet Sematary or Poltergeist), destroying the family from the insi...