I would begin by thanking my supervisors, Laurent Mellet and Cristelle Maury, for their advice, guidance and for their endless sources of information. I also want to thank them for believing in me when I decided to radically change my field of research during my second year of master's degree.

I am grateful to my family who have been patiently listening to me talking about horror films and women's empowerment over the last ten months without complaining. I would particularly like to thank Lola for not only paying attention but also taking part in my frenzy, sharing her own knowledge on the subject, and for spending hours watching films and reviewing visual and written works with me.

I am forever thankful for my friend Karen, who has been my personal motivational coach until the very completion of this thesis and who never failed to make me surpass myself when I was in doubt.

I want to thank my classmates for creating a supportive environment. A special thankyou goes to Natacha for the countless and endless working sessions, for the motivational speeches and for being my unofficial Thesaurus. Another special thank-you goes to François for his support and uplifting words.

Finally, I would like to thank my former colleague Julie for her priceless knowledge on the subject of the horror genre, for all the material she provided me with and for the deep discussions and debates that helped me organise my thesis better and articulate my thoughts.

Editorial Notes

The present thesis analyses, discusses and reflects upon Karyn Kusama's horrorcomedy Jennifer's Body (2009). For this matter, the film studied here corresponds to the extended version, also called director's cut or unrated version, which was released on DVD in 2010. [START_REF]Male Sadism and Their Satisfied Desires Jennifer's sacrifice scene has been dealt with in Chapter 1, through the inscription of Jennifer's Body in the rape/revenge subgenre[END_REF] This version [107:23 min] is five minutes and seven seconds longer than the theatrical version [102: 16 min], offers sixty-six altered parts including almost thirty alternative footage, eleven edits and the version offers six parts that are longer than the in the theatrical version. 2 The analysis also includes scenes than are neither in the theatrical version nor in the extended version, but which were made available as deleted scenes in the DVD extras in 2010. 3 When discussed in the thesis, the dialogues and frames are not timed as they are not featured in Kusama's final cut.

Furthermore, for the sake of coherence, Diablo Cody's (Jennifer's Body's scriptwriter) original script, 4 written in 2007 is quoted and sometimes compared to Kusama's film. This way, the thesis can discuss and comment on the correlation and divergence in terms of text and subtextsuch as the taming of remarks or the development, modification or deletion of scenes and characters.

Finally, as to work deeper on the complex characterisation in Jennifer's Body, the thesis will sometimes rely on Rick Spears's graphic novel, 5 released in August 2009-a month prior to the national release of the film-and presented at the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con. The aim here is to work on the characters' background and to provide depth and dimension to the narrative's monster and male adolescents of Jennifer's Body.

Introduction: Jennifer's Body (Karyn Kusama, 2009) Versus the World

The Genesis of Jennifer's Body (2009) So look out big bad world... here I come. 6 (Jennifer Check in Rick Spears, 'Epilogue', Jennifer's Body, op. cit., n.p.) In 2007, after winning an Oscar for the Best Original Screenplay for her script of the teen movie Juno (Jason Reitman, 2007), Cody was given carte blanche by the 20 th Century Fox for her next piece of writing. Hence, 'immediately after Juno Cody resolved to create a horror film pastiche of the films of the 1970s and 1980s that challenged the demeaning characteristics of young females in the genre.' [START_REF] Casali | Terror of Girlhood: Ideological Representations of the Adolescent Female in Jennifer's Body, Thesis presented at the Rhode Island College[END_REF] Jennifer's Body came out of the creative free reins given to Cody: a one hundred and fourteen-page long screenplay of a teen horror-comedy which addresses female adolescence, female friendships, sex, empowerment, and revenge. 8 Thence, because of the themes it addresses Jennifer's Body falls into the category of the 'woman's film' described by Jeanine Basinger as 'a movie that places at the center of its universe a female who is trying to deal with emotional, social and psychological problems that are specifically connected to the fact that she is a woman,' 9 and into 'women's cinema' which Alison Butler conceptualised as a type of cinema that 'might be made by, addressed to or concerned with women, or all three.' [START_REF] Butler | Women's Cinema -The Contested Screen[END_REF] Kusama's (Jennifer's Body's director) film actually is all three as it is a film made by women for women-as I'm going to prove thanks to a study of the reception of the film-and starring women as main characters.

The inscription of Jennifer's Body in the woman's film it tightly linked to Pam Cook's idea that, 'The existence of the women's picture both recognises the importance of women and marginalises them.' [START_REF] Cook | Melodrama and the Women's Picture[END_REF] That is where transgenericity-that is 'the subversion of genres in order to combine genres to create something' [START_REF] Maury | Transgénéricité et Subversion dans le Cinéma de Todd Haynes[END_REF] -between the woman's film and the horror genre become particularly significant. Indeed, the horror film acknowledges the importance of its female characters but marginalises them by making them the ultimate scapegoat. [START_REF] Creed | The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis[END_REF] Jennifer's Body's transgeneric nature enables it to address women's alienation by turning the horror genre on its head as to give female characters in the horror genre a new meaning. The film aims, through its subversion of genres, at empowering the marginalised women of horror narratives and more particularly sexually active young women who are the main targets of the genre.

Cody and Kusama take a strong feminist stance in Jennifer's Body. They address issues which are closely bonded to the third-wave feminism-the celebration of individualism, diversity and sex positivity [START_REF] Brunell | The Third Wave of Feminism[END_REF] -, and the Riot Grrrl movement which addresses rape, patriarchy, female empowerment and teenager girls' anger. [START_REF] Marcus | Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution[END_REF] The filmmakers also rely on postfeminism whose notions encapsulate 'femininity [as] a bodily property; the shift from objectification to subjectification, the emphasis upon self-surveillance, monitoring and discipline; a focus upon individualism, choice and empowerment; the dominance of a makeover paradigm; [and] a marked sexualisation of culture.' [START_REF] Gill | Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility[END_REF] They even go as far as to anticipate, in some ways, the ideologies of the fourth-wave feminism-which began in the early 2010s-that request gender equality and addressed the marginalisation of women.

Jennifer's Body presents Anita 'Needy ' Lesnicki (Amanda Seyfried), a nerdy and seemingly 'get-walk-over-by-her-best friend' high schooler who will try anything she can to save the boys of Devil's Kettle high school from being eaten by her best friend Jennifer Check (Megan Fox) after the latter has been turned into a succubus by a fame-seeking indie band, Low Shoulder.

The musicians sacrificed Jennifer as a virgin-which she was not-in exchange of fame and glory from 'the Beast' whom they are in league with. The film follows Needy through her quest and transformation from wannabe saviour to survivor and finally avenger.

As film director Kusama stated it herself Jennifer's Body '[i]s a little bit more complicated than a straight comedy, a straight horror film, a straight high school movie, [it is] a fresh take on all of those things.' 17 The purpose of Jennifer's Body was thus to perform on several cinematic levels while shedding new lights on the genres it partakes of. Moreover, both scriptwriter and director's intent were to make a 'feminist horror' of Jennifer's Body hence linking the film to American feminist waves, movements and their agenda. Julie Casali explains in her thesis, 'Both Cody and Kusama confessed that the movie was a cinematic Trojan horse meant to entice 15-year-old boys into the audience of a "feminist" horror film.'18 This decision of turning Jennifer's Body into a cinematic Trojan horse is conterminous with the way some female filmmakers work with and shape their horror films. 19 As Maude Michaud explains If female filmmakers are first and foremost horror fans [as both Cody and Kusama are] who are aware of the archetypes of the genre and have an alternative reading of the horror films, it is no surprise that their work plays with the genre norms, some of them making it a point of subverting specific elements. 20 Thence, Cody and Kusama's aim was to subvert cinematic genres by addressing them in a way that does not strictly conform to the codes, stereotypes and clichés, but which bends them, manipulates them and even mocks them to give them a new purpose and to serve a subjective view on gender. Kusama and Cody's idea was to present a horror film that seems to adhere to its prescribed ideologies on the surface, but which actually twists them and bends them enough to comment on them21 and to present them through a feminist agenda. Indeed, Michaud, in her essay 'Horror Grrrls' states that:

There are some common threads in women's contributions to the genre; the stories are often told from a woman's perspective, the films often subvert stereotypes and clichés in "turning the table" type scenarios that empower female characters, and others offer an introspective approach to the genre by focusing on topics that appeal directly to women such as eating disorder, body image issues and rape. 22 Cody and Kusama's film seemingly intends to follow Michaud's 'guideline' to the letter, hence, creating a piece of work that 'pushes narrative boundaries and plays with genre in order to create an exaggerated and campy portrayal of the horrific standards to which women are expected to adhere.' 23 Nevertheless, the subversiveness of the film and its critiques of society is not what transpires in the film's paratext-in its trailer, in the official and unofficial posters and, later, on DVD covers.

What You Give Is What You Get or How the Marketing and Advertising Teams Sold Jennifer's Body

Shut your mouth, object. (Nikolai Wolf in D. Cody's Jennifer's Body, op. cit., 70) In an interview he gave to Vulture in 2010, Adam Brody (who stars Nikolai Wolf, Low Shoulder's lead singer in Jennifer's Body) gave his own interpretation on 'why you didn't see Jennifer's Body.' 24 In this interview, Brody stated, 'I do think it should win a Razzie for Worst Ad Campaign ever.' 25 His remark is directly linked to the marketing of the film, the test screenings and the myriad of negative reviews that followed Jennifer's Body's screening in 2009.

In the one minute and forty-seven seconds teaser of Jennifer's Body several mini extracts are shown in order to enhance the viewer's will to see the film. These extracts are separated by short sentences that aim at framing the plot of the film as they state: 'In every school -There's one girl -Every girl wants to be friends with -And every guy -would die for.' 26 This sentence is somewhat reminiscent of films such as Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1988), Mean Girls (Mark Waters, 2004) and All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (Jonathan Levine, 2008) in which the character of the popular (mean) girl is at stake and in which high school gossip plays a character 22 M. Michaud,Offscreen,op. cit. 23 Caitlin Egan, 'Hell is a Teenage Girl': Monstrous [Im]perfection in Contemporary Horror, Thesis presented at the California State University of San Marcos, 2017, 41. 24 Mike Vilensky, 'Adam Brody Explains Why You Didn't See Jennifer's Body', Vulture, 2010, https://www.vulture.com/2010/09/adam_brody.html (last accessed 5 April 2021) 25 Ibid. of its own. However, and while these films may have had an impact on the script and the direction of Jennifer's Body, the latter, in Cody and Kusama's minds, does not put its focal point on ' Megan Fox Hot.' 27 What the marketing and advertising teams focused on in the trailer, but also on the film posters (Figures 1 and2) and, later, on DVD covers (Figures 3 and4) is the objectification of Fox's body or rather of Jennifer's body. As explained by Jordan Crucchiola, 'Twentieth Century Fox promoted the film around a ginned-up, vixenish version of Fox's media-friendly persona, seemingly downplaying Body's potential audience of young girls in favor of horny boys aged 18 to 24,'28 who would rather objectify Fox's character than see the subjectification of society's issues. 29 The 20 th Century Fox thus chose to take the film title rather literally and to focus on Nikolai Wolf's caustic reflection to Jennifer in Cody's script, 'Shut your mouth, object.'30 31 Fox is lasciviously sitting on a school desk, dressed in a revealing outfit and looking candidly at the camera while a hand is hanging from the front of the desk. Figure 2: Coming Soon film poster. 32 The poster is reminiscent of the True Blood (Alan Ball, 2008-2014) teaser poster and emphasises Jennifer's luscious lips which she lasciviously licks as blood drips from them. The marketing and advertising chose to focus on Fox and her status as 'sex symbol' in order to target an audience that has been very specific to horror films since their booming in the 1970s and more specifically to the specific audience of teen horror films. This audience is, as Cody explains to ET Live, made of 'guys' who were expecting a particular characterisation of Fox, which is to see her feminine attributes and to see her suffer as young, luscious and sexually enhancing females are meant to suffer in slasher films. 33 Fox herself deplores the advertising of the film and, as Kusama and Cody, feels like the film was mis-marketed. 34 Figures 3 and 4: Jennifer's Body DVD Covers. 35 Fox in presented in revealing outfit, luring at the camera with a frightening expression (Figure 3) and a luscious expression (Figure 4).

This mis-marketing can be linked to the fact that, 'For a film text to bear meaning, the codes and conventions it employs must be recognisable, justifiable and plausible for spectators and producers.' 36 Thus, this objectification and destruction of the sexually attractive character in a horror movie is what bears meaning to the spectators and to the producers, because it represents what has been done, times and times again, commented and twisted since the 1960s horror films.

While the spectators search for what is recognizable and stable 37 in Jennifer's Body, or in other words what is part of their knowledge of the genre(s), some failed to understand that Jennifer's Body aims at subverting the horror genre rather than aligning with it. This failure might explain why 'that movie was a commercial failure,' 38 why 'the test screenings were horrible' 39 and 33 Diablo Cody to ET Live, op. cit. 34 See for example ET Live (2019) and Peitzman (2018). 35 The DVD covers were found online. Figure 3: https://www.amazon.com/Jennifers-Body-Megan-Fox/dp/B002USF1WC (last accessed 5 April 2021) Figure 4: https://www.dvdfr.com/dvd/f46373-jennifers-body.html (last accessed 5 April 2021) 36 Claire Berlyn, Teen Angst with a Body Count: Genre, Discourse and the Killer Girl Hero in Popular Film, Canterbury Christ Church University, Dissertation submitted for the MSc in Social Research Methods, 2013, 27. 37 James Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror, Oxford UP, 1985, 84;and R. Altman, Film/Genre, op. cit., 84 and 88. 38 Diablo Cody to ET Live, op. cit. 39 Ibid.

why the reviews that followed the film were for the most part withering, trenchant and in a word negative.

Test Screening, Film Release, and the Downfall and Renaissance of Jennifer's

Body

What's wrong with you? I mean, besides the obvious surface flaws. (Jennifer Check to Needy Lesnicki in D. Cody's Jennifer's Body, op. cit., 80, my emphasis) In his book, Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s: Why Don't They Do It Like They Used To, David Roche evoked film theorist Laurent Jullier when talking about the different criteria used by critics and moviegoers to evaluate a film. According to Jullier, six criteria are taken into consideration 'to evaluate the quality of a film: economic success, technical achievement, "enlightenment" (i.e. what the film teaches us about the world or about film), emotion, originality, and cohesion.' 40 When it comes to Jennifer's Body, the audience at the test screenings was partly made of '[p]eople who were fans of Juno, which is not the same kind of movie [and] the other part of the audience were guys who wanted to see something very specific from [Fox].' 41 Therefore, the criteria of enlightenment, emotion, originality and cohesion were not specifically those expected from a teen horror-comedy, but those expected from a light teen comedy, a sexploitation film 42 or 'skin flick' 43 in which the sex and skin interest would be Fox. Kusama and Cody's intentions of making a feminist and subversive teen horror-comedy did not match the audience's interpretations of the film-as most of them, in 2009, saw Jennifer's Body at the crossroad of 'three popular genres: horror, comedy and teen angst. [But which] [u]nfortunately [] fails at all of them.' 44 However, as Janet Staiger explains in her work Media Reception Studies, speakers cannot hope 'to influence, persuade or merely enlighten their audiences' 45 if their intentions do not match the audiences' interpretations.

