With the recent release of Jennifer’s Body on DVD there have been a second round of reviews that re-affirmed what the original critical reception stated. Jennifer’s Body, it was deemed, is a misogynistic film aimed squarely at the Transformers fans market. I, however, would have to disagree and suggest that, although flawed, there is a lot more going on in the film than originally suspected.

Jennifer’s Body produced a rare opportunity in the male dominated world of American cinema to put a unique spin on what a mainstream horror movie could be. From the pen of Oscar winning screen writer Diablo Cody, known for her strong female leads in Juno and The United States of Tara, the film offered a chance at atonement for Karyn Kusama after her misfiring Aeon Flux and the potential to give cinema-goers fed up with torture porn and PG horror a new, cerebral experience. And yet, despite Cody’s reassurances that the film would be a smart, sassy feminist addition to her impressive canon, the end result is all the more disappointing because of this wasted opportunity. Or so I thought after initially seeing the film. A period of perpending revealed a much more intelligent, well-considered tale than had been initially envisioned.

Megan Fox stars as the titular character, her role being that of the high school genre stock character – the hot girl. She’s the vixen whose looks have all the male students enchanted, the head cheerleader, the girl the camera focuses on as her hips sashay down Devil’s Kettle High School’s corridors. Atypically for a high school film Fox, the “hot” one, is best friends with Amanda Seyfried’s character “Needy” a.k.a the geeky one. As with most films set in high schools, the “geeky” one is of course played by a splendidly pretty young lady who dons glasses for the film’s role; one of the many clichés this film presents yet subtly subverse as the ideology progresses.

Things go awry for our lead characters when Jennifer drags Needy along to see a rock band perform and, in a mix up of epic proportions, Jennifer is mistaken for a virgin and kidnapped by the band from the venue which has serendipitously set ablaze. Later that night, Jennifer arrives at Needy’s home beaten, grimy and bloody, unwilling to say what has just happened.

Needy is further confused when Jennifer appears at school the next day acting as though the previous night had never occurred. Jennifer is seemingly the only person not mourning the fire which took the lives of a number of the town’s young and, to compound the strange events going down in Devil’s Kettle, the high school’s star football player is found brutally murdered.

Needy is the only one who suspects that Jennifer may now be possessed by some type of vampiric succubus; something happened to Jennifer that night and how else to explain the strange occurrences? As with a whole host of films dealing with the supernatural, our protagonist Needy heads to the library to read up on her suspicions that Jennifer has become “actually evil. Not high school evil.”

In one of the many moments of knowing tongue-in-cheek in Jennifer’s Body, Chip, Needy’s boyfriend, finds himself asking the obvious question:

“Our library has an occult section?”

Diablo Cody has described the film as a belated feminist entry into the horror canon and, whilst the idea is a noble one, the execution of the film suggests, at first glance, some disparity between her best intentions and the finished product. Cody’s aim apparently was to include the sexist fundaments of horror and then go about butchering them one by one. And whilst the role of vampiric seduction is inverted to see females seducing males, a clear reversal on the Dracula story, there is initially little more evidence to suggest Cody has achieved her lofty goals. Feminism should surely not have the leads fit so squarely into such stereotypes; if it was Cody’s intention to debunk these then she seemingly failed – at no point did Megan Fox ever become more than a hot girl ogled both by her male peers and, with regularity, by Kusama’s camera. Similarly, Seyfried failed, it would seem, to advance beyond her role as the nerdy “Final Girl”.

With the references to Argento (et al) in Juno it would seem that Cody is indeed a fan of the horror genre and, given her propensity to write strong female leads, the whole damn mess that is Jennifer’s Body becomes downright confusing. Aside from the failure to communicate a clear feminist message, Jennifer’s Body also shows a surprising amount of irony-free horror clichés that are laughable for all the wrong reasons; hackneyed images of blood falling from the ceiling, apparitions of victims ominously seated in chairs. “Cody has proved herself to be a writer of much talent and it would be impossible to imagine she won’t bounce back from this mis-step” would not be an inappropriate first impression.

