Jennifer’s Body flopped in 2009 because it was sold as a sexy teen slasher for boys, when it was really a story about two girls, assault, and queer love. The same female-rage, “good for her” horror it pioneered is exactly what packs theaters now.
In 2009 it made $31.6 million on a $16 million budget and got written off as a middling horror-comedy that was neither funny nor scary enough. 20th Century Fox sold it as a hot-girl slasher built on Megan Fox’s Transformers image, aimed at teenage boys. Blah, blah, blah, we all know this story by now, and yeah that marketing buried what Diablo Cody and Karyn Kusama actually made: a biting satire of objectification, an assault allegory, and a queer coming-of-age story about two girls.
Cody has said the bond between Jennifer and Needy is “pretty obviously a queer relationship.” Fox has said women still tell her the film triggered their sexual awakenings or helped them come out.
The plot itself is the assault metaphor: Jennifer is lured by an all-male band, killed in a botched satanic ritual because she isn’t a virgin, and returns as a succubus who has to consume boys to stay powerful. The emotional center is the intense, codependent, erotically charged friendship: sandbox love, the “lesbi-gay” insult, the kiss after Needy sleeps with her boyfriend, Jennifer’s “I go both ways,” and the final confrontation that ends both the possession and the bond.
Streaming and social media gave it a second life. By the 2020s it was the feminist and queer cult classic credited as an ancestor of the female-rage wave that now packs theaters: Pearl, Midsommar, Ready or Not, Blink Twice, and Obsession. The latter, a micro-budget ($750k) film about male entitlement that turns a woman into a violent, autonomy-stripped obsession, just crossed $500 million worldwide, becoming the first original film of the 2020s to hit that mark and one of the highest-grossing horror movies ever.
This is the exact cultural moment Jennifer’s Body was ready for in 2009. The audience that made Obsession a phenomenon already existed; they just had to find the earlier film on their own years later.
A sequel is for happening. Production listings put filming in Vancouver this October. Cody is writing it and has said the original’s constraints left her feeling “unleashed”; the new script is a direct response to the rediscovery. Kusama is directing. Fox is returning. Amanda Seyfried has said she won’t do it without her. The fans who spent years arguing it was a queer trauma text have one clear ask: sell it as what it is this time. Do that, and it doesn’t chase Obsession numbers 17 years later, it opens at them.