Rachel Schmitz tries to rationalize the mismatch between intention and interpretation by explaining that the spectators present at the test screenings-and, later, screenings in cinemas-40 David Roche, Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s -Why Don't They Do It Like They Used To?, Mississippi UP, 2014, 7. In reference to Laurent Jullier, Qu'est-ce qu'un bon film? Paris, La Dispute, 2002. 41 Diablo Cody to ET Live,op. cit. 42 Sexploitation means the 'exploitation of sex in the media and especially in films.' ('Sexploitation', Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sexploitation [last accessed 7 March 2021]). 43 A skin flick is 'a movie featuring nude people' ('Skin Flick', Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/skin%20flick [last accessed 7 March 2021] Janet Staiger, 'Introduction', in Janet Staiger, ed., Media Reception Studies, New York and London, New York UP, 2005, 1-16, 1. might have been missing some '[k]nowledge in film, literature, and feminist theory [which] is […] indispensable to understanding the message of Jennifer 's Body (2009).' Thus, to the majority of the spectators, 'the film is barely more than an absurd film.' [START_REF] Schmitz | Horrifying Stereotypes: The Construction of New Gender Roles in "Jennifer's Body[END_REF] Schmitz's conclusion on the reception of the film by the spectators is largely visible on film reviewing websites. The most striking example being Rotten Tomatoes which constitutes the prime sources of reviews used in this thesis. [START_REF]Since only twelve reviews of Jennifer's Body dating from 2016 to 2021 are[END_REF] The review-aggregation website's 'Tomatometer'-an aggregation of professional critics' reviews-granted a 45% fresh 48 to Jennifer's Body-with an average rating of 5.30/10-and gave as critics' consensus, 'Jennifer's Body features occasionally clever dialogue, but its horror/comedy premise ultimately fails to be consistently funny or scary enough to satisfy.' 49 With 115 'Rotten' reviews for 93 'Fresh' in total, [START_REF]Rotten' and 'Fresh' are terms used by the website Rotten Tomatoes to determine if a film was good-here 'Fresh'-or bad-here 'Rotten[END_REF] the film is not even close to the eulogistic reviews and the percentages of freshness given to films Jennifer's Body has been compared to. Indeed, Heathers and Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976) both received a 93% of 'Freshness', Ginger Snaps (John Fawcett, 2000) an 90% and Mean Girls an 84%. [START_REF] Although | Carrie and Heathers scores were based on 50 to 70 reviews, while Jennifer's Body counts more than 200[END_REF] The major problem of Jennifer's Body, according to the reviews, [START_REF] Twitchell | Dreadful Pleasures[END_REF] seems to be that it is not stable, or recognizable and moves too far from the conventions it has been attached to.

Out of the two hundred and eight critic reviews provided on Rotten Tomatoes, more than one hundred and eighty were written in 2009 and present different types of critiques which can be seen through the dichotomous spectrum of 'good' film versus 'bad' film. Rachel Simon fully summarises the polarity of the reviews as follows, 'For all the positive reviews and fan reactions that praised the film's feminism and Diablo Cody-penned script, there were just as many scorching ones, responses that railed the films supposedly bad writing, weak acting, and ludicrous plot.' [START_REF] Simon | Why "Jennifer's Body" Got So Much Hate[END_REF] Indeed, some reviews from 2009 were positive, and praised the film and provided arguments and explanations to their positive views of the film; some reviews, although positive, explored the elements that provoked the failure of the film. The negative comments, on the other hand, can be divided into three categories: the ones which deplored the unclearness of the message Jennifer's Body wants to convey, the ones which blamed its failure on the director, the scriptwriter and/or the actors-most of these reviews focused solely on Fox's performance-and the ones which stated that for a horror-comedy, the film was neither funny (enough) nor scary (enough).

In 2009, critic Anne Billson, writing for The Art Desk, demonstrated that critics-and probably some spectators too-understood Jennifer's Body just the way the marketing team wanted them to understand the film as she stated 'Megan Fox is hot. And evil. But mostly hot.' 54 Critics such as Michael Sragow from the Baltimore Sun emphasised this idea as he stated, 'The one perfect aspect of Jennifer's Body is its title: No one is going to like this movie for its brain.' 55 Hence, in this type of reviews, the context and subtext of the film are completely ignored and only its visual effects are being judged. Other reviews, in 2009 (and 2010), addressed the question of the context and subtext in relation to the film genre. These reviews were either eulogistic, such as Anthony O. Scott from the New York Times who stated that Jennifer's Body '[t]akes up a common theme of slasher films-that queasy, panicky fascination with female sexuality that we all know-and turns it inside out.' 56 Or they were rather cynical, such as Adam Lippe's reviews for A Regrettable Moment of Sincerity, in which he wrote, 'If Cody truly had the courage to tell the story [...], she would have gone the mean and nasty route that Heathers hinted at, instead of all this self-conscious dialogue and wimpy horror.' 57 Ben Child, who wrote for The Guardian in 2009, even made a comment on the feminist aspect of the film as he wrote, 'Neither Diablo Cody's script nor a vampiric Megan Fox have sold critics on Jennifer's Body.

Did the feminist subtext convinced you or did the high school horror outing just drained your patience?' 58 Hence, in 2009 the consensus, for the major part, was that the film genre was dubious, the plot was deceptive, and the subtext was unconvincing. However, in less than a decade, this consensus was almost totally reversed in every part of its argumentation.

Since 2015 and more specifically since 2018, the speech on the legitimacy of the inscription in the horror genre of Jennifer's Body's feminist subtext has changed. Petrana Radulovic's review, for example, in Matt Patches' article for Polygon, states that Jennifer's Body is 'gory without being gratuitous, sexy without being degrading, empowering without being pandering.' [START_REF] Radulovic In | Jennifer's Body, Over the Garden Wall and Everything we watched this weekend[END_REF] It seems now that critics, as well as moviegoers, understand the stand and the purpose of the film in the light of the #MeToo 60 and the Time's Up 61 movements. Frederick Blichert mentioned it in his article for Vice as he stated that 'it's worth considering that [Jennifer's Body] themes of abuse, empowerment, and accountability would likely be a winning formula with horror movie critics in the #MeToo era.' 62 Fox,herself,admitted that people involved in the making of the film 'were eight years ahead of everybody else with what [they] were doing and feeling and thinking and saying and speaking.' 63 However, while film reviews evolved through time, the film has not changed and the message it wanted to convey and the issues it wanted to address have not changed either. Hence, some critics, such as Louis Peitzman, regrets the fact that 'Jennifer's Body is suddenly being called "timely" in the #MeToo era, as though the abuse and exploitation of women in a patriarchal society is merely part of a recent trend,' [START_REF] Peitzman | You Probably Owe "Jennifer's Body" An Apology[END_REF] while female exploitation and the critic of the patriarchal hegemony were already at the heart of Cody and Kusama's project in 2007 and 2009. The comment on society and the criticism of the patriarchal hegemony which holds sway over women's representation of themselves and projection onto other is what make Jennifer's Body an alternative film in women's cinema in 2009. As alternative films in women's cinema were described by Teresa de Lauretis as films which engage the current problems, the real issues, the things actually at stake in feminist communities on a local scale, and which, although informed by a global perspective, do not assume or aim at a universal, multinational audience, but address a particular one in its specific history of struggles and emergency. 65 Jennifer's Body's subtext and the issues it addressed were not global, nor were they openly addressed in the late 2000s. However, with the evolution of feminism, and with events that happened in the private as well as in the public sphere, Jennifer's Body's themes, soon became topical and largely discussed issues.

Teen Angst with a Body Count and a Feminist Twist on the Patriarchal Hegemony in High School Horror I have a feeling we're gonna blow up. (Nikolai Wolf in D. Cody's Jennifer's Body, op. cit., 27) The present thesis will seek to observe, analyse and then discuss how Cody and Kusama used the codes and tropes of classic horror films to subvert the genre and serve feminist purposes such as the criticism of girl-on-girl hatred, female (s)exploitation and the condemnation of patriarchal hegemony through a horror film pastiche. In the field of cinema, '[p]astiche structures can be seen as constructive of postmodern film, movies that share their stylistics and ideological criticism with postmodern art, literature and general critical theory.' 66 It is precisely the critical theory of postmodernism that Kusama and Cody address in their horror film pastiche. The aims will be to understand how Cody and Kusama used the horror codes and tropes, but also how they transformed them and subverted them enough to shock the critics in 2009 and enough to delight recent critics in the way it addresses the horror genre within a feminist lens. In addition, this thesis will intend to understand how the film serves a topical cause in 2021, the cause of women's sexual emancipation and women's emancipation from patriarchal values, while it addressed it more than ten years ago, when this topic was only burgeoning online and barely tackled in this manner in films. This present research understands itself a work in the field of reception studies in some ways. Indeed, the discussion around Jennifer's Body emerges primarily from the way the film and its subtext are understood by critics and spectators at large. The issues raised in critics' reviews thus act as starting point in this thesis. Hence, the discussion will evolve around the way 65 Teresa de Lauretis, 'Guerrilla in the Midst: Women's Cinema in the 80s ', Screen, 31, 1990, 6-25, 17. 66 Ingeborg Hoesterey, 'Cinematic Pastiche', in Ingeborg Hoesterey, ed., Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana UP, 2001, 45-79, 46. Kusama's film was received and perceived in different social and political contexts and erasnamely the pre-#MeToo and post-#MeToo eras. The first context being when the film came out in 2009, and the second one starting in 2018, thus almost a decade later, when Jennifer's Body started its resurgence. This thesis will first analyse to what extent the film belongs to the horror genre as it was questioned by critics in 2009. The first chapter will focus on the horror genre in which Jennifer's Body falls, or rather on the subgenres' elements-such as the luring and deceived voyeurism trope of rape/revenge, the evilness of the possessed teenage girl, or the invasion of horror in high schools' boredom which is tightly linked to teen horror and slasher filmsborrowed by Kusama and the way she used them in the film. Four subgenres will thus be discussed in the light of their codes and tropes, the way they are used in Jennifer's Body and the way they reflect on the ideologies of society in 2009 and since 2018. These four genres are: the teen horror, the slasher, the possession film, and the rape and revenge film.

The complex inscription of Jennifer's Body in the horror genre leads to what will be discussed in the second chapter, that is the complex characterisation. The symbolic dimension of the characterisation of the interiorized horror stereotypes-by horror film critics, connoisseurs and fans-and what Jennifer's Body reveals about the representation of males, females and teenagers in a given time will be discussed. This chapter will first focus on the figure of the monster in Jennifer's Body: the impersonated monster that Jennifer represents and the actual, yet symbolical, monster that is the patriarchy-represented by the indie band Low Shoulder. The figure of the monster will then give way to the figure of the heroine and the way she is represented in Jennifer's Body. Finally, the male victims and their diverse representations will be analysed in order to demonstrate that the range of male victims in Jennifer's Body says a lot about the patriarchal society the characters, but also the spectators, live in.

The manipulation, transformation and subversion of one of the most codified film genres, in terms of plot and characters, reveals the main issue encountered by Jennifer's Body. This issue concerns the dissonant interpretations of the meaning of Kusama's film linked to a seemingly misunderstood feminist subtext in 2009 and the new light which has been shed on it a decade later. The controversy will be discussed in the third and last chapter which deals with the social contexts, society's normative values and their evolutions. This chapter will first discuss the feminist dimension of the film which has alternatively been acknowledged and refuted since 2009. This chapter will, then, discuss the way Jennifer's Body addresses misogyny, why it has been called misandrist, and in which way this gender contempt themes have been interpreted in 2009 and since 2018, going from gratuitously displaying lesbianism and male-hatred for no apparent reason, to cleverly turning norms on their heads and comically commenting on the complexity of female relationships in an adolescent context.

Chapter 1: Jennifer's Body's Genre -A Feminist Horror

Film or Feminist Horror Films

As discussed in the introduction, the consensus around Jennifer's Body in 2009 is quite different from the one reached in 2018, at least for the most part, as 57% of the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes dating from 2009 were negative, 67 while 75% of the reviews written after 2016 were positive. 68 It seems that the critics in 2009 were mitigated as the 'audience consensus labell [ed] the film marginal at best, vapid at worst.' 69 One of the main elements cited in the 2009 negative reviews addressed the genre of the film. Jennifer's Body, according to some critics, is not scary enough, its characters are not campy enough or the film just does not work as a horror flick. In 2018 the consensus changed almost completely as Jennifer's Body is now called a 'cult classic horror film' 70 and a 'wickedly funny retro slasher pastiche,' 71 which indicates that the postmodern dimension of the film and its subversiveness was grasped in 2018 while the genre imitation and the comment made on it by Kusama, and Cody were not (totally) understood in 2009. Tania Modleski, in her chapter 'The Terror of Pleasure,' argues that postmodernism in horror film manifest itself through three cornerstones: the suspense concerning the actual death of the killer (is Jason really dead? Why is Carrie's hand raising from the grave?), the minimality of the plot and the interchangeability of the characters, and the inability for the spectators to identify to those same characters. 72 Jennifer's Body presents seemingly interchangeable male victims, and the plot seems, at first, reductive-a shallow teenage girl turns into a literal maneater and eats any boys who comes her way to stay pretty-but proves to carry a deeper meaning if the subtext is looked at more carefully. Furthermore, Cody and Kusama both argued 67 One hundred and four negative reviews were written in 2009 against eighty positive ones. 68 Rotten Tomatoes only indexed twelve reviews dating from 2016 on (nine positives for three negatives). However, multiple other websites, magazines and even podcasts present positive reviews of the film which are not listed on Rotten Tomatoes (see for example Constance Grady for Vox [2018], Frederick Blichert for Vice in the DVD commentaries that Jennifer could still be alive by the end of the film. [START_REF] Kusama | Audio Commentaries[END_REF] Hence, Jennifer's Body plays with conventions, old and new, uses them to deconstruct them and gives them a new meaning. A meaning which reflects a political reality for Cody and Kusama that is female empowerment and female agency, and this political reality is what is at heart of postmodernist films for Linda Hutcheon. [START_REF] Hutcheon | A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory[END_REF] When Kusama and Cody address women's empowerment by giving access to pleasure to the ultimate horror film scapegoat, namely women, that is when the subversiveness of the film comes into action.

The generally negative consensus observed in 2009 might come from the difficulty for the audience to accept changes in an established genre, in which they expect to recognize invariable elements as well as the generic identity of the film. [START_REF] Altman | Film/Genre[END_REF] Indeed, Jennifer's Body falls into the category of 'generically marked films' which are:

Films which rely on generic identification by an audience-and hence specific forms of audience knowledge-in order to make sense. […] [I]t refers more to the moment of reception and may include instances of generic reworking and generic rejection as well as instances of generic conformity. [START_REF] Neale | Genre and Hollywood[END_REF] The mismarketing of the film clearly had an impact on the audience as explained in the introduction. However, the subversive tone of the film also unsettled the audience and created unease, because the text, the context and the subtext do not seem to conform to the traditional horror genre. Indeed, in Jennifer's Body, the horror genre is modified and reworked to serve a new purpose which is to present a feminist horror film.

