Jennifer’s Body is perhaps the cultiest of cult classics. The movie critics were least ready for. And in retrospect, maybe it was too much to ask of 2009 to welcome a bisexual, literally maneating cheerleader (I know she’s in color guard leave me alone) with open arms. That said, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that one of the most feminist films of the past thirty years has also been the most critically maligned. Let’s talk about it.

For those of you unfamiliar with the premise of Jennifer’s Body, it centers on Anita “Needy” Lesnicki (Amanda Seyfried) and Jennifer Check (Megan Fox) as high school students who have been best friends since kindergarten. One night, they go to an indie band’s gig, and it turns out the band has made a deal with the devil that means they have to sacrifice a virgin. They kidnap Jennifer, who is not a virgin, and kill her, but this ends with her becoming possessed by a demon. Jennifer and Needy’s relationship begins to fracture as she gets worse and worse, killing their classmates and shunning her friend. On paper, this doesn’t sound feminist. It sounds like a movie about a hysterical teenager flying into a rage. And it would most definitely play that way if the same premise were written by a man. Lucky for us, the script was written by Diablo Cody, and directed by Karyn Kusama.

The movie’s most critical moment - Jennifer’s sacrifice - plays like a rape scene. There’s no way around it. The boys in the band gang up on her, tie her down, and laugh at her, mocking her name, and cheering their newfound success before they stab her to death. It is mostly filmed from Jennifer’s perspective on the ground, making all the more unsettling. What could have been just an exploitation scene effectively becomes a statement on male violence and assault with just a few choice directing choices. Not only that, but from then on, Jennifer lures in and kills her victims in much the same way she was lured in and killed. She might not be exacting revenge on the boys who killed her, but she is killing boys. And that’s really what matters. She promises them sex, and then eats them alive in retribution for having accepted a promise of only her body and nothing else. Which is iconic if you ask me, but definitely not something critics were ready for.

Which then brings us to the film’s title. Jennifer’s Body. For being only two words, the title does a lot for the story. For one thing, what the story is really focused on is the “totally lesbi-gay” relationship between Jennifer and Needy. It’s a movie about the difficulties of repressed yearning within a long-lasting friendship. It’s not about the boys Jennifer eats. It’s about queer female friendship and all its difficulties, varied and beautiful as they are. But what the title really does is indicate the most important point of the movie - that the girl on the screen for most of the movie is not Jennifer. She is in Jennifer’s body, but she is not her. She is something else that was put in there, and is now acting as a teenage girl who has been given all the power and rage she has ever wanted. But the main thing is that Jennifer Check is only onscreen for about the first twenty minutes of the movie, right up until she is murdered behind a dive bar while trying to have a fun night. Her body is a plot point, something to be taken by anyone who wants it, no matter what she wants or doesn’t.

A lot of people will call Jennifer’s Body a ‘good for her’ horror movie. And you all know that I don’t really believe in those (see: A Midsommar Night's Dream), but this is the closest anyone has ever gotten. It maybe helps that it was actually written by a woman. I tend to believe that all ‘good for her’ horror movies are really tragedies. Carrie, Midsommar, Hereditary, Pearl, etc., and Jennifer’s Body is no exception. What happened to Jennifer Check was awful, and not her fault. That is something the movie never shies away from. There is no concept of ‘oh, but she was at a bar’, or ‘oh but she was out looking to hook up with someone’ to blame her for her own murder. Jennifer’s Body is crystal clear on the fact that Jennifer was manipulated, lied to, and kidnapped by a whole group of men during a crisis situation, and that’s what led to her death and subsequent possession. I guess maybe the events of the movie might be empowering for the demon, and it certainly is cathartic to watch her eat shallow, predatory, boys for most of the movie. But Jennifer Check is dead, and Anita “Needy” Lesnicki is not.

Needy is the true hero of Jennifer’s Body and I will die on this hill. She stands by her possessed, evil, self-centered, friend until the very end. She goes to prison for her. She traumatizes herself, skips out on prom, and murders her best friend all to save Jennifer’s soul. Jennifer’s Body is a tragedy for everyone involved - several high school students are killed, Needy’s boyfriend dies in her arms, she has to murder her best friend and then go to prison - but Needy does what needs to be done. She saves her friend and her classmates. She exacts the revenge Jennifer wasn’t able to. She learns who she is outside of Jennifer, and it turns out that person can’t exist, so she does everything she can to live on like Jennifer would - which is to say, by using her newly inherited demonic powers to kill the people who killed her best friend since kindergarten. And to that I can, for the first time in So Desensitized history, say good for her. Needy is more than just the corrupted one of a standard corrupter/corrupted queer horror couple. She’s her own whole person, and she’s out for revenge.

Movies about female friendships tend to be about pitting women against each other, movies about women being assaulted tend to make it at least a little bit her fault, and high school movies don’t usually have much respect for teen girls’ inner lives. Jennifer’s Body knows all of this and turns it on its head. Jennifer and Needy have their difficulties, but they love each other, and all of their fights are actually really about the demon possessing Jennifer’s body, not their real relationship. Every reference to Jennifer’s murder makes it clear that she did nothing wrong, that it wasn’t her fault. And the whole entire plot hinges on the inner lives of teenage girls. It passes the Bechdel test with flying colors, and does not pass the reverse Bechdel test. The women in it are heavily sexualized, but to the point of satire and the male gaze, not for the men watching the movie. In fact, the movie was marketed as basically being about Megan Fox being really sexy, and then she jumped onto a car covered in blood and tore a boy to little tiny pieces and ate him, and the teenage boys it was marketed to didn’t really like that. So it bombed both critically and at the box office, because most people who watched it went in expecting a completely different, shallower, movie. But now people love it. It was given a new life by the queer community, who generally thought that Megan Fox was made sexier for the murder and cannibalism. So it didn’t do too bad after all.