Why Are We Afraid of Teenage Girls? Exploring the Critical Reception to Jennifer's Body (2009)

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 profit, and it works; there is a huge audience for horror, willing to sit through remakes and sequels year after year. Jennifer's Body should have been a soaring success- but it wasn't; it barely doubled its production budget of $16 million in the global box office. All the elements were in place for an audience-pleasing horror hit, except there was one thing that held viewers back; Jennifer herself.

Teenage girls in horror films can usually be divided into three categories. Firstly, there are the Scream Queens, seen in slasher movies of the 70s and 80s, who die early on at the hands of a demented serial killer. They're stupid, two-dimensional and caricature-ish; they scream and then they die, usually as a result of promiscuity or sexual misdeeds. Think Drew Barrymore's Casey Becker in Scream, Lynda van der Klok in Halloween, and the mother of all scream queens (though not being a teenager): Janet Leigh as Marion Crane in Psycho.

Drew Barrymore as Casey Becker in Scream.
Courtesy of Dimension Films.

In the second category, there are the 'Final Girls', a term coined by Carol Clover in her seminal piece Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. These are the foils to the Scream Queens, women who survive the killer and live long enough to either be rescued (usually by a man) or kill the killer themselves. Clover defines Final Girls as 'not masculine but either/or, both, ambiguous'; they have the masculine-coded traits of strength, intelligence and resourcefulness, they are rarely seen being sexually active (a notable exception to this rule is Sidney Prescott in the somewhat post-modern Scream), and they often have androgynous names such as Laurie, Sidney, or Ripley.

Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode in Halloween.
Courtesy of Compass International Pictures.

The third category is the one that Jennifer fits into: the female villain. Teenage girls are often portrayed as monstrous, disgusting and demonic as a result of puberty: Reagan in The Exorcist goes from an innocent child to a possessed heretic; Carrie White in Carrie is much the same, turning from timid and God-fearing into blood-soaked and murderous after the onset of her first period. Reagan and Carrie are both seen as villains by the narrative of their respective stories, and their descent into a monster is inextricably tied with their arrival to adolescence. Jennifer follows this trend almost perfectly; she is far from innocent before she becomes demonic as the result of a failed ritual sacrifice, and claims to be 'not even a back-door virgin anymore', but she is still a fairly harmless teenage girl becoming corrupted by forces beyond her control, just like Reagan and Carrie. So why is it that Carrie and The Exorcist have become cult horror classics, succeeding where Jennifer's Body has failed, if they have essentially the same subject matter?

It could be argued that the success of a film like Carrie is partly due to director Brian de Palma and his fame- but de Palma had only directed three films before Carrie, two of which were box office flops. Carrie's success could also be attributed in part to the fantastic Sissy Spacek, but as I have already mentioned, Jennifer's Body features two actresses who had previously starred in Hollywood productions that were fresh in the cultural consciousness. What really differs between the two films is the presentation of their female 'monster'; Carrie is meek, scared and ultimately self-destructive. She appeals to a male audience with a long, almost pornographic shower scene, and though she is responsible for a lot of death and destruction, she has a good reason; the abuse she suffers from both her mother and her peers makes her an empathetic character, a victim as well as a villain.

Sissy Spacek plays both victim and villain as Carrie White in Carrie.
Courtesy of MGM.

To contrast, Jennifer is never seen as a victim, even before her demonic turn. She is mean and catty to her best friend Needy and dismissive to everyone else. We see her fear briefly during the scene where she is sacrificed by a fame-hungry indie band, as she sobs "please, please don't do this, I'll do anything"; but her suffering is detracted from as the man sacrificing her cracks jokes and starts to sing Tommy Tutone's Jenny (867-5309). After Jennifer's transformation, she is even more brutal, telling the men she kills that she 'need[s] them frightened', before devouring them with lengthened, needle-like teeth. Jennifer is unapologetic in every aspect of her personality and refuses to bend to societal expectations of what a girl should and shouldn't do; she refuses to be chaste, is openly sexual, and preys on men for no reason other than she wants to. She is far from the harmless femininity portrayed in most media; she is an active, violent and confident femininity, which scares us, and which we subconsciously don't want to encourage because of the threat it poses, hence the mainly negative critical response to Jennifer's Body.

Megan Fox herself best describes the box office flop of Jennifer's Body, acknowledging society's reticence to support a film with a scary, monstrous woman who does not hide her viciousness. "People expected 'Jennifer's Body' to make so much money," she says. "But I was doubtful. The movie is about a man-eating, cannibalistic lesbian cheerleader, and that pretty much eliminates middle America. It's obviously a girl-power movie, but it's also about how scary girls are. Girls can be a nightmare."
At the time of its release, the public may have ignored or criticised Jennifer's Body, but in the years after, it has risen in popularity, gaining a new cult following of teenage girls who identify with Jennifer's plight as a young woman in a society very carefully constructed to disenfranchise young women. Jennifer tells us that we should reclaim our spaces, our lives and our sexuality- her murderous tendencies could easily be read as a metaphor for female empowerment and standing up against sexism. Culture as a whole is starting to take women more seriously, and maybe that's why the fear of teenage girls is being increasingly realised in media, especially horror; think of The Witch, portraying a teenage daughter as a threat to the family unit, and Julia Ducourneau's Raw, which implicitly connects female teenage sexuality to cannibalism. Megan Fox was right when she said that girls can be a nightmare, but she forgot to mention that we can also be powerful, and that's what people are afraid of.

Works cited:
Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, by Clover, Carol J. Princeton Classics Edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015

Written by Millie Felton. Published on 29th March 2019.