In 2009, Kusama explained that Jennifer's Body is not a remake, nor a franchise, which became rare in this genre. However, those who liked the new versions of Halloween [a teen slasher] or The Last House on the Left [a rape and revenge film] should like this film too, because it respects the traditions attached to those films while taking a fresh look at them. [START_REF] Kusama In | Du Sang Pour Lolita -Jennifer's Body de Karyn Kusama[END_REF] The traditions Kusama refers to here can be read as the stereotypes in terms of gender and sexuality that the horror genre is using and abusing, 78 especially in the subgenre of the teen horror: the 'dumb whore' à la Jules (Anna Hutchinson) in The Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard, 2011) or Marlin (Melissa Price) in All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, the prude à la Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) in Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), the quarterback, the nerd, the weirdo. While all those categories of people are found in Jennifer's Body they are manipulated and twisted to serve a feminist purpose by commenting on horror genre stereotypes.

Cody and Kusama's manipulation of codes and tropes seems to echo 'the Freudian understanding of femininity as a battle for power and agency in a misogynistic culture, a battle that females are instinctively primed to fight, [and which] finds a vivid representation in the woman's film and later in modern horror.' 79 Hence, scriptwriter and director inscribe Jennifer's Body in the woman's film through the themes of female empowerment and the subjects of misandry and misogyny-which will be further discussed in the third chapter. But they also carve it in modern horror as they comment on female monstrosity, thus using 'the horror genre [to express] male fear of the feminine,' 80 and its corroboration with the patriarchal culture.

Caitlin Egan, in her thesis, summarises Jennifer's Body's aims as she states, '[It] pushes narrative boundaries and plays with genres in order to create an exaggerated and campy portrayal of the horrific standards to which women are expected to adhere.' 81 This summary of Jennifer's Body's social and political engagement highlights two fundamental elements: the fact that Jennifer's Body plays with the horror genre, and the fact that it does so to critique and indict society's standards imposed upon women. Kusama and Cody chose to exploit the horror genre in its wide variety in order to provide a reflective but satirised vision of the impact of the pressure society exerts over (young) women.

In the media, Jennifer's Body has been tagged as a comedy horror film, however, the term 'comedy horror' is an umbrella term which encompasses several subgenres of horror, 82 78 R. Schmitz, The Maastricht Journal of Liberal Arts Liberal Arts, op. cit., 29. 79 David Greven, Representation of Femininity in American Genre Cinema -The Woman's Film, Film Noir, and Modern Horror, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 28. 80 Cristelle Maury and David Roche, 'Introduction', in Cristelle Maury and David Roche, eds., Women Who Kill: Gender and Sexuality in Film and Series of the Post-Feminist Era, London, New York, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney, Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, 1-30, 22. Maury and Roche here quoted Barbara Creed (B. Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, op. cit., 7). 81 C. Egan,'Hell Is a Teenage Girl',op. cit.,41. 82 Annex 1 gives a non-exhaustive view of different genres and subgenres of the horror film, which emphasises first the multitude of film subgenres the term 'horror' refers to but also demonstrates, as this chapter intends to, the transgenericity of Jennifer's Body. Hence, with this five-word sentence, Cody encompassed all the difficulties of the rite of passage that is puberty: the shame of being seen as a teenage girl and the consequences that this objectification has on the self and on the projection of Others.

Adolescence is thus depicted as a purgatory; a path between childhood and adulthood upon which all the shameful acts, behaviours and deviances must be purged. This metaphorical purgatory is linked to the idea that '[t]een films concern themselves with the physical and emotional consequences of adolescence, as children become adults, assuming a social identity shaped by gender, social class and ethnicity.' 92 That is why hell is not a teenage boy but a teenage girl, because in the patriarchal hegemony, the female sex will always be deviant and divergent. 93 It is the sex that must be criticised and punished for its abjection, 94 it is hell personified.

In Jennifer's Body, hell becomes a teenage girl, or rather is personified in teenage girls. Firstly, in Jennifer's character, who allegorically represents the threat that physical ideals and social pressure can pose to women, and their consequences. Then, in Needy, who represents the literal hell that a teenage girl can represent when she deliberately chooses to fight for women's power and agency. However, Kusama and Cody had to establish a teen horror setting in their narrative Heckerling, 1996) or even The Breakfast Club 97 (John Hughes, 1985). Yet, this flashback is introduced both by the camera, frozen on a decaying Jennifer [0:05:13], and by Needy's voiceover from her cell in a psychiatric facility. Hence, something differs from the classic teen comedy, and goes more along the lines of a dark comedy/horror-comedy à la Heathers-to which Jennifer's Body has often been compared 98 -or a hormonal horror 99 à la Ginger Snaps.

The camera, frozen again, but this time on a photograph of Jennifer in her flag team uniform (Figure 1) [0:05:21], then tracks down to reveal, first, a picture of Needy 'inspecting a school newspaper layout' 100 (Figure 2) [0:05:25] and then, a picture of Chip 'playing a strap-on snare drum at a school pep rally' (Figure 3 Cody, Jennifer's Body, op. cit., 12 for this quotation and the following one. their social category. Kusama, in the DVD, even comments on Needy's phrase, 'We were yearbook pictures', as she says, 'people in high school just so desperately want to be categorized.'101 This categorization plays a role in the horror aspect of the film as Kusama and Cody, through labelling, reveal 'the adolescent anxiety toward fitting into gendered stereotypes and physical ideas.' 102 The spectators are here introduced to the normality of Devil's Kettle that will soon be disturbed by the Others, which are embodied first by Low Shoulder's members and second, and most importantly, by Jennifer's newly acquired monstrous identity as a succubus-a man-eating female demon. But this Otherness is already being addressed here as it is first and foremost the horror of adolescence and the anxiety it induces that create monstrosity in Jennifer's Body. The fact that the three protagonists are pictured on the same page could imply that there is a triangular relationship going on between them. Needy seems to prove this hypothesis right as she states, 'Just two months ago, me, Jennifer and my boyfriend, Chip, were completely normal people ' [0:05:24]. The order of the enumeration seems to have its importance here. The story revolves around Needy, Jennifer and, lastly, Needy's boyfriend, Chip. It seems here that the relationship between Jennifer and Needy, whatever its nature may be, is what is at stake for Needy. The events which are going to happen throughout the film follow those lines as 'there is some kind of a rape/revenge narrative to this movie [as it will be discussed in one of the following subchapters] but it's definitely more about these two girls and their relationship and this co-dependent friendship/romance they have.' 103 Needy and Jennifer's 'BFF [Best Friend Forever] [and seemingly sapphic] bonding' 104 is even tormentors are the adolescents at large and not only a 'generic cliches about jocks/hotties doing war with nerds/notties,' 107 as Chastity seems-physically-at least as nerdy as Needy.

Chastity's sarcastic and sardonic comments and even mocked impersonation of Needy reflect upon Cody's exploration of the 'intense baffling and all-consuming relationships that bind and repel adolescents to and from one another' 108 by focusing on the horror which is associated to the woman's look. Indeed, as stated by Linda Williams in her renowned essay 'When the Woman Looks,' 'The horror film may be a rare example of a genre that permits the expression of women's sexual potency and desire, and which associates with the autonomous act of looking, but it [may] do[] so […] to punish her for this very act, only to demonstrate how monstrous the female desire can be.' 109

The introductory scene is thus not prominently reflective of the teen horror as the horror is underlying and rather implicitly represented through the aural channel than visually presented on-screen, although it does introduce the normality that will soon be disturbed by the Other.

The teen movie setting is explicitly represented through characterisation, props and the trope of the pep rally. Jennifer's Body could thus be seen as 'a hybrid horror and teen angst film that tracks the ups and downs of a female friendship.' 110 Jennifer's Body does fall into the subgenre of teen movie because it addresses teen issues of friendships and fitting into society's ideals. But the film is even more relevant to the genre as it addresses society's expectations of women. The purgatorial phase of adolescence from which young females' bodies which are particularly fetishized in teen horror,115 transition from childhood to adulthood116 in a monstrous way is exacerbated. This exacerbation emphasises the empowerment of the young female protagonists and their diverging way to deal with the patriarchal hegemony and the normative sexuality imposed upon them.

Far from inscribing their film into one specific horror subgenre, Kusama and Cody choose to use and twist codes and tropes of different subgenres so as to pick on specific elements of each to address, comment and, sometimes, condemn generic aspects. The first subgenre, which has been analysed, was teen horror. Indeed, Jennifer's Body through the tropes of the pep rally and the dance, through the stereotyped characters and ultimately by using high school as main setting establishes it narrative as a teen movie which then cross the horror line when one of its teens starts a killing spree. The first part introduces the main characters while implying that a killer is on the loose. Then, in the second part, murders happen one after another at a regular pace. In the third part, everyone is dead except for one girl who is directly confronted to the killer and who will have to escape from him by being strong. 121 Halloween, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hopper, 1974) or Friday the 13 th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980) which introduces Jennifer's Body as an atypical slasher and more importantly as a female slasher.

Kusama, when introducing the killer for the first time, does not use a point-of-view shot to position the spectator as the killer, as it is the case for most of the slasher films (see Figure 1 from Halloween [0:05:48]), but chooses to follow Needy (Figure 2) [0:20:37] around the house and thus puts the viewers in the 'victim's' shoes, and here, in the shoes of a teenage girl. As for accentuating the victimization aspect of the spectators, the camera is handheld, thus shaking and emphasising the rising anxiety. Kusama's camera angles aim at creating tension as she chooses which elements are highlighted and which are hidden or fall by the wayside. Needy opens the front door, but there is nobody there [0:25:57]. She then approaches the cellar, a place commonly known as dreadful and scary where horrible events are meant to happen-at least in slasher films and psycho-killer films such as Mum and Dad (Steven Sheil, 2008). She The expectation of the audience is defeated as the corridor remains empty, with the exception of Needy. Thus, the suspense builds up even more as Needy has been outside on her own, has courageously opened the cellar door and leant her head toward the gloomy room and still nothing has happened to her, yet. However, as the shots accelerate, the extra and intra diegetic sounds accumulate and the camera angles shift quickly. Time then freezes upon revelation.

Needy's point-of-view shot pictures Jennifer's monstrous face that mixes trickling make-up and dripping blood (Figure 4

B. Jennifer Kills Boys, Not People and Does So by Luring Them, Not

Hunting Them 'Diablo Cody and Karyn Kusama thus start turning inside-out the usual slasher scheme

[…] which expects girls to be the scatter-brained, abandoned to the (usually adults) male killers while boys become collateral damage, made defenceless by their hormonal frenzy.' 129 It is indeed their hormonal frenzy which leads men to their own peril. Nonetheless, men are in no way collateral damage, but targeted victims, chosen by Jennifer for a very specific reason: to avenge her objectification and establish her power as a strong woman. The connection between Jennifer's rampage and the affirmation of woman's power will be discussed in more detail in the third chapter of this thesis.

In Jennifer's Body, murders happen one after the other, at a regular pace, nevertheless, Jennifer is not an intruder like most slasher killers are. 130 Jennifer neither chases, nor hunts her male victims, but she lures them and simply asks them to follow or meet with her. Unsurprisingly, the teenage boys willingly accept without further question or refusal (See Figures 5,6, 7 and8 lures and kills male victims, but she does not kill Needy when she intrudes her place.

The last intruder of the film is Needy herself; she intrudes Jennifer's place during their final confrontation [1:31:21] and intrudes Low Shoulder's hotel suite when she makes sure 'tonight, is going to be their last show' [1:37:47]-although she is kind enough to ring this time instead of forward rolling through their window. When it comes to Needy, as it will be discussed later, the trope illustrates the idea that the Final Girl may become the monster if patriarchy pushes her hard enough towards her limits. Once again, director and scriptwriter use an unmistakable trope of the slasher film and twist it so as to shed new light on the purpose of this trope, on the subgenre at large and to comment upon how society views and treats young women. This idea is directly linked to the notion of postfeminism as Joel Gwynne and Nadine Muller state that,

[e]ven though many critics have drawn attention to the apparently empowering aspects of postfeminist discoursecomprising philosophies that espouse equality, inclusion and free choicethey have also highlighted how this celebration of the power of the individual is part of a more insidious process whereby the social constraints placed upon contemporary girls and women are deemed inconsequential. 133 Kusama and Cody comment on this inconsequentiality by empowering their teenage girls and freeing them from their social constraints through the use of the female slasher.

C. Slasher Ideologies and the Female Slasher

The slasher film experienced its golden age in the mid-1980s, with its three main cornerstones being Black Christmas (Bob Clark, 1974), Halloween and Friday the 13 th , and ultimately met its downfall in the 1990s, although it was revived by Wes Craven and its metaslasher series Scream which began in 1996. Throughout the 2000s, the genre was strongly criticised due to the numerous remakes, reboots and sequels (e.g., Halloween [Rob Zombie, 2007], Friday the 13 th [Marcus Nispel, 2009], My Bloody Valentine [Patrick Lussier, 2009],

The Hills Have Eyes [Alexandre Aja, 2006]). One can thus wonder why Kusama and Cody chose to give a slasher tone to their 2000s' film. The answer could be found in the ideology behind the subgenre.

The slasher film 'gives us a clearer picture of current sexual attitudes, at least among the segment of the population that forms it erstwhile audience.' 134 When it comes to Jennifer's Body the slasher parts mainly concern Jennifer's monstrousness, hence acting as an answer to the violent sexual assault she was the victim of by the indie band Low Shoulder. Consequently, Jennifer's violence towards men is a response to the misogyny she endured during the sacrifice.

This very sacrifice presents a twist that goes against the current, because Jennifer owes her 'survival' solely to the fact that she was not a virgin. Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saw, op. cit., 70. to survive than their non-sexual female peers and their male peers, but that their death scenes were measurably longer. (Welsh, 2010).' 135 Jennifer's Body seems to be a perfect counterexample of these results, as not only does Jennifer survive precisely because she was not a virgin, but Needy, the hero of the film-who first seems to be despite of herself, but after the death of her boyfriend takes her life in her owns hands-, is actually involved in sex and does not fear for her life for the most part of the film.

In Jennifer's Body, Kusama and Cody demonstrate that although tropes must be present to guarantee genre identification, they can, and sometimes should, be manipulated. Jennifer's Body thus plays with the codes and tropes of the slasher genre. By, sometimes, using them in their pure form-through the killing spree, the numerous victims and the use of a monstrous and seemingly unkillable murderer-and other times twisting them to comment on them and on society's social climate. The film 'goes from a Wes Craven's pastiche to a psychology study reminiscent of Juno,' 136 to the perfect representation of a female slasher which 'through destruction and mayhem, is an anomaly in the slasher genre that deviates from expected narratives and casts a spotlight on restrictive expectations placed on women.' 137 Female slashers are directly linked to the bond between women and society-based representations of women, ergo Jennifer's Body can be read as a female slasher as it questions women's place in society through the characters of Needy and Jennifer, and through the relationships the two of them have, between themselves and with their male classmates.

