Written By Emma Lowry

Edited By Hannah MacDonald

A memorable scene from the film Jennifer’s Body (2009), directed by Karyn Kusama, shows Jennifer caught in her best friend Needy’s kitchen, vomiting up a tar-like substance after she couldn’t keep down a rotisserie chicken; Jennifer is drenched in the blood of the boy she cannibalized, dripping from her fangs down to her white puffer jacket, mini skirt, and red lace tights. This film offers a unique viewer experience through its depiction of how feminine rage, horror, queerness, and the supernatural intersect with one another. The plot follows Jennifer Check—a popular high school student—who is offered as a virgin sacrifice by the band “Low Shoulder” in return for fame and recognition. When the sacrifice goes awry because Jennifer is not a virgin, she becomes possessed by a demon that compels her to attack and eat men to maintain her power. With men as her sustenance, Jennifer is immune to pain or death. Jennifer’s Body thus uses the abject in a campy and unserious way as the comedic excess of blood and supernatural vomit portrayed in the film represents Jennifer’s liminal state somewhere between life and death, natural and supernatural. Making a thrilling commentary on the boundaries of the “human” body of a high school bombshell, the film portrays Jennifer as a monstrous woman whose capacity for gruesome revenge far exceeds the expectations of the men who took advantage of her. 

Using the methodological framework presented within Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1982) and Barbara Creed’s work on femininity and monstrosity, I analyze Jennifer’s Body through the psychoanalytic lens of abjection theory. Kristeva defines abjection as “that which does not respect borders, positions, [and] rules” and something that “disturbs identity, system, [and] order” (Kristeva, 4). Creed expands upon this concept by considering its application to the feminine body, particularly in relation to portrayals of women within the horror genre of film.  She connects religious immorality, queerness, and revenge to modern horror depictions of the abject:

“Definitions of the monstrous as constructed in the modern horror text are grounded in ancient religious and historical notions of abjection–particularly in relation to the following religious ‘abominations’: sexual immorality and perversion; corporeal alteration, decay and death; human sacrifice; murder; the corpse; bodily wastes; the feminine body and incest” (Creed, 8-9).

Jennifer’s Body highlights nearly all of these “abominations” in a modern high school world, exploring Jennifer’s growing monstrousness as a result of her initial “impurity.” While monstrosity has frequently been used in film as a device to ostracize and dehumanize the mad woman—often extending to the queer woman as a result of her participation in supposed sexual immorality or impurity—Jennifer’s Body uses this trope differently. The director Kusama rewrites the ending to a story we all know well: a woman, hurt by men or misogyny, who rejects the patriarchy and is consequently written off as insane; she is silenced, sent to the psych ward, lobotomized, or called a witch and burned at the stake. Contrastingly, Jennifer’s Body offers us a new ending to this story of the mad woman, letting loose the feminine “monster,” allowing her to act upon her hunger for revenge, actualizing it in glory and gore. The film amplifies the abject to a level that could be considered camp, pushing the bounds between what is real, imaginary, and supernatural with CGI fangs, magical hovering, and enough sarcastic sexual quips to nearly demolish the idea of what it means to be a “good” (human) woman.

In Queering the Monstrous-Feminine (2022), Creed explores instances of the monstrous feminine in film, highlighting Jennifer’s Body (2009) and The Lure (2015) as examples that depict feminine “monsters” who are not just verging on evil, but are entirely supernatural. Creed references Judith Butler in this chapter to discuss the ways monstrousness is used as a device to illustrate an inability or refusal to “perform” gender in the correct way (112).  In the case of Jennifer’s Body, this refusal takes the form of juxtaposition between Jennifer’s human life as a beautiful bombshell cheerleader and her supernatural life as an occult demon. Even before she becomes monstrous, Jennifer uses her femininity as a weapon against men, threatening her “performance” as a woman by challenging patriarchal power structures. She says to Needy that she will buy alcohol for them (both who are underage) at the Low Shoulder concert by playing “Hello Titty” with the bartender. The film chronicles her metamorphosis from an idealized woman to a man-eating monster while never depriving her of power. From beginning to end, Jennifer knows what she wants from men and how to get it, both as a human girl and a monstrous demon. However, placing a demon in a high school setting blurs the boundaries between the real and the magical. It is the moments in which graphic violence coincides with teenage girl humor that leverages the abject to its full potential for displaying feminine rage. In one of the film’s final scenes, Needy learns that to kill a demon, they must be stabbed in the heart. After Jennifer murders Needy’s boyfriend Chip, Needy follows through on her plan to exorcize Jennifer by stabbing her. With a blade through her heart, Jennifer exclaims, “My tit!” and comments about the “butch-ness” of Needy’s murder weapon of choice—a box cutter that Jennifer assumes comes straight from Home Depot. 