Yet it becomes apparent by the time the film has ended that approaching Jennifer’s Body as either a horror or comedy is to do the film a mis-service. Whilst adopting the tenants of the horror movie and lacing the screen-play with trademark wit and stylized dialogue, Cody is, instead, framing a seldom told story within the confines of a standard genre movie. The film is a barbed and subtle critique on the representation of females in the media and, as such, a much bigger film than initially envisioned; appropriating the cinematic cues and language of the horror genre is simply Cody’s way of Trojan horsing an entirely different, less commercial tale into the mainstream. At its heart Jennifer’s Body is, to borrow a Cody-esque word, a “Frienemy” film – a plot centred around the intense, almost romantic, relationship between the two disparate lead characters whose relationship falls apart as men enter their life. A straightforward reading of the film would see Cody fail at splicing the scripts of Clueless and Scream together in a sub-Kevin Williamson attempt at satire. Yet, taking the film on a different level, there is much to be read from Cody’s critique of the modern representation of women.

Simultaneously to telling the tale of two young women bound together from their youth, young women who have began to outgrow each other as sexuality, or lack thereof, have entered their lives, Cody’s script, through fantastic casting and a delicious subtext, has managed to deliver a damning indictment on the pop culture ideal of modern women. Megan Fox, winner of many “Sexiest Woman In The World” polls, is delightfully cast as the polar opposite of the supposed “mousy” Amanda Seyfried. Fox, in a surprisingly engaging turn, represents Jennifer as a character whose sexuality defines her – she is “socially relevant” and attractive only when she is sexually active; when not “man eating” she needs to plaster herself in layers of make-up to maintain her alluring veneer. Sexuality, it seems, is the only thing that defines Jennifer. Seyfried, on the other hand, delivers a nuanced turn as Needy, a woman who has a steady boyfriend and an appetite to study; she, rather than the mass murdering Jennifer, is deemed insane by society in the film. Her glasses, a cliched semiotic in the horror realm, act as a deeply satiric feature in the highlighting of how an overly used item can signify that a clearly attractive, normal woman can be deemed as not fitting social norms by deviating ever so slightly from the tight, set rules of what a woman should be according to the popular media.

Cody’s script, as well as being hugely satiric, also manages to tell an exclusively female tale in a medium that presents male stories as the norm. The tale of two friends who outgrow each other as puberty impacts upon their life is subtly told by Cody and Kusama; fleeting shots of Needy’s glances at Jennifer, an emphasis placed by Needy on Jennifer’s well-being over those who have literally burnt to death before her eyes – the romantic feelings escalating from a teen confusion, and frustration, by Needy toward Jennifer are clearly signposted before a lingering, passionate kiss between the two which, on first impression, may seem exploitative. In a less intelligent film the “experimental sleepover” scene may have been the case but, in Jennifer’s Body, the kiss marks an important coming-of-age moment for Needy. Having let her attention veer towards her BFF during her first sexual encounter with Chip and asking him not to attend the prom so she can “keep an eye on Jennifer”, it is clear that Needy’s feelings towards the cheerleader are not necessarily platonic until that moment. Needy’s intense feelings towards Jennifer are bordering both “extreme friendship” and “girl crush” territory. Her cries of “What the fuck?” after some period of kissing suggest that, having experimented with these feelings, Needy is experiencing the real horror in the film – not supernatural beings or demonic possession but rather the confusion that is felt by adolescent women struggling to come to terms with and understand their sexuality. Needy is experiencing the emotions she reflects in the films opening line of dialogue: “Hell is a teenage girl.”

Despite the rather intelligent, rich sub-text the film is not, unfortunately, without its flaws. The end product is one which, thankfully, will not appeal to frat boys and Eli Roth fans who like their horror exploitative and their females humiliated; this is certainly no Captivity. However, nor will this film appeal to the feminists who Cody was attempting to reach out to.

Jennifer’s Body is a well-intentioned mess of a film; a comedy that never fully raises a chuckle, a satire which indulges clichés whilst challenging some, acquiescing to others, and a horror with no scares beyond a couple of sforzando stabs. Whilst not an abundantly horrible film, its lofty ambitions mean this can be at best be described as a well-intentioned failure.