Throughout this subchapter, it appears that Jennifer is the villain of the film as she kills men who dare to objectify her by devouring their innards. She goes after men, lures and seduces them only to better substitute sex for violence and to empower herself as a female killer.

However, she acts as such because of the demon that lives within her. Indeed, Needy, through her research in the occult section of the school library 138 [1:08:30-1:10:45], establishes that Jennifer has been turned into a succubus, a woman demon who feeds on males to stay beautiful and desirable. Hence, Jennifer is not demonically possessed the way Regan (Linda Blair) is in

The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) or as Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) is accused of being in The VVitch139 (Robert Eggers, 2015), however, she does present signs of devilish behaviours after her encounter with evil 'agents of Satan' in the persons of Low Shoulder members.

Devilish behaviours that she sometimes seems to have control over, and which sometimes overpower her, illustrating the idea that Jennifer is conflicting from within concerning her place in society. 'In popular U.S. horror films featuring demonic possession, the possessed female is helplessly entrapped by the demon taking over her body and has no control over the violence that she performs.'142 Jennifer, however, does not seem to be overtaken by the demon or to lose herself in her transformation, and she is certainly not the one who is helpless as she tells Colin she needs him to be hopeless [0:53:09] and frightened [0:52:36] in order to devour him, hence entrapping him both mentally and physically.

III. Possession Film

A. The Manifestation of Jennifer's Occult Faculties -Jennifer as Vagina Dentata

Jennifer manifests real signs of possession solely when she substitutes sex for violence with her male victims. When the succubus devours the young men, Jennifer's face turns into a snakelike maw (Figures 1 and2) [0:33:06, 1:24:47], filled with pointy fangs and her pupils turn whitish and blood injected. It is worth noting that only Jennifer's face is transformed and presents monstrous specificities, the rest of her body remains as luscious as she intends it to be. It seems thus that while Jennifer was the victim of a wrongful sacrifice, Jennifer's 'transformation into a succubus is a fulfilment of her character, not a negation of it.' 144 In other words, Jennifer's non-virginal character allows her not only to survive the sacrifice, but to thrive as a sexually active young woman.

Harrington, in

B. The Source of Jennifer's Curse and Power

During the improvised slumber party initiated by Jennifer at Needy's house [0:56:45- a satisfied way. Needy, unconvinced, replies, 'Maybe it did' [1:04:17]. Indeed, Low Shoulder needed a virgin for the sacrifice, which Jennifer has not been since Junior High, and that is why the sacrifice did not work as it should have. She died that night, but she also came back as a succubus, because she was not a virgin. For this reason, the film seems to comment on performative virginity (i.e., The action of pretending to be a virgin while one is not to fit in a given situation 145 ) but also, on young adults' sexuality and in particular on the sexuality of young women.

Kusama and Cody, by giving power to a sexually active young woman after she has been killed on the supposition that she was not, thus empowers women's sexuality and adolescents' sexuality. The latter, as Robin Wood comments in his seminal essay 'An Introduction on the American Horror Film', is the fourth and fundamental repression in our culture. 146 The possession here does not act as a punishment as it is sometimes perceived for Carrie's telekinetic powers-which can be assimilated to witchcraft-or Mia's (Jane Levy) drug addiction in the Evil Dead's remake (Fede Alvarez, 2013), but as a way for Jennifer to violently affirm her active and unashamed sexuality which saved her from the clutches of misogynistic, opportunistic and pathetic men. The very men who have no shame in using a young woman's sexuality to their advantage and disparaging both Jennifer's sexuality and her character as Nikolai explains to Dirk (Juan Riedinger), 'There's always that girl. They love to show it off, but they do not give it up' 147 [0:13:07].

There is here a reverse of power. Low Shoulder take advantage of Jennifer because they have power over her, they have knowledge-although they proved to be erroneous-and most importantly they have control over her because she idolises them. The same scheme then repeats itself with Jennifer and her victims. Therefore, while the sacrifice is a source of suffering and is demeaning Jennifer as a sexually active woman, the supernatural consequences of her victimization enable her to bring about a major change in terms of gender power relations, thus giving a feminist dimension to an act of hatred performed on a woman. 145 Another example of performative virginity could be seen in the character of Tobey Cobb (Hale Appleman) in Teeth (Mitchell Lichtenstein, 2007) & Festival of Festivals, 1979, 7-28, 8-9. 147 Nikolai Wolf in K. Kusama, Jennifer's Body, op. cit.

C. The Meaning of Jennifer's Body as Occult Portal

'It is not just Jennifer's Body subversive tone that distinguishes it from your standard demon possession […]. It was essential to both director and screenwriter that the film has a specifically female perspective.'148 Indeed, Jennifer's possession does not only symbolize her monstrousness, but also and primarily the monstrosity that was imposed upon her by (a malegovern) society which punishes her for (supposedly) being a virgin-through the sacrifice-and

for not being a virgin-through the menstrual-like curse of cannibalistic feeding to survive and thrive. Thus, the spectators, who love to despise Jennifer Check-and her impersonator Megan Fox-cannot help but feel compassion for Jennifer and to understand Jennifer's way of coping with a heteronormative, bourgeois,149 and borderline puritan society that categorises and belittles her whether she is perceived as a virgin or as a whore.

Jennifer, through her possession, is entrapped in the societal expectations of young girls in a patriarchal culture. However, the way she copes with the curse of having to feed on men to remain beautiful and luscious is conscious. She is aware of what she is doing and does it voluntarily because she wants to remain beautiful and to remain the ideal of a woman's body.

Thereupon, Jennifer appears to be morally entrapped in the succubus, but she should be able to stop the killing if she was not so self-obsessed and egocentric.

By the end of the film, however, or rather, by the beginning of the film, Jennifer seems to have let go of her 'State Fair Butter Princess'150 [0:12:59] status as she is picking a scab on her pale skin [0:00:38] and is chewing on her dull hair with her teeth stained with blood [0:00:48].

Hence, just as Regan lost her battle against the demon that possesses her and is, thus, presented as monstrous with her face covered with scars and her own vomit (Figure 3) [1:28:17], Jennifer is presented in a similar way (Figure 4) [0:05 :12]. She is so before being freed from all forms of possession by the vengeful Needy, who stabs her to death [1:32:13]. Nevertheless, Jennifer's dullness has nothing to do with Regan's disfigured face, which only emphasises the shallowness and superficiality of the former and the futility of her cannibalistic rampage. suffering and that involves a more literal form of possession exerted on the female body by a man or by men.

IV. Rape and Revenge Film -'What is a pretty thing like you doing here, all alone?' (I Spit on Your Grave, Steven R. Monroe, 2010) The rape and revenge 155 Zarchi, 2019]). They can also involve the revenge from a third party, as it is the case in The Last House on the Left in which it is not Mari (Sandra Cassel) herself, who seeks revenge-as she has been raped and killed-but her parents, the Dr John Collingwood and his wife, Estelle (Gaylord St. James and Cynthia Carr).

Jennifer's Body works on this aspect as it is Needy who goes after Low Shoulder and not Jennifer herself. The last aspect of the rape and revenge, and the aspect that most particularly concerns Jennifer's Body is that it does not necessarily have to be a rape per se to act as one but has to do with the near annihilation and the exploitation of the woman's body, who then rose to annihilate her attacker(s)160 (literal or subliminal). Low Shoulder's members do not rape Jennifer in the strict sense of the term, but they do penetrate her body with a phallic weapon (Figure 1) [1:03:44] with the verbalised will to gain something from this act of penetration. However, the consequences of the all-but-name-rape, and the murders, are quite different for Jennifer than they are for Low Shoulder. B. Who Actually Seeks Revenge in Jennifer's Body?

Clover, in the third chapter of Men, Women and Chain Saw, entitled 'Getting Even,'

describes and analyses the rape and revenge subgenre. In her analysis she explains that rape/revenge narratives are 'a premier processing site for the modern debate on sexual violence in life and law.'163 She argues that these narratives are paradoxical in the sense that rape/revenge films are 'overwhelmingly consumed by young males'164 while they heroize women and vilify men. Jennifer's Body could thus be used to comment on the infamous askingfor-it-ness165 that women are often confronted with. As for the retaliation, it confronts young men with the reality of consent and the emotional, psychological and physical after-effects of a rape. These after-effects are amplified and apparently vilified in Jennifer's case as she quite literally becomes evil after her symbolic rape and materialises her trauma by cannibalizing her male classmates. Needy is also affected by this exploitation of Jennifer's body since she is a second-hand victim of it and a first-hand avenger as she turns into a literal serial killer. Jennifer and Needy are turned monstrous by Cody and Kusama to better reflect on the actual monstrosity of the symbolic rapists.

The female monsters created by men in Jennifer's Body reveal who the true monsters are. These monsters are male, and 'through the figure of the male monster, the horror film speaks to us about our origins, our deep-seated anxieties and our debt to women, nature, the animals and death.' 166 As Marian Philips states in 2019 'Jennifer's Body is a movie about the teenage girl that was brutally taken advantage of by men for their benefit.' 167 Kusama and Cody both address an issue that was topical but stifled back in 2009 and which is still topical and globally fought against more than ten years later. By using the horror genre-and more specifically the specificities of several of its subgenres-as an allegorical satire of society's dysfunctional gender disparities Jennifer's Body's filmmakers adopted a feminist discourse and hence created a feminist horror film.

The rape/revenge subgenre in Jennifer's Body seems to reflect on an earlier piece of work by Abel Ferrara called Ms. 45 (1982) in which a mute fashion worker, Thana (Zoë Lund), is raped and assaulted by two men. She manages to kill one of her aggressors and, as a consequence of her trauma, starts a quest to 'kill[] not only for her own literal rape, but for the figurative rape of all women.' 168 The same way, and quite hyperbolically Jennifer kills males who dare to objectify women's body one way or another by only perceiving Jennifer as a physical ideal and not as a fully-fledged woman. Needy on the other side, turns her weapon and newly acquired powers against the literal perpetrators of wrongful deeds so as to protect young women such as Low Shoulder's hysterical fan seen in the end credits (Figure 3) [1:37:19]. Both Jennifer and Needy aim to protect women, but they do so in a very different manner. Nonetheless, both of their ways of coping with their first-hand and second-hand rape victim status echo society's way of perceiving rape victims, the devastating effects rape may have and the possible annihilation of good-vs-evil acts in terms of retaliation. C. Rape/Revenge Film as a Mirror of Society's Issues precise capacity to address "big questions" that makes it such a vibrant and multi-faceted pool to play in.' 176 Pascal Françaix even encapsulates Cody's aims in terms of genres when he states that the scriptwriter uses elements of 'rape/revenge, girl horror and teen sex comedy to deliver a post-feminist and queer lampoon in which codes belonging to the three genres are puckishly restyled.' 177 E. Ann Kaplan, in 'Troubling Genre/Reconstructing Gender', states that:

[g]enre categories not only proved useful as critical referents through which to comment on positions women occupied in certain genres (such as the horror film or film noir […]), but they inspired feminist directors to imagine aspects of their social and political worlds through a genre lens, combining aspects of Hollywood genres with the generic feminist critics "invented", namely the woman's film. 178 Kaplan's interpretation of the intertwined genres and their connection to the woman's film appears to be at stake in Cody and Kusama's film. Jennifer's Body's filmmakers chose the horror film, a genre 'perceived as "masculine"' 179 in order to address women's issues in society. Moreover, they use specific elements of four subgenres of horror that are known to be specifically abusive towards women. The teen horror is known to diminish female adolescents;

the slasher chases, de-humanises and kills sexually active women; the possession film magnifies the idea that evil has feminine overtones; and the rape/revenge narrative inflates the physical and psychologic consequences a rape may have on women and their entourage.

Jennifer's Body, thus, finds it place in the horror genre as it both uses and twists codes and tropes of the teen horror, the slasher, the occult film and the rape and revenge narrative Grim, 5, 2019, 7-8, 7, https://anatomyofascream.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/grim-no-5-living-dead-girlsdigital.pdf (last accessed 23 March 2021) 186 Blair Davis and Kial Natale, '"The Pound of Flesh Which I Demand", American Horror Cinema, Gore, and the Box Office, 1998-2007', in Steffen Hantke, ed., American Horror Film -The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium, Mississippi UP, 2010, 35-57, 39. 187 In Rick Spears's graphic novel Jennifer's Body, Jennifer states in the 'Epilogue', 'Not one of them saw me for who I am. They only saw this...Jennifer's body. ' (2009, n.p., his underlining) universal scapegoat, the sacrificial victim,'188 used for men's benefit. While 'in most horror movies the female characters are sort of interchangeable or […] don't even serve a purpose

[as] they all always end up getting slaughtered at some point, [in Jennifer's Body] the women are the predators.' 189 Needy and Jennifer are not interchangeable here, because these threedimensional characters serve a purpose of their own, which could not have been served by any other character. Jennifer is the stereotype of the cheerleader whose shallowness and selfishness lead her to be killed and subsequently to rise as the ultimate avenger of female objectification by the male hegemony. Needy, on the other hand, is the warm, submissive and gentle woman who rises to break stereotypes to become competent, assertive, cold and rough-traits that are more often than not connoted as masculine 190 -and subsequently to fight the patriarchy at large. These two female characters must fight their battle on their own as neither men, nor parental figures will help them in their quest for emancipation.

In Jennifer's Body, as several critics noticed, 191 all parents are relegated to the background. It almost seems that-as it is the case for most horror films-teenagers do not have parents, 192 until they die. Robert Cumbow states that parents in slasher films are 'absent or ineffectual.' 193 They are 'incapable of protecting their children and always arriving after the murder.' 194 It is the case for every single parent in Jennifer's Body: Needy's mother (Amy Sedaris) is working swing shift and is only present to tell Needy the nightmares she had on Needy being taken away from her; Jennifer's mother (Carrie Genzel), Jonas's parents (Bill Fagerbakke and Marilyn Norri) and Colin's family are only displayed on screen after the death of their children and represent parental grief and rage, and Chip's mother (Cynthia Stevenson) is totally blind to the danger that prowls around her son. The absence of parents in Jennifer's Body thus leads the teenagers to fend for themselves, and to try to protect each other the way their parents could not. They represent complex characters whose age bound them to the state of victims in the horror tradition, but whose singularity made them survive-or not-the purgatory that adolescence can be.

Cody and Kusama picture adolescence as a passageway between a lost childhood and an adult life full of responsibilities in which adolescent characters must experience emotional trials. 195 In the horror genre, puberty is often represented as a path to monstrosity. The pre-pubescent girl is innocent but as she enters adulthood, she 'mutate[s] into a dreaded powerful woman and become[s] (sexually) dangerous.' 196 However, in Jennifer's Body, Jennifer is a dreaded powerful and sexually dangerous woman even before her transformation. The succubus curse merely turns her from 'high school evil' to 'actually evil' [1:12:00], hence, heightening her dangerousness from adolescent mankind to mankind as a whole. This dichotomy between males and adolescents can be seen as two sides of the same coin. On one side, teenage boys are innocent victims in Jennifer's hands, who does not feel lust but hunger towards them. 197 While, on the other side, the adult males, in the figures of Low Shoulder's members, represent the origins of the monstrosity that invades Devil's Kettle.

In this chapter I would like to focus first on the figure of the monster, established by Wood and discussed in depth, when it comes to the female monster, by Barbara Creed,198 in order to understand how the emblematic figure of the horror film was turned on its head in Jennifer's Body and how its filmmakers through cinematic structures and their characters' personality traits adopted a feminist position. I will then analyse the monster direct antonym: the hero(ine), with the figure of Needy as Final Girl, victim hero and Killer Girl Hero who, by becoming a monster with the highest body count of the film, also becomes the most positive female character and a figure of postfeminism. Finally, I am going to expand on the male victims who, while not rare in horror films, tend to represent new forms of male figures going from the innocent teenage boys who were not deserving punishment-at least in the film, as it could be seen differently in Rick Spears's eponymous graphic novel-to the pathetic killers who are single-handedly turned into victims by a 'Jan Brady' 199 figure.

195 Diablo Cody to E. Levy,Emanuellevy,op. cit. 196 Shannon Walsh, 'Sympathy for the She-Devils: Alice Sweet Alice and 70s Female Killers ', Grim, 2, 2018, 10-12, 12, https://anatomyofascream.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/grim-no2-mascara-machetes-digital.pdf (last accessed 24 March 2021) 197 As Colin suggests in Rick Spears's graphic novel when he says 'She looks at me like I've never been looked at before. It's not lust. It's more like hunger.' ('Chapter Two', Jennifer's Body, BOOM! Studios, 2009, n.p., his bold). 198 B. Creed,The Monstrous Feminine,op. cit. 199 Dirk to Nikolai Wolf in K. Kusama, Jennifer's Body, op. cit. Jan Brady is a fictional character from The Brady Bunch (Sherwood Schwartz, 1969-1974) a 1970s TV show. She is less beautiful and less popular than her sister Marcia whom she envies as she has everything Jan dreams of: popularity, beauty and a boyfriend.

I.

Of Monsters and Patriarchy: Masculinity, Femininity and their

Consequences on Men and Women

Often with horror film comes the assumption that the killer is an adult male, who is at least 6'5 feet tall and either overly muscly (e.g., Jason Vorhees in Friday the 13 th ) or heavily armed (e.g., Freddy Kruger [Robert Englund] in A Nightmare on Elm Street [Wes Craven, 1984]). The victim, on the other hand, is more often than not a fragile and weak woman who either survives despite of herself (e.g., Laurie Strode in Halloween) or because she went through a mental makeover (e.g., Jennifer Hills [Camille Keaton] in I Spit on Your Grave).

Jennifer's Body totally turns these stereotypes on their heads as the plot is very much about a female killer whose monstrosity did not emerge from the violence she was victim of, but was heightened and amplified by it as she went from a figurative maneater to a literal cannibal whose diet consists exclusively of teenage males. Hence, 'the botched satanic ritual […] subsequently transformed Jennifer into a demonic monster whose voracious sexuality is sublimed into the desire to literally devour young men.'200

What is more, is that although Jennifer's literal monstrosity has been brought by males, those males' representations are far from the stereotypical serial killers as they are neither potent, nor manly-Officer Roman Duda (Chris Pratt) calls them 'a bunch of faygos'201 [0:11:03]-nor powerful, but rather pathetic and childish. It thus seems that Cody and Kusama chose a strictly codified genre with highly recognizable monster figures and twist them enough to subvert the genre and reverse the trend-as Christopher Landon did in 2020 with Freaky in which an ill-atease teenager (Kathryn Newton) and a serial killer called The Butcher (Vince Vaughn) switch bodies for a day. Jennifer, through her complex character, thus represents both the monster and the victim of Jennifer's Body's narrative, as she is 'less a teenager girl turned monster than an exploration of the monster that lurks inside every teenage girl,'202 and might be brought to life by an act of dreadful violence. Jennifer's maliciousness is increased tenfold through the sacrifice as she does not verbalise her hatred but demonstrates it by killing men whom she considers to be at the same time weak men, but who are still brave enough to objectify her. Moreover, Jennifer's killing spree is not unmotivated, she is re-enacting the same scheme she experienced with Low Shoulder members, who belittled her and genuinely did not care about her other than to serve their own purposes.

A. Jennifer

It thus seems that Jennifer is reversing the misogyny she was victim of. 203 Jennifer Check in D. Cody,Jennifer's Body,op. cit.,20. 204 Jennifer Check in K. Kusama, Jennifer's Body, op. cit.

It Is a Case of the Biter Bit

In 2009, when asked about her character, Fox argues, 'Jennifer Check, she's that narcissistic, selfish, self-obsessed girl that everyone knows in high school. She goes through a lot of transformation, and she becomes at one point in her life a victim and then she becomes a predator of sorts and things get crazy.'205 Jennifer, 'the kind of girl who attracts hangers-on and feeds off of their blind devotion, abusing them to feed her ego,'206 fell foul of her own trap when Low Shoulder did exactly the same to her, only pushing the abuse even further. The band butchered her with the sole objective to gain fame and fortune. Jennifer's moral victimization, on the other hand, comes from a larger institution as it comes from society's idealization of Jennifer's body and its objectification which both empowers her, when she is in control, and serves her badly when she is decaying.

The two faces of this victimization are openly presented in a 'scene where Jennifer's sitting alone smearing make-up on her face [Figure 3] [1:15:58]. [Cody] always thought that was such a sad image. She's so vulnerable. [Cody doesn't] know any woman who hasn't had a moment sitting in front of the mirror and thinking, "Help me, I want to be somebody else."' 207 The fact that, in this very moment, Jennifer's mirror is surrounded by pictures of herself demonstrates that she does not want to be somebody else, but she wants to be the picture-perfect image people have of her-flawless, stunning and sexy. Jennifer is vulnerable at some point in the film, but she becomes so because, at a crucial moment, her outrageous self-confidence led her in the wrong direction and turned against her. Clover established that 'female killers are few and their reasons for killing are significantly different from men.'208 According to Clover, female killers do not suffer gender confusion, their motive is not overtly psychosexual, and they happen to kill because they 'have been abandoned or cheated on by men.'209 When it comes to Jennifer, these reasons become more complex as it is a fact that Jennifer does not suffer gender confusion and her killing spree finds its origins in men who cheated on her in a way by abusing her credulity and her inhibited state.

However Jennifer is first and foremost a femme castratrice217 and she was so even before she was turned into a succubus as she verbally castrates her male peers with her biting remarks. But when Jennifer trades remarks for literal castration her monstrosity is visually revealed. The visual representation of Jennifer's castrating power is portrayed through Jennifer as vagina dentata. 218 It seems that both Kusama and the makeup department of the film decided that Jennifer's body Berlatsky might have provided an explanation of Kusama's purpose using recreational terror.

Indeed, he states, 'In a world where men see women solely in terms of their outer skin, it seems only fair that women should show men the skin men want, the better to devour the lookers.'223

Thus, Kusama uses off-screen killing to intensify Jennifer's power in these situations: she is beautiful, she is dangerous-as her eyes turning from a soft blue to a demonic white injected with blood (Figure 8) [0:52:13]. However, the spectator never knows the full extent of her power and dangerousness. Jennifer, thus, uses her status as vagina dentata and femme castratrice to overcome her victim status and to possess the men who try to possess her by objectifying her.

Reversing the Male Gaze and Female Objectification

Shohini Chaudhuri, referring to Creed, states that '[a]lthough this by itself does not make her a "feminist" of "liberated" figure, the revelation of the woman as castrator does challenge the patriarchal views that woman is essentially a victim.' 224 But Jennifer differs slightly from Chaudhuri's interpretation of Creed's theory because, while Jennifer is a woman, the woman figure presented in front of the camera does not signify a woman, but a succubus or a 'demonic version of man's desire.' 225 As a result, the curse and transformation of Jennifer into a succubus represent the issues of a patriarchal society, that is, the objectification of women's bodies. Jennifer's rampage on the other hand, represents her way to cope with these issues, to play with her objectification and to gain power from her sex drive which Low Shoulder try to repress.

One setting, used twice by Kusama, highlights the power Jennifer acquires through her manipulated objectification, that is the representation of Jennifer as a neo-noir femme fatale.

Jade Bitomsky explains, 'The contemporary femme fatale found in neo noir is a powerful seductive intellectual with a malevolent streak a much greater agency than her forebearerstransformed from a mere visual object to a central driver of the plot, a main protagonist; at times the objectifier, not the objectified.' 226 The fact that these events occur while Colin is to meet Jennifer, and while Ahmet randomly stumbles upon Jennifer in the middle of the road reflects upon Jennifer's nature and the multidimension of her character as femme castratrice, vagina dentata and femme fatale. While Low Shoulder's aim was to annihilate Jennifer's body, they actually give it height and dimension as, although Jennifer is a victim of her own curse of pursuing female's perfection, she uses male objectification as it pleases her. Hence, Cody and Kusama's text does not 'portra[y] femininity as monstrous.

[It] portray[s] obsession with appearance and manipulation to conform to the idealized notion of perfection as monstrous.' 229 'Although she is a monstrous and evil character, Jennifer Check is also a tragic figure. She represents the monstrosity of the obsession with female perfection and does not get the chance to break free of it.' 230 Jennifer's tragic figure is emphasised even more by the fact that while her monstrosity is male created, this monstrosity is both irrelevant to its male originators and is unaffecting them as they do not get punished for their own atrocities and monstrosities performed on Jennifer's body. Consequently, while 'Jennifer gets to be the monster [Nikolai Wolf] gets to be the villain.' 231 Nikolai does not, however, embodies the on-screen representation of the male gaze, but stands as a comment on postfeminism and its relation to the woman's film.

In the 'Epilogue' of the graphic novel, Jennifer's Body, Jennifer states in the captions 'Not one of them [her victims] saw me for who I was. They only saw this... Jennifer's Body,' 232 while her blood-stained and torn white dress is presented to the reader, leaving her face unrevealed (Figure 11). The obsession with (women) physique, that Jennifer is deploring, is '[o]ne of the most striking aspects of postfeminist media culture.' 233 Rosalind Gill argues that, in today's media it is possession of a "sexy body" that is presented as women's key (if not sole) source of identity. The body is presented simultaneously as women's source of power and as always already unruly and requiring constant monitoring, surveillance, discipline and remodelling (and consumer spending) in order to conform to ever narrower judgments of female attractiveness. 234 Cody Nikolai and Low Shoulder are a representation of the patriarchal hegemony, they are the mirror that reflects society's vision of sexism, its dichotomisation of gender power and consideration of social categories. But while this mirror does not depict a positive image of society, it does not make it monstrous either. Hence, the same way Fausto Fasulo asks, 'How to jolt a man enough to justify the future murder he is going to commit?,' 241 one can wonder what pushes Nikolai and his band to kill an innocent girl whose mistake was to be naive enough to think that her high school Queen Bee status would work with grown men? The answer is as shallow as Jennifer's obsession with appearance is: fame, fortune and glory.

circumstances.'243 When it comes to Low Shoulder, the circumstances are both selfish and shallow. Nikolai even summarises the situation. To do the sacrifice or not to do the sacrifice will determine them being 'rich and awesome like that guy from Maroon 5' or 'work at Moose Hoof Coffee Forever'244 [1:01:17]-or even worse 'be a huge suicidal loser.'245 While Nikolai's line in Cody's script sounds a little desperate with the use of 'suicidal,' Adam Brody's Nikolai in Kusama's film is definitely pathetic, shallow and selfish to the extreme as he is willing to take an innocent's life in exchange of becoming supposedly 'rich and awesome.' Furthermore, the consequences of the ritual will prove to be individualistic and ephemeral for Low Shoulder, while they will have consequences on the community at large with Jennifer's transformation.

Nikolai's sadism is underlined in this scene. Low Shoulder's lead singer goes as far as to joyfully sing '867-5309/Jennifer' by Tommy Tutone right before he repeatedly stabs Jennifer to death (or at least it seems) [1:03:20-1:03:55]. Nikolai's malice, openly and even hyperbolically depicted, appears to be closely related to modern feminism. Indeed, 'identifying male sadism, especially towards women, and holding men at least theoretically culpable for such acts as rape, wife beating, and child abuse are major achievements of modern feminism.' 246 Cody and Kusama, thus use the horror film and its codes and tropes to address a societal issue, an issue that will be increasingly addressed with the #MeToo and the Time's Up movements.

Cody in her script-describing Nikolai literally mauling Jennifer-, Kusama with her camera handling-with her close-up on a proud and satisfied Nikolai (Figure 13) [0:14:27]-and Brody in his impersonation of Nikolai in the film all amplify the antipathic, self-centred and egocentric personality of Low Shoulder's lead singer. However, in a figurative sense, they also hold a mirror that appears to reflect the way society sometimes acts towards women.

Asserting Masculinity and Possessing the Female Body

'The trope of the sacrificial virgin, whose death offers some sort of transition, offering or exchange'247 is not new in the cinema field, it even is a classic trope. However, most of these sacrifices are meant to have a great impact, to save lives or to prevent a disaster. Jennifer's sacrifice will not save lives, nor will it prevent a catastrophe, it will simply allow selfish men to achieve their selfish goals: to become rich and famous. Instead of doing so by working themselves through celebrity, they would rather violate and wound a teenage girl's body, thus asserting their dominion.

The horror films of the 1970s, according to Roche, 'underline the fact that masculinity is a cultural construct grounded in the possession of female bodies, with protection and violation being two sides of the same coin.'248 Several scholars and critics agreed on the idea that Jennifer's Body can be read as a horror pastiche of 1970s and 1980s films.249 However, Jennifer's Body does not seem to comment on the protection side of the coin, but solely on the violation one. Hence, once again, the sacrifice is not about Jennifer for Low Shoulder, it is about themselves. The selfishness that Jennifer represents, in her embodiment of the high school mean girl, is magnified in Low Shoulder's characters as they moved from bullies to literal murderers in the name of their own personal gain and thus the assertion of their dominion by becoming 'rock stars.'

When it comes to Low Shoulder's future, it seems paradoxical that in a film which claims to be feminist, men who sacrifice a woman on the altar of their success do not get any repercussions from their abominable act of violence. It is even more saliant in Spears's graphic novel as Jennifer's adolescent victims' wounded bodies are graphically depicted, while Nikolai and Low Shoulder only appear once at Melody Lane's concert and are not depicted as agent of the devil but as actual musicians comforting Ahmet with their music. 250 However, the consequences of the sacrifice are more pernicious than they seem to be.

How to (Almost) Get Away with Murder

In 2020, Megan Arnall asks, 'Why doesn't [the sacrifice] impact them [Low Shoulder] at all?' 251 The sacrifice, in fact, impacts them, but not the way the spectators would expect it.

Five men were meant to sacrifice a virgin, which Jennifer was not, the sacrifice goes wrong, and Jennifer ends up being possessed by a literal man-eating demon, hence 'she gets the repercussions, and they don't.' 252 Or put differently, she bears all the negative consequences of the wrongfully perpetrated sacrifice while Low Shoulder reaps all the positive effects: money, fame, hysterical fans-who ironically are about Jennifer's age and present similar traits (beauty, youth, and a fascination for the band) (Figure 14) [1:37:10]. establish the rightful 'world' in which killers must be punished, shows what reality can be for women.