The ridiculous gore portrayed in the film initially feels out of place to the viewer. Yet, as the film progresses, the viewer connects the sarcastic tone and high school setting to man-eating bloodlust. It bridges the archaic religious ideas of perversion and the girlish humanness of powder foundation, cheap “Best Friend Forever” necklaces, and Jennifer’s iconic pink cropped hoodie printed with red hearts.  If Jennifer’s Body took itself seriously, the function of the abject would not work. As Kristeva (1982) explains, “Abjection […] is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who stabs you” (4). Even the film’s title emphasizes the purpose of using the abject—the transgression of borders, a story about Jennifer’s revenge enacted through her body’s liminal state being half teenage girl, half paranormal demon. If the film were strictly horror, filled with anticipation and fear, Jennifer would become exactly what the film is trying to destroy and reassemble: a mad woman, a monster that men should truly be afraid of, that viewers should be afraid of. By leaning into the blurriness between comedy, romance, horror, gore, girliness, friendship, and queer desire, Jennifer’s Body uses the monstrous feminine to empower a character rather than isolate, gaslight, and ridicule her. 

In “Kristeva, Femininity, Abjection,” Creed (1993) explains how the murder or sacrifice of a woman is related to her supposed “religious impurity” (13). This is essential to my interpretation of the film through the lens of the abject. Creed argues in this text that the corpse (usually gory and disfigured) is a central image in virtually all horror films but that the gendering of these bodies adds another layer; the bodies of women are usually “slashed” as a mark of their perversion or religious immorality, as they are subjected to particular constraints under patriarchy (Creed, 13). Unique to the story of Jennifer’s Body, however, is the double standard placed on Jennifer when the men of Low Shoulder sacrifice her. Needy and Jennifer think that Jennifer pretending to be a virgin will make her less appealing, but they are wrong. If she were a virgin and had been sacrificed as Low Shoulder planned, she would have died a gruesome death. If she had not been, as we see in the film, she would have evolved into a demonic monster. There is no way Jennifer could have made it out of the hands of these men without confronting the boundaries between life and death. Thus, it is no surprise that she then harbors an evil spirit. At this point, a typical film would portray her as gone to the dark side, crazy, without any loyalties, trustworthiness, or value. However, Jennifer’s Body takes the opportunity to capitalize on the gray area, the nuance by balancing Jennifer’s new gruesome man-eating habit and graphic displays of her disemboweled victims with a tone that permits sarcastic narration, like describing the latter as “lasagna with teeth.”

At the beginning of the film, we hear Needy say, “Hell is a teenage girl,” which sums up how horror is used as a device in Jennifer’s Body to empower the characters through monstrous femininity rather than exploit them. In the final scenes of the film, Needy escapes prison after inheriting some of Jennifer’s demonic powers and brutally murders the members of Low Shoulder, who have finally found fame at the expense of Jennifer’s life. Feminine rage and revenge against violent men come full circle, connecting the film to a larger interpretation of gore and horror as it can be leveraged and embraced by those forced into the trope. Distinguishing itself from typical horror films, Jennifer’s Body pioneers a nuanced portrayal of the abject as it fits into the life of a teenage girl who suffers a supernatural punishment for having existed outside the bounds of a “good” woman. It leads the way for campy and queer horror films that center a feminist twist on the age-old prophecy of the witches burned and the women gone mad. 

Works Cited

Creed, Barbara. “Kristeva, Femininity, Abjection.” 1993. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, 2nd ed., Routledge, 2023, pp. 64–70. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203138618-5.

—–––.“Queering the Monstrous-Feminine: Jennifer’s Body, The Lure, Thelma.” Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema, 1st ed., Routledge, 2022.

Jennifer’s Body. Directed by Karyn Kusama, Twentieth Century Fox, 2009.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon Roudiez, Columbia UP, 1982.