On Saturday, Oct. 23 in the Taylor Science Center, the Hamilton College Film Club continued their month-long exploration of the horror film genre in celebration of Halloween. The third weekend showcased horror comedies as curated by Film Club Treasurer Brendan Wiseman ’23. In a tight vote,

Jennifer’s Body

(2009) was selected by the Hamilton community for Saturday’s screening, with

What We Do In The Shadows

(2014) and

Zombieland

(2009) following closely behind at second and third place respectively.

Jennifer’s Body

stars Megan Fox as a newly possessed cheerleader-turned-mankiller Jennifer Check, and Amanda Seyfriend as her dorky and insecure sidekick Anita, or “Needy.” Fox, fresh from her role in the

Transformers

franchise, was eager to play the role of Jennifer because of her alleged love of the script. American writer and producer Diablo Cody was the script’s author. Around the same time as Fox, Cody was similarly coming off of critical support for her work on the Academy Award-winning film

Juno

(2007), which is a similarly gritty just humorous film centered around a disgruntled female protagonist.

Jennifer’s Body

was also exciting for Seyfried, and she was especially grateful to be cast alongside Fox. Seyfried expressed her comfort playing a more nerdy character instead of just an attractive one in this film.

Despite the buzz around the project in the months leading up to the film’s release, critics swiftly and brutally slammed

Jennifer’s Body

upon its release. Currently, the film stands at 5.3/10 on IMDb, 45% on Rotten Tomatoes and 47% on Metacritic.

Much of the criticism is based on the film’s initial marketing: the promotion of the film was catered heavily to the male gaze. The marketing relied heavily on male audiences to recognize Fox as a sex symbol in prior blockbuster action films. Advertisers hoped that audiences would be motivated to buy theater tickets through the marketing of

Jennifer’s Body

as a simple, overtly sexual horror flick. However, the script was written with the nuances of toxic and suggestively homoerotic female friendship and the slaughtering of practically every male character on screen. The “target audience” for the film in a monetary and promotional sense did not align with the target audience that Cody and Fox had intended for, and this disparity was reflected in the film’s tanking in the box office as well as in reviews.

In recent years, the film has slowly but surely risen in popularity, with many calling it the “forgotten feminist classic.” On Letterboxd, a social network for the current generation of movie-lovers,

Jennifer’s Body

sits at a comfortable 3.5/5. Over 15% of users who watched the film gave it a perfect 5/5 in acknowledgement of the film’s impact on pop culture, including the viral GIF of Jennifer Check setting her tongue on fire with a lighter. In fact, the GIF seems to have found its place on every Buzzfeed quiz and vaguely coquettish tweet.

However, the film should largely owe its recent success to its plot, which many consider now to be ahead of its time.

Jennifer’s Body

is a brash, sharp and stylish revenge film against a group of men sacrificing a girl’s body for their own advancement. However, the men’s sacrifice backfires, and Jennifer comes back from the dead with a newly developed insatiable thirst for male blood. Needy must then try her hardest to keep Jennifer from wreaking havoc on their town. Its plot is inextricably intertwined with feminism, namely the #MeToo movement and the Times Up movement. As each movement picks up steam and feminist issues continue to be championed by younger and savvier generations of female movie-goers,

Jennifer’s Body

has proven to be an iconic film that has finally reached its true target audience: women looking for complexity in female representation and empowerment, demonic or not, in horror and in the film industry as a whole.

Next week, The Hamilton Film Club will be concluding Horror Fest with emblematic Halloween films, ranging from horror to oldie to animation. For those interested in attending the Film Club’s final Halloween screening, it meets every Saturday this month at 2:00 p.m. in room G027 at the Taylor Science Center.