In 2009, Fox gave an interview in which she drew a parallel between fiction-with the sacrificeand reality as she states, 'That scene represented my relationship with the movie studios at the time and the studios executers and just Hollywood in general, because on almost a daily basis, I felt like I was being sacrificed for their gain with almost no concern for my physical wellbeing. Fuck your mental or emotional well-being.' 254 The very idea of sacrificing women for men's gain with no regard for these women's well-being is causally linked to the #MeToo movement and in the case of Fox in particular the Time's Up movement as it has to do with Hollywood and the cinema industry. It is even more related to the cinema industry as some allegations had consequences on women who spoke up, but not on the men who had been accused. 255 One of the aspects that surprised the critics and the spectators the most is the fact that Jennifer never turns on her assailants but chooses to punish the male-centred society at large. Hence, leaving another female figure to avenge her (first) death: Needy. Needy is an ambiguous character, 'she's a heroine, she's a protagonist and yet she's not glamorous or totally figured out […] but she's also realistic' 256 says Seyfried (Needy Lesnicki impersonator) in an interview. What is more to her character is that the 'ambiguity at the start of the film indicates that [she] will also experience a monstrous downfall, which is ultimately caused by her obsession with Jennifer.' 257 Needy's ambiguity thus resides in the fact that she is the heroine of the film, she is a Final Girl, but she also is the character in which Jennifer's monstrosity keeps living. 258 Needy is, in short, a survivor, who fights and kills because she is the only one left who can do so.

II. The New Heroine: 259 Needy -The Positive Female Figure with a Hint of Monstrosity

In 2009, the mismarketing of Jennifer's Body evolved around the misinterpretation of the intentions of the film, its plot, but also the misinterpretation of its characters. Megan Fox was put in the spotlight, while it is Seyfried's character, Anita 'Needy' Lesnicki, who is the actual heroine, main protagonist, narrator and the character with the highest screen time. 260 While the film is branded with the name of Jennifer Check, it is through Needy's voice-over that the spectators experience the film. 261 with her ridiculous feminine pink princess prom dress but with a distinctive twist: she is now the proverbial prince charming, and her boyfriend is the proverbial damsel in distress.' 272 For that matter, the vision of reverse damsel in distress is even more emphasised in the graphic novel as Chip verbalises his position as helpless victim and Needy's as ultimate, yet feminine, saviour (Figure 3 Sydney Prescott in the first Scream in 1996 paved the way to new representations of the Final Girl. Indeed, Sydney is the ultimate Final Girl, but she becomes so after she engages in sex with her boyfriend and soon to be discovered assailant, Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich). While it was almost unprecedented in 1996, Françaix claims that in the twenty-first century the heroine's virginity became incidental, as it seems more likely that a teenage girl such as Needy would be involved in sex rather than being a virgin. 274 But Needy goes further than simply defying the virginity of the Final Girl as she shakes the heteronormativity of the Final Girl up by being deeply in love with her best friend, with whom the relationship is both deeper, more intense and more dangerous than it is with Chip (as it will be discussed in Chapter 3). Cody and Kusama's aim was therefore to create a '"real" independent woman,'275 who does not constrain herself to the expectations of society, but emancipates herself from them, by choice and by force.

Needy Lesnicki was never a conformist, she did not chase society's approval, however, she was not a lawbreaker or a troublemaker either. At one point in the film, she 'takes the matter into her own hands because Jennifer is dead, and this zombie is very much alive, and that zombie is a stranger to Needy and nobody believes her and Needy is the only person that's really seeing this.'276 Needy thence appears to become a Final Girl by choice, because she wants to avenge the death of her best friend-and secret love interest-but she also wants to avenge the death of her boyfriend, friends and classmates, and because she wants to punish the males who wronged a female body. However, she also becomes a Final Girl by force because no one else sees and knows what she sees and knows and because no one wants to believe her.

Her role as Final Girl is therefore paradoxical because she becomes one both deliberately and in spite of herself, thus linking her to the figure of the victim hero.

B. Becoming a Hero through Victimization

Needy, like Jennifer, undergoes a transformation. But while Jennifer goes from prom queen to sacrificial victim to succubus, Needy on the other hand goes from plain Jane to second-hand victim to survivor and finally aggressor. Her transformation, although radically different from Jennifer's is no less impressive and plot related, because she goes from victim to hero to actual monster. While in many horror films, and slasher films in particular, '[w]e love to watch [the Final Girl] go from timid and inexperienced to being able to confront her assailant to the bloody death,' 277 when it comes to Needy, the transformation is even more salient and remarkable.

As discussed in the previous subchapter, Jennifer's Body presents two monsters, Jennifer as literal monster and the patriarchal hegemony as symbolical monster embodied by Low Shoulder's members. However, Needy is not a traditional victim of either of those monsters, she has no real interaction with Low Shoulder and although she is mentally and physically tormented by Jennifer, she is not a victim in the same way Jonas, Ahmet, Colin and even Chip are. Needy's victimization comes from her role as investigator and as protector of her fellow classmates and most importantly of Jennifer's body, which has become a vessel of women suffering at the hands of male power.

The victimization of Needy is latent but visible. Jennifer pushes her around, literally (Figure 4) [0:09:05] and figuratively, she mocks her and minimises Needy's paranoia so as to invalidate her-she goes as far as to call her 'tardy ' and 'a sped' 278 [0:58:49]. Although Needy does not end up looking like lasagne with teeth or being drunk from like a Fountain of Youth, she is one of Jennifer's victims. By the end of the film Needy 'finds her freedom and autonomy by defeating Jennifer, who inhibited her personal growth,' and subsequently 'by destroying the patriarchal ties that bind her to the good girl archetype' 279 she becomes an emblematic figure of the postfeminist horror film culture. Needy's heroism, though portrayed as positive, is not entirely representative of fictional heroes.

Indeed, Needy's freedom is acquired and not inherent. Needy is a double victim, a victim of Jennifer's monstrosity, but also a victim of her own attachment to Jennifer. It is this attachment and the unbreakable bond between the two girls that enables Needy to acquire some of Jennifer's power, and subsequently some of her monstrosity, thus becoming more than a victim, more than a hero, more than a monster; she becomes a Killer Girl Hero.

C. Fighting Back, Refusing the Victim Status and not Subordinating to Objectivity -How Needy Became a Killer Girl Hero

The figure of the Final Girl, as well as the figure of the monster(s), is subverted in Jennifer's Body as the main monster is female in the figure of Jennifer (and male through Low Shoulder) and in the sense that Needy voluntarily becomes a killer by the end of the film and does not save herself despite her victim status as it is commonly the case for Final Girls. 287 Hence, Needy, through her status seems to fit Claire Berlyn's definition of the Killer Girl Hero who 'combine[s] violence, cunning, victimisation, and moral fallibility together in a way rarely seen in earlier films.' 288 In her dissertation, Berlyn establishes nine traits that can often be observed in outsider or tough characters who embody the Killer Girl Hero. These nine traits are: intelligence, opinionatedness, self-sufficiency, sexual confidence, loneliness, deceptiveness, violence, angriness and proneness to mental illness. They seem to be organised from the most positively connoted trait to the most negatively connoted one. Throughout the film, Needy presents every single one of them. She goes from intelligent, opinionated, self-sufficient and sexually confident at the beginning of the film, when her life, although dictated by Jennifer, was rather balanced, to lonely, deceptive, violent and ultimately disturbed as she ends up in a mental institution. It is thanks to these traits and to the shift in her personality that Needy finds her inner Killer Girl Hero dimension.

Another important element of the Killer Girl Hero, which is particularly striking in Jennifer's Body, is that the 'monster pursue Jennifer has been called a tragic figure in this thesis, but Needy could also be described as such.

Needy fits the model of the heroine who thrives to tell the tale precisely because she goes through multiple tragedies. She loses her friend Colin, her boyfriend dies before her eyes, and her best friend is abducted, symbolically raped, literally stabbed to death and yet comes back from the dead and torments her to her breaking point. It is the slow and steady loss of her high school male classmates, alongside her gain in independence from Jennifer, the patriarchal hegemony and the normative worldview that turn Needy into the film heroine. Nevertheless, Jonas, Colin, Ahmet and Chip are not collateral damage and Low Shoulder are not simply pathetic and amoral opportunists, but they are all part of Cody's spectrum of male victims and their echoes in society. [slasher] films portrayed male and female victims equally in frequency.' 295 However, 'women seemed to be brutalized during violent or death scenes more often than do the men characters.' 296 Jennifer's Body's feminist director and scriptwriter wanted to change the trend and to render onto men the violence they perform onto women and the violent deaths women often endure in horror films. Hence, Cody resumes to create complex male characters, some innocent, some villains, some almost heroic, but all eventually meeting a mortal fate in the hands of empowered young women. Jonas, Ahmet, Colin and Chip are naive adolescents who are simply blinded by what society expects of them, which leads them to their demise. On the other hand, Low Shoulder are aware of their position and willingly affirm their dominion, which also results their fatal fate. We are thus witnessing a comment on the male-based society at large.

III. A Spectrum of Male Victims and the Varying Degrees of Punishment

A. Chip: The New Hero and the Tragic Figure of the Genuine Nice Guy

In 2013, Amy Burns spoke at length about the figure of the New Hero. Based on John

Beynon's 'new man,'297 the new hero is both a nurturing and a narcissist. The nurturer nature of Chip is clearly visible in the film as he is always available for Needy and barely complains when she cancels plans with him to spend time with Jennifer. Although his narcissistic personality does not come up until late in the film when Needy refuses to go to the dance with him and makes him promise that he will not go at all (a promise that he breaks), Chip can still be read as narcissistic. Indeed, he still goes to the dance and is seduced by Jennifer apparently as payback for Needy who broke up with him. Chip's narcissistic nature is emphasised even more in the graphic novel, as he confesses to his male friend that although he loves Needy, she drives him crazy by not giving him what he wants. Chip, in Spears's, even has an erotic daydream about Needy and Jennifer both wanting to have sex with him, at the same time. 298 What is more to the nurturing and narcissistic nature of the new hero, 'the most important facet of the New Hero-one that is compulsory for all-is that he is shown to be in love with the heroine and wholly devoted to her if not at the beginning of the text, certainly at the end.'299

This dimension is probably the most relevant of Chip's character in his relationship with Needy. Both, in the film and in the graphic novel, the confrontation scene between Needy and Jennifer, by the pool, emphasises Chip's devotion to Needy. In the film, while he is seemingly dying in the water and later as he lies on the floor, Chip regains his strength to try to save Needy from Jennifer's monstrosity by stabbing Jennifer with a pool skimmer (Figure 1) [1:27:03],

hence trying to 'rescue the chick heroine of the film,'300 as the New Hero is supposed to. This moment is almost a triumph for Chip301 who, unlike the other male victims, has managed to do enough harm to Jennifer to keep her from killing again. Nevertheless, Chip dies and Jennifer does not, thus highlighting his victim status and Jennifer's power over her male victims. which is not the case in Jennifer's Body as boys scream, cry, whine and beg, just the way Jennifer did when she was sacrificed by Low Shoulder. Clover argues that boys in horror films 'die, in short, not because they are boys, but because they make mistakes.' 304 When it comes to Jennifer's victims, there appears to be a paradox. Jonas, Ahmet and Colin make the mistake of objectifying Jennifer (Figure 2 provides an example of Jonas openly objectifying Jennifer in the graphic novel). 305 But it also seems that Jennifer kills them precisely because they were boys as a cut scene from the film hints: 'You're killing people' explains Needy, 'No, I'm killing boys' 306 retorts Jennifer. Hence, Cody seems to have written a precise scheme in terms of victimhood. the origins of her suffering, and in order for her to try (and fail) to free herself from the hold of society, she tries to objectify males the same way they objectify her. 305 The captions enable the readers to see what the characters' thoughts are, which is not possible in the film as the only voice-over is Needy's and she is not omniscient to the action. 306 These quotes do not have a timing because they come from a deleted scene which has been added to the DVD extras (K. Kusama, Jennifer's Body, op. cit.) In 2020, Françaix states in an interview, '[F]ilms which develop a feminist discourse often give the paradoxical image of males as not threatening anymore but as insignificant, dumb or absent.' 308 Teenage males in Jennifer's Body are particularly insignificant and have sometimes been qualified as dumbed by lust 309 for their choices of following Jennifer in the forest or agreeing to meet her in an under-construction house in an abandoned neighbourhood, or even to follow her to an abandoned and filthy swimming pool that looks nothing like a dating area.

What is more to that is that those boys are not 'deserving of punishment. They're just clueless.' 310 All these elements together, put men in both a powerless position and in a position of weakness and inferiority, which is a position that the male spectator does not want to be put into. Thus, Cody and Kusama offer two choices to the male spectator-which are not exclusivehe can choose to identify with the Final Girl, an unapologetic feminine figure, and/or recognize that the male characters did not deserve to die, the same way Jennifer did not deserve to be sacrificed for men's gain.

In sum, in Jennifer's Body, '[n]one of the men […] have enough presence for the audience members to project themselves onto.' 311 Indeed, as Creed stated, by putting males on screen in a powerless situation, the male spectators who identify with these males, are put in the same position, which they would not accept. In this way, Kusama and Cody subvert the classic horror film by giving credit to women. Men are weak and bound to die, in contrast, women are strong, powerful and dangerous characters. Jennifer's Body's filmmakers thus prove that women in horror films can be multi-dimensional and can stand and fend for themselves, fight back and even, if push to their very limits, become the monster. The empowerment of women becomes even more prominent when they turn back to the original villain with their very own weapon as it is the case for Needy and Low Shoulder. Dahl, 1994). In fact, they did, in the first test screenings.

However, because moviegoers demanded closure concerning the band, 312 During the last scene of the film [1:35:58-1:37:01], before the big reveal with the end credits, Needy is hitchhiking to 'follow[...] this rock band.' 313 'The act of hitchhiking is a trope of storytelling that not only marks the beginning of an adventure, but also epitomizes fearlessness and reckless abandon.' 314 Needy is thus determined to achieve vengeance, and she does, as the end credits and the photographs of Low Shoulder's members suggest [1:37:02-1:38:59]. These photographs create a new way of presenting deaths, whereby the deaths themselves are not emphasised. Indeed, the emphasis seems to be on the methods of investigation and the pursuit of the perpetrator(s) (Figures 4 and5). This emphasis on the perpetrator(s) raises the idea that Needy, through her makeover and through Jennifer's bite, has become a 'psychotic monster' who kills because she was 'symbolically castrated, that is, she feels that she has been robbed unjustly of her rightful destiny.' 315 The destiny refers here to her high school years with her boyfriend Chip on the one hand and with her best friend/love interest Jennifer on the other.

Thus, Needy-as her name suggests-needed to take revenge on those who had deprived her of it, namely Low Shoulder. By becoming an avenger and by targeting Nikolai and his band, Needy turns them into preys-the same way they had made Jennifer a prey-and soon enough into victims of brutal murders. Due to the tone of the film, the unfair sacrifice of Jennifer and the equally unfair deaths of teenage boys, Jennifer's Body's spectators wanted Nikolai and his 'accomplices' to suffer.

