Whoever marketed Jennifer’s Body underestimated two things: just how gay everyone would grow up to be, and just how into horror women are.
By now, the Karyn Kusama-directed cult classic is well into its critical resurgence, having finally found its audience of Sapphic Tumblr girlies and Gen Z film nerds left to feast on the carcass of millennial culture. But those of us who remember the film’s 2009 theatrical release know how brutally it was savaged at the time.
The Los Angeles Times called it “sorely lackluster,” the Associated Press deemed it “only sporadically amusing,” and the AV Club couldn’t get past screenwriter Diablo Cody’s penchant for coining slang. The movie was dismissed as a vacuous writing exercise — a vehicle for witty one-liners and little else.
Popularly, it developed a reputation for featuring a same-sex kiss between co-stars Megan Fox, who plays cheerleader-turned-succubus Jennifer Check, and Amanda Seyfried, who perfectly captures the vicissitudes of being a popular girl’s best friend in her role as the timorous “Needy” Lesnicki. That steamy scene proved formative for many girls who grew up to be queer women, but feminist critics at the time largely dismissed it as shameless titilation. (In one representative review, Salon wrote that the scene’s “calculated eroticism is enough to make you long for the male gaze.”)
Of course, it was never meant to be interpreted that way. Jennifer’s Body is a film about female friendship — one that takes the underlying violence of a sororal bond and renders it explicit, bloody, and beautiful. Jennifer’s Body knows that sometimes you want to kiss your best friend and sometimes you want to stab her in the tit with a box cutter, and that those feelings aren’t contradictory, but rather different expressions of the same intense (and often very gay) emotion.
We know all this now that people have started to see the film through new eyes. Or maybe we know it now that 15% of Gen Z is LGBTQ+ and an entire generation of young women has grown up fantasizing about movie monsters, from vampires to fish-men to mummies. Either way, the critical reevaluation of Jennifer’s Body changed everything for me as a creator. It showed me I could make something weird and dark and funny, and that the right people would find it.
My novel Patricia Wants to Cuddle, available June 28 from Zando Projects, is not something I ever expected to bring to fruition. Don’t get me wrong, I knew the idea of combining a Bachelor-style dating show with a gory slasher movie was a winner from the beginning. I knew it the same way that Diablo Cody knew that a succubus story was the ideal package for a surprisingly tender exploration of high-school relationship dynamics. But I didn’t know who would want it: Would any fellow Bachelor fans be interested in an unapologetically queer book about a lady Sasquatch tearing influencers limb from limb? Or was that just an image I should lock away in my journal for the rest of time?
That’s why, even though I had the basic premise of Patricia in mind five years ago, I didn’t start working on it until much later. Instead, I kept writing queer memoir, which I enjoyed doing, but wasn’t exactly a bucket-list item for me, creatively speaking. I had done autobiography before and I knew I could do it again; it didn’t stretch me the way I needed to be stretched. I wanted to do a big, eye-catching, challenging project — the kind of book that would raise eyebrows at a dinner table.
I wanted to show what it would be like for the kind of women who compete on The Bachelor to encounter a big hairy shadow of heteronormative femininity in the forest — a threat not just to their lives, but to their very conception of themselves. The supernatural, I knew, was a powerful way to expose and upend the gendered ideas that we perceive as natural. But I put it off for fear it wouldn’t connect.
In 2019, my calculus started to change, in part because I was gaining confidence as a writer, but also because I had seen so many younger people find and embrace media like Jennifer’s Body. I remember watching, totally enraptured, as Diablo Cody and Megan Fox candidly discussed the film for 35 minutes in an ET Live held to mark its tenth anniversary. In that conversation, Cody recalled how she wanted to use the creative carte blanche she got from Juno to pen a “crazy, gonzo horror movie” that would explore “female friendship” through the lens of “a girl who eats boys.”
The idea seemed so perfectly formed, and she held it with such strong conviction. But I can only imagine what it would have been like to want to make that film in 2007, when no one in Hollywood thought women would like it.
“The studio had a strong, unshakable belief that this movie needed to be marketed to young men, specifically,” Cody told Fox during the ET Live sit-down, recalling one particularly egregious email from a “marketing person” that reduced the rich complexity of the film to three words: “Megan Fox hot.”
As Fox herself observed, that marketing strategy also relied on the false notion that the actress’ most ardent fans are straight young men.
“It’s funny, people assume … that most of my fan base is male, and it’s not true,” she told Cody. “It’s young girls.”
Indeed, I’d wager that, much like Needy herself, many of Fox’s fans are young women who either want to be her, want her, or both. The genius of casting an actress like her in Jennifer’s Body is that few stars capture that very Sapphic slipperiness between aspiration and outright desire. Fox makes it look easy in a performance that has stood the test of time.
It’s not surprising that I hear more conversations about Jennifer’s Body now than I ever did back in 2009. The queer girls found it even though it wasn’t marketed to them because, much like Jennifer after her ritualistic transformation, they were hungry and they needed to feast. Thanks to their repeated rewatching and their fan art and their obsession, the movie has become one of Cody’s best-known projects.
“If somebody stops me,” the screenwriter told Fox, “it’s always some 22-year-old who wants to talk to me about Jennifer’s Body.”
It’s those same 22-year-olds who made me realize Patricia Wants to Cuddle would have a home in 2022. The kids have grown up and they want weird queer shit. In one short decade, we’ve gone from studios assuming that only men would be interested in a film like Jennifer’s Body to Showtime actively courting a female audience for a cannibalism drama that was executive produced by none other than Karyn Kusama.
By the time Yellowjackets began to air, I had already committed to my own gonzo idea, and Patricia was well on its way toward publication. Still, I had pangs of nervousness about just how weird my book was — concerns that ran in an eerie parallel with Cody’s own after she finished writing the script for Jennifer’s Body.
“I think I was aware of how bizarre it was,” she told Fox. “Like, right off the bat, I was like, this is not a super commercial movie.”
But every time I saw another friend post a Letterboxd rave of Jennifer’s Body, and every time I saw an Instagram page post a meme about how excited they were for someone to get eaten on Yellowjackets, I gained a little more courage. And now I can’t wait for Patricia to meet a world that is more than ready for her.
Patricia Wants to Cuddle is out June 28 from Zando.
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