Kusama delivers closure to the viewers as Needy, through the violence presented in the endcredits photographs, renders onto Low Shoulder the suffering they inflicted on Jennifer. Indeed, while most of the violence was inflicted on teenage boys by Jennifer, this violence was initiated by the butchery orchestrated by Low Shoulder and perpetrated on Jennifer. The completion of this series of massacres is incumbent upon Needy, who becomes a sort of Femina Furiosa, 316 a free spirit who goes wherever she wants and does whatever she wants, a strong woman in sum 317 -the figure of the Femina Furiosa is remarkably personified in Charlize Theron's Imperator Furiosa in George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).

Hilary Neroni highlights the idea that a woman who takes upon her to become violent is threatening because as she does so, the woman 'breaks up this symbolic relationship between violence and masculinity.' 318 Although Jennifer kills men and is a violent woman, she cannot be compared to the Femina Furiosa or the violent woman in the same way Needy can. Needy kills and becomes violent to, first, take revenge, but she also does so to protect other women and girls from Low Shoulder's evilness while Jennifer does it for personal purposes and because she 'had' to in order to 'survive.' 319 Needy is a Femina Furiosa, a strong girl, a 'female 316 Femina Furiosa is a term use to describe a female gladiator of the Ancient Roman era. 317 Fausto Fasulo used these terms of 'electron libre' and 'femme vraiment forte' when he talked about the representation of the Femina Furiosa in Natasha (Jag Mundhra, 2007) 319 The inverted commas here illustrate that the meaning of these words must not be taken literally as Jennifer's survival as a succubus was solely based on physical appearances and the archetypal idea of woman's ideal body based on patriarchal values.

Hence, it is surprising that the comments made by Jennifer's Body's filmmakers did not find their public back in 2009 as demonstrated by the following reviews.

Back in 2009, the consensus concerning Jennifer's Body's themes of abuse, gender-division and (same and different) gender-hatred seems to be at the same time acknowledged but misread and unimportant to society. In 2009, Matt Goldberg, who writes for Collider-a movie news website-, raised all the issues at stake in Cody and Kusama's film-the physical and mental aftermath of a rape, the threat that female sexual empowerment may represent, the fragility of women's friendship, the commentary on gender-roles. He then judged that the film actually addresses none of them. 337 James Berardinelli, still in 2009, made a similar comment on Reel Views-a website specialised in movie reviews-, but instead of considering the film as nonsubversive, he called it 'neither original, nor interesting.' 338 Thus, in 2009, these critics did not review the film as being subversive or critically reflecting on society or the horror genre on specialised websites, but rather, they reviewed it as trying to, and miserably failing at it.

However, there were a few exceptions, and some critics did make a parallel between the issues dealt with in the 1970s and their reflection upon society, and the fact that Jennifer's Body is a pastiche of those films, both in term of codes and tropes and in terms of the issues it addresses. Who has it and how you use it.' 341 While both Needy and Jennifer's Body needed some time to realise the power they had, they did change things both on-screen and off-screen.

Since 2018 (and even for some reviews a year or two before), the consensus has drastically changed and the subtexts of Jennifer's Body seem, not only to be acknowledged, but to be celebrated and praised in the genre, in cinema and in society, while they have not changed since the film's first release. In 2018, Sarah Fonseca summed up the messages that Jennifer's Body intends to convey as she wrote on them.-a LGBTQ+ 342 community platform, Women should always aim to support one another; patriarchy makes friendships between women terribly difficult, and sex with men a bore; survivors are omnipotent; the reckless abandon of teen girls does not justify assault; no one asked to be made into a monster, but no one should be surprised when the monster of their creation invites herself over for dinner. 343 The themes listed on them. are not different from those on Collider, however, them. seems to have shed a new light on these themes as it acknowledges both their relevance and their legitimacy. Em Canon, in her 2019 academic paper presented at New York City Tish School of the Arts, aimed at explaining these new views of the film. She states, 'In the MeToo era, female audiences began to rediscover Jennifer's Body as a cathartic film, one in which the female victim of abuse is turned into a revenge machine, seeking justice on those who represent the patriarchy.' 344 Therefore, it seems important to acknowledge the role that the social and political environment plays in the understanding of the core issues of the film and the way it wants to convey them. In other words, as Jack Wilhelmi, claims on Morbidly beautiful-a website that focus on the horror genre-, 'Though panned upon its release a decade ago, "Jennifer's Body" can now be appreciated as the smart and subversive feminist horror it really is.' 345

It appears that Jennifer's Body, along with Jennifer Check, fell victim to a curse. Indeed, it seems that critics and moviegoers in 2009 were not eager to hear or to understand the statements the film wanted to make. However, films and in particular horror films have always reflected upon societal issues. In this light, it can be understood that Kusama and Cody, and even Fox, considered women's experience of a patriarchal society as part of the sociopolitical anxieties of the 2000s, although many critics did not.

In the last decades, more and more horror films which deal with the issue of adolescence and present teenage girls as monstrous came out346 -Teeth, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, Excision (Richard Bates Jr., 2012), Hard Candy (David Slade, 2005), Deadgirl (Marcel Sarmiento, 2008) to name but a few. This representation of powerful, strong and assertive girl on screen and in the horror genre was made possible thanks to the fact that 'chick culture has become a dominant force because women are now recognized as an autonomous group within contemporary culture-due in large part to the success of second-wave feminism-and so can be addressed as consumers and subjects in their own right.'347 Even Clover, in her seminal book

Men, Women and Chain Saws, explains that women became a topic largely dealt with in horror 'because for at least two decades [the 1970s and 1980s], the readiest supplier of the scenarios and rhetoric of self-righteous victimization in which horror trades has been […] the women's movement.' 348 In this chapter I am thus going to focus first on the feminist dimension of the film and the way it was dealt with through the figure of the teenage girl and the metaphor of adolescence as purgatory. I will then discuss the misogyny and the patriarchal hegemony condemned by Kusama and Cody by the way of a seemingly 'scandalous' scene, extravagant personalities and a twisted vision of sex. Finally, I will deal with the wrongly called misandrist aspect of the film and its link to the rape culture in America, the way the female victim is sometimes blamed and demonized and the idea of 'principled revenge.' Each of the subchapter will aim at explaining how the issues raised by the film echo differently in the pre-#MeToo era and in the post-#MeToo era.

I.

A Feminist narrative? Adolescent Girls as the Embodied Medium for Women's Empowerment

As explained in the first chapter, which analysed Jennifer's Body inscription in the horror genre through key elements targeted in specific subgenres, Kusama and Cody chose to set their satire on society in a high school narrative. This choice is not trivial, but rather gives credibility to a fantasy scenario. Christy Lemire, in 2009, wrote a negative review of Jennifer's Body for Opelika Auburn News-a local daily newspaper-, however, she admitted that 'when [Cody's] characters talk about regular stuff like toxic female friendships, awkward adolescent sex and high-school dances, it's funny and resonant.'349 Hence, although Lemire did not like Jennifer's Body, she acknowledged the relevance of the theme of high school friendships, and the reliability and validity that it gives to the themes that are addressed by its feminist filmmakers.

When asked about the meaning of the film, scriptwriter Cody states, 'We are trying to say stuff about body image and sexuality, about female friendships, about relationships.' 350 Hence, the film is very much about gender, the power struggle between them and even within them. Some critics recall-even back in 2009-that 'Jennifer's Body has more to say about the dynamics of teenage female friendships, sexual power games and the trials of adolescence than many a more self-consciously worthy film.' 351 Consequently, just like and Carrie did some years prior, Jennifer's Body, in its use of high school troubles 'flirts on being a piece of social commentary on the phenomenon of female bullying,' 352 on the hypersexualisation of female adolescents and on the behaviours based on gender which come out of this hypersexualisation. 353 The way these social and political issues are dealt with in Jennifer's Body is directly linked to postfeminism which 'has been read as offering liberating possibilities to women as a discourse indicative of a post-traditional era characterized by dramatic changes in social relationships and conception of agency.' 354

A. High School Girls and Adolescence as Purgatories, from Childhood to Adulthood

In an interview she gave in 2009, Kusama critiqued the weight society puts on women's shoulders and particularly on teenager girls' shoulders as she claimed that 'our society is creating this framework for girls to adhere to an unattainable physical ideal and its damaging on so many levels for so many people.' 355 This obsession with the female body 356 and the way 'women are subject to a level of scrutiny, and hostile surveillance that has no historical precedent' 357 is at the centre of Gill's postfeminist sensibility. Many teen flicks address these issues of blaming girls for not adhering to society's physical ideal such as The Duff (Ari Sandel, 2015) or Sierra Burgess Is a Loser (Ian Samuels, 2018). However, Cody and Kusama add a key element to the plot as they transform social bullying and peer pressure into physical monstrosity and monstrous acts. 'The monstrosity [in Jennifer's Body] critiques the social pressure that adolescent girls face to adhere to an unattainable physical "ideal", image, or reputation,' 358 but the same monstrosity also represents a way out for those teenage girls, a way to finally free themselves from their invisible but all too present ties that bind them to society's gaze and judgment. Jennifer's monstrosity, the curse she is a victim of, appears thus to be tightly linked with the fact that Jennifer is a teenage girl, leaving her childhood behind her and entering adulthood and the consequences that it represents for the human body. However, Jennifer does not perceive her monstrosity as a curse as a deleted scene-although partly visible in the film trailer-hints.

In this scene, called 'Needy confronts Jennifer' in the DVD extras, 360 Needy comes to meet Jennifer in a locker room with the will to convince her that 'maybe there is a way to reverse the curse' and 'to save [Jennifer].' 361 Jennifer's answer is surprising, to say the least, and ultimately revealing of her shallowness as she claims that being on your period is a curse, the same way having oddly shaped breasts is a curse, hence reflecting on the monitoring of women's bodies. What is even more striking is that Jennifer then continues by saying that what she is doing-eating boys to stay beautiful-is not a curse in comparison. The fact that Jennifer states those words as she is more beautiful than ever with a halo of light illuminating her (Figure 1), emphasises the idea that part of Jennifer's monstrosity was present before her 355 Karyn Kusama to R. transformation and that it is closely linked to Jennifer's idea of society's ideal of teenage girls' bodies. Jennifer answers 'I am not insecure, Needy. God, that's a joke. How could I ever be insecure?

I was the Snowflake Queen' 365 [1:26:32-1:26:39]. This very sentence is the essence of the problem raised by Needy as Jennifer's validity and confidence lie in the award she won based on her physical appearance and thus on the validity she gets from a patriarchal view of women's beauty and relevance turned into a competition. This argument is particularly striking and heavily contrasting with the appearance of Jennifer in this scene: weary, soiled, bloodied (Figure 2) [1:26:26] and all because of her own actions linked to the desperate need to maintain her status. Jennifer's social relevance then is directly addressed by both Needy and Jennifer as Needy stated that Jennifer used to be 'socially relevant', to which Jennifer answers, in a scream: 'I AM STILL SOCIALLY RELEVANT' 366 [1:26:43]. Jennifer's monstrosity is what makes her both relevant and insecure, as she 'seduces and kills boys from her school in order to literally feed on the expectations and maintain her own representation of the ideal,' 367 which is biased by society's framework of self-worth lying in physical appearance. 368 The scene even visually comments on Jennifer's social relevance as the intercutting between Jennifer and Needy shows a contrast in their soiled bodies. Jennifer's mouth is dripping with blood, and her dress is stained with black gunk, nonetheless her make up is not smudged and her hair is perfectly combed [1:26:26]. Needy, on the other hand, looks physically wrecked, her hair is totally tangled, and her face is covered with sludge [1:26:05]. Thus, even at her worst Jennifer makes it a point of 364 Needy Lesnicki in K. Kusama,Jennifer's Body,op. cit.,my emphasis. 365 Jennifer Check in K. Kusama,Jennifer's Body,op. cit.,my emphasis. 366 Ibid. 367 R. Schmitz,The Maastricht Journal of Liberal Arts,op. cit.,37. 368 Karyn Kusama to R. Tarek, ComingSoon, op. cit. honour to stay socially relevant exclusively through her physique. In this light, Needy is not actually being critical of Jennifer's social relevance, but of her social relevance according to a patriarchal society. According to Lyn Mikel Brown:

Girls can be excruciatingly tough on other girls. They can talk behind each other's backs, tease and torture one another, police each other's clothing and body size... and can promote a strict conformity to the norms and rules of idealized femininity, threaten rejection and exclusion, and reinforce gender and racial stereotypes. 369 It is not the case in this instance. Needy is not being tough on Jennifer, but she is showing her that Jennifer's own severity towards her worthiness is based on that girl-on-girl excruciating toughness, which is itself due to patriarchal norms. Indeed, a striking example of this selfinflicted toughness which had been created by the pervasive diet-culture of the patriarchal society is verbalised by Needy. The latter states that Jennifer, a thin teenager whose body enters a transitional period, voluntarily takes laxative to 'stay skinny' [1:26:46]. Thus, as stated in the website Humans Echoes, Jennifer's Body's 'greatest strength probably lies in how it portrays teen issues: jealousy, sex, the intensity of teen girls' relationships.' 370

B. A Commentary on Female Friendships

'Over the past couple of decades, an increasing number of film feature teen-girl monsters within a larger social context, with sisters or friends who go along with them on their journey of monstrous transformation.' 371 Ginger Snaps is a prime example of these films. In Jennifer's Body, the main transformation concerns Jennifer, but she does not go through it on her own, Needy is always by her side and is willing to do anything in her power to help Jennifer the same way Brigitte did with Ginger. Needy witnesses Jennifer's transformation, first helplessly, then openly keen to help save her, and finally determined to end the situation.

In a way, Jennifer's Body is a '[c]ommentary on the complicated relationships between adolescent girls.' 372 The evolution of the complicated relationship between Jennifer and Needy can be seen by the contrast between a scene such as the final confrontation by the pool, which occurs rather late in the film, and the scene of strong bonding between Jennifer and Needy-on Needy around for the attention and the lack of competition' 380 and thus, to feel more special than the 'normal' girls both in the eyes of Low Shoulder and of the male sex at large. She goes as far as to introduce Needy to Nikolai as '[her] friend ' [0:11:46], whose name is not even worth mentioning, while Needy emphasises the fact that she is her best friend when she defends influences the depth of the horror of the film, is the 'enormous surplus of sexual energy' between the girl 'that will have to be repressed.' 387 Casali, Terrors of Girlhood, op. cit., 33. makes in terms of sexuality: the distinction between men's displaying of their sexuality and women's. 'Writer Diablo Cody intended for the film to confront misogyny in the horror genre by creating a story told from a female perspective.' 400 I would argue that more than confronting misogyny in the horror genre, Cody and Kusama, confront misogyny in the film industry (on-screen and functions: being erotic objects for the males on screen and being erotic objects for the male off screen. 405 It goes without saying that the horror film makes no exception to the rule and even emphasises the 'sadistic-voyeuristic' gaze, described by Laura Mulvey, in which 'pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness.' 406 Colin's coffin bawling (Figure 3). Cody's humour is sardonic and almost cynic here as Jennifer is Colin's murderer and represents the way '[t]he impact of puberty on a young high-schooler's mind and body is metaphorically realised as a demon transference.' 419 However, the only thing that matters to Chloe is that 'that bitch' invited Colin over to watch Aquamarine (Elizabeth Allen, 2006). Once again, shallowness is targeted here as Chloe seems to state that being a superficial bimbo and successfully manipulating a naive teenage boy is worse than being a murderer who turns pubescent males into Italian dishes with teeth. This dominion will be reproduced in the final confrontation between Needy and Jennifer (Figure 8) [1:31:38], but as was the case for Jennifer and Colin's encounter, this time violence will be substituted to sexual tension. Anton Bidel comments on this power struggle or rather this progressive inversion of power as he states, '[I]t gradually becomes clear that the two girls' roles are neatly reversing and that it is Anita who is truly becoming empowered by her own 427 Ibid.

teen metamorphosis.' 431 Needy thus gains control but is still conflicted between love and friendship, and her full metamorphosis will not happen until the very end of the film with her reverse makeover [1:30:18] which has been discussed in the second chapter. Anita's internal dissension is stressed by a close-up of the two adolescents kissing while her BFF necklace is dangling between them [0:57:05], thus highlighting Needy's struggle: Do I want her, or do I want to be her? Jennifer, on the other hand, demonstrates vulnerability and highlights the fact that Needy's gaze is more important than men's gaze who are only pawns in her game of seduction. 432 In the first fifteen minutes of the film, Needy looks at Jennifer the same way she looks at Chip throughout the film (Figures 13 and14) [0:45:03, 1:13:54], hence hinting at the idea of Needy's character as queer as she seems to be both out of the heterosexual spectrum and to be polyamorous-romantically involved with several individuals. Not once does she question her feelings toward one or another of her love interests. On the contrary, it is the discovery of the powerful love she can express and the loss of her love interests-and for one of them at the hands of the other-that empower her and enable her to become the avenger she is meant to be. Lincoln Geraghty and Mark Jancovich state, 'One therefore needs to be careful not to transfer one's own understandings of genre terms and their meanings back onto previous periods in which the terms and their meanings might have been very different.' 436 According to religious folklore a succubus is a sexual demon. She is a seductress, she seduces men in order to have sex with them. While this definition of a succubus does not appear to be life-threatening, according to religious beliefs 'having repeated sexual activity with a succubus can lead to deterioration in both physical and mental health or can also lead to death.' 442 In the Jewish folklore succubi are also known to be ice cold and to have an uncanny relationship with body fluids. 443 While many of the elements aforementioned fit Jennifer's representation as a succubus-as Jennifer seduces her victim, leads them to their death by the mean of sexual acts and has an unusual relation with body fluids-, none of them mentions any kind of need for the succubus to eat her victims' flesh to acquire any form of strength or to become more beautiful.

It thus seems that Cody, in her representation of the succubus, introduces a new element to the persona which is the element of deadly violence.

I would argue that Jennifer's cannibalistic appetite adds complexity to her character and gives depth to the issue of the overrepresentation of violence in sexual relation. Hence, 'Cody and Kusama disengage the male viewers by attempting to subvert their "gaze", forcing them to watch themselves be violated and vulnerable in a horror film for a change.' 444 Jennifer kills boys from very different backgrounds with very different social status in the high school 'food chain.' However, her modus operandi does not change from one victim to another, she lures them, seduces them, seemingly initiates intercourse, but ultimately resumes to kill and devour these innocent boys whose naivety led to their fatal fate. The cannibalistic dimension almost acts as an allegory of Jennifer feeding her ego with her male victims' voyeuristic nature. Hence, the power in Jennifer's Body is definitely coded feminine, while the horror genre as a tendency to inscribe itself 'within a male-dominated discourse where power is coded as masculine, even when embodied in biological females.' 445 What Jennifer's Body does is that it is '[t]urning adolescent sexual insecurity into the stuff of nightmares.' 446 But while most films do it in a way that often mirrors society, putting a young woman in a position of distress in which she is sexually abused by violent men (the most striking example of this type of narrative being the rape/revenge film), Jennifer's Body uses this nightmarish representation as starting point for its subversion of 'the power structures of patriarchal societies.' 447 Indeed, while Jennifer is the first victim in Jennifer's Body as she is symbolically raped by Low Shoulder and is then literally killed (Figure 10 Hence, and as shown in the first chapter, violence against the opposite sex implies very different consequences. For some critics Jennifer's displays of violence against innocent male victims (as seen in chapter 2) have to do with the misandrist tone Cody and Kusama give to their narrative. The way Jennifer plays with innocent men coming from diverse social groups and the way she verbally and physically belittles them before literally tearing them apart has been understood by a few as hatred against the male sex at large and thus as conveying a misandrist message.

'plays with that kind of antagonistic relationship between men and women.' 457 Which could explain the misandrist backlash against the film, its filmmakers, its actors and its characters.

A. American Society's Connection to Rape Culture

In several interviews and retrospectives, Kusama, Cody and Fox commented on the complexity that filming the sacrifice scene represented, because it felt real, because it was resonant for these women and because it was triggering, from a societal point of view.

Nevertheless, some critics failed to see the allegorical representation of a rape, and the pathetic and shallow motives Low Shoulder came for with this repeated penetration of Jennifer's body as she is gagged and strapped to a stump in the middle of the forest under a waxing moon [1:03:36]. 'Jennifer is a hero for the #MeToo movement,' 458 but Jennifer was sacrificed before the rise of the #MeToo movement and thus, the sacrifice resonated differently in the pre-#MeToo era.

The very fact that the title of the film, Jennifer's Body, is named just as one of The Hole's song which is about an isolated woman onto whom 'violence is enacted [...] and she's in pieces, and she's powerless to stop it,' 459 should have given hints. The fact that Courtney Love-The Hole lead singer-has been referred to 'as the riot grrrls' "Saint Patron"' 460 in the early years of the movement 461 should have provided some background. But neither the song, nor the singer's political involvement did, or only partially. Indeed, American society was, and still is, anchored in what second-wave feminists coined as 'rape culture,'

A complex of beliefs that encourages male sexual aggression and supports violence against women. It is a society where violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent. In a rape culture, women perceive a continuum of threatened violence that ranges from sexual remarks to sexual touching to rape itself. A rape culture condones physical and emotional terrorism against women and presents it as the norm. 462

[demonic possession] not happened to her, other terrible things would have been done to her in the name of her beauty and wanting to possess it and wanting to dismiss her and wanting to belittle her.' 470 However, using the demonic possession as a trope enabled Cody and Kusama to heighten Jennifer's feminist power by turning her into an unkillable supernatural entity the same way Jason and Freddy are. Because she does not represent a human being anymore, but one of society's tenacious and well-anchored deflects that requires a global understanding and societal changes in order to be annihilated.

B. Demonizing the Female Victim or the Succubus as the Avenger

'Religions extol a divinely inspired division between Good and Evil and have rules to follow, and many horror films are about breaking those rules and the punishment that rains down from above such arrogantly transgressive behaviour.' 471 However, while Jennifer is 'high school evil' [1:12:00] she did not break any of the good vs. evil rules, whereas Low Shoulder did. First, they sacrificed Jennifer, which goes against the rules of doing good. However, they did sacrifice a non-virgin which goes against the rule of doing evil. They thus broke rules of both good and evil but got away with it while the punishment fell upon the character of Jennifer.

One can thus wonder if Jennifer's transformation bears symbolism at the level of horror film as well as at the societal level. vagina dentata. Jennifer, then, becomes a literal representation of men's fear of castration by

women, but no one believes her to be capable of such acts, except Needy.

In the classic high school film trope of the library stroll by the nerdy character [1:10:01-1:10:15], Needy finds out, thanks to the library's occult section, the origins and the ins and outs of Jennifer's curse. Needy's voice-over in a whispered tone recites the words presented onscreen through montages (Figure 1) [1:10:18]. She, then, when confident in her paranormal findings, goes to the only person she thinks would believe her, her boyfriend Chip. When she intimates to Chip that Jennifer is evil, Chip simply answers 'I know' in an unsurprised and unbothered way [1:11:56], thus hinting that Jennifer's nature was acknowledged way before it engaged a body count. However, when Needy comes up with her proof that Jennifer is 'actually evil, not high school evil' While no one wants to believe Needy, not even her boyfriend, 475 whom she still tries to protect by breaking up with him, she is right, and her research, while creating a comical effect through the existence of an occult section in a small-town high school library, is accurate. Indeed, Low Shoulder did try to sacrifice Jennifer to Satan as the virgin that she was not; Jennifer does eat boys who make her glowy and pretty, and she actually becomes 'weak and cranky and ugly' for her when hungry [1:12:44-1:12:49]. But what Needy fails to explain, and what spectators 475 It might be interesting to note that in this scene, in Kusama's Jennifer's Body, Needy is way more assertive than she is in Cody's script. Here, she does not give up on her ideas and her beliefs, while in the script she apologizes to Chip about her 'teenage paranoia' and blame it on her 'hormones and emotions.' (D. Cody, Jennifer's Body, op. cit., 85). Hence, in just two years, Needy's character became more unapologetic and decisive than she originally was.

have to understand is that '[t]he persistent presence of violent trauma at the birth of the monster, as well as a violent death at his end, implies that these monsters [are] purposely created as a way to manage society, as examples of how not to act in the face of overwhelming personal catastrophe.' 476 Jennifer is a chimeric representation of how women could establish their revenge on the loss of power over their body, the objectification and manipulation of this latter and the inability to naturally fit in society's ideal of the female body. Hence, while 'a woman who kills for pleasure or in the grip of emotion is still hardly accepted in the horror film context in which survival instinct and revenge are sole excuses for unpunished female violence,' 477

Jennifer seems to fall between these two categories. She is torn between the pleasure to acquire beauty and attention from the boys she seduces and kills, as the multiple shots of her admiring herself in mirrors after her killings suggest (Figure 2) [0:36:51], and the will to take revenge upon any man who dares to treat her as an object of their own pleasure. Thence, these reflections symbolise the duplicity of the femme fatale-from seductress to murderer. [horror] films encourage us to see female paranoia as a reasonable response to a world that is hostile to women, they can offer important critiques of existing power relationships.' 478 When one considers the difference between Jennifer's and Needy's use of their power, one can only realise that Needy's paranoia helped her achieve her principled revenge. Which is to go back to the origins of Jennifer's suffering and to render onto Low Shoulder the hostility they demonstrate towards Jennifer. By going back to the source of women's suffering, Needy thus targets the male-centred, women-degrading society that Low Shoulder embodies.

476 S. Bell,Monsters & the Monstrous,op. cit.,29. 477 P. Françaix,Teen Horror,op. cit.,224. 478 Jonathan Markovitz, 'Female Paranoia as Survival Skill: Reason or Pathology in A Nightmare on Elm Street?' Quarterly Review of Film & Video, 17:3, 2000, 211-220, 219. C. Principled Revenge or Why It Is the Male Kind at Large that Is Targeted

In her book, The Violent Woman, Neroni notices that '[t]he 1970s films depict the woman's violence as something she must resort to as victim of horrible things that men do to women. Nonetheless, female violence remains in the 1970s, a response to victimization, and in this sense, it continues to fit the traditional image of femininity.' 479 In 2009, nearly forty years later, Jennifer resorts to woman's violence after she experienced traumatizing and horrible events at the hands of men. In a way, Cody and Kusama chose to make society face its flaws and the way it still has to go in terms of violence inflicted upon women. While they do so more or less subtly throughout the film, one scene in particular, which has already been partially discussed, verbally renders onto men this violence and establishes that being a succubus may not be a curse but could actually be a blessing for women.

In this deleted scene, after her paranormal research, Needy, still determined to help and save her best friend, meets Jennifer in a locker room to explain the way she envisions the future for Jennifer. The opening of this scene looks like an homage to Brian De Palma's Carrie, and thus to the theme of adolescence as horrific. The girls' showers framed with the fog and the display of nudity (Figure 3) creates just the same atmosphere it did in Carrie (Figure 4) [0:02:20]. If this scene had been preserved in the film, spectators could have grasped more easily the feminist subtext of the film and the depth of its themes. Indeed, this scene in itself exposes first, the pleasure Jennifer feels when she kills, but also the apparently unbreakable bond that exists between the two teenage girls and the toxicity of this bond. that matters to Needy is also Jennifer. While Needy refutes Jennifer's statement as she claims that she has Chip, neither Jennifer, nor Needy seem truly convinced by this argument. This distrust is precisely why Needy ends up going through principled revenge.

' [Needy] went from being a slightly nerdy high-school student to a violent patient at a mental hospital,'483 because men destroyed Jennifer, because men created a figurative and literal monster embodied by her best friend and because by the time she found the truth out no men, not even her boyfriend would believe her but would blame her and her paranoia. Hence, while

Cody and Kusama created innocent male non-survivors who are not deserving of suffering, they still represent male-created society as oppressive, controlling and dangerous for women.

The only way Needy can turn back on this society is by turning their very own weapon against the killers and thus using the bowing knife Nikolai narcissistically used to admire himself in (Figure 6) [1:02:59] after using it to kill Jennifer, to put an end to this male supremacy. What Jennifer's Body presents issues related to female body treatments, the relevance of women in society and how women are treated in general. The way these issues were predominantly interpreted in 2009 when the film was released is radically different from the way they have been generally understood since 2018. The film plays with the antagonization of men and women at a societal level. 486 In some respects, it almost looks like Cody and Kusama 'conflate feminism with violence,' which 'sounds very uninformed.' 487 However, the filmmakers use violence and the horror film only to give dimension to Jennifer's Body and to give some depth to the messages they would like to convey on women's agency and women's place in society.

Thus, people have learnt that Jennifer's Body does not condone women's violence against men, nor does it condone men's violence against women, but it condones women who stand for what they judge to be right and stand against what they estimate to be against their agency.

The stance Cody and Kusama takes in Jennifer's Body, a horror-comedy, is therefore fundamentally linked to feminism, its multiple waves and movements. They comment on the ideology of sex positivism which is at core of the third-wave feminism, on teenage girls' anger which is one of the principles of the Riot Grrrl movement, on women's agency an element at stake in postfeminism and on the empowerment of women which characterises the fourth-wave feminism.

Thus, and as Kusama stated in 2009:

There is certainly a long tradition of horror movies that depend on using a girl's sexuality as a way to suggest her vulnerabilities. Whereas with this movie, I think it's a little more complicated: the teeth are out. There were a lot of layers to the ideas in the script that functioned on that level for me. It just felt different. It felt like a really cool reversal. 488 While this difference bothered many critics and moviegoers in the 2009, it has mostly been applauded and praised since 2018.

girls through a horror pastiche. Because Jennifer's Body is a horror film, it features tropes and elements of slasher film and other horror subgenres, but it subverts them. Jennifer's Body subverts the horror genre by changing it, changing its target, changing its persecutors, changing its victims and most of all changing the vision spectators have of horror films. It does so with a feminist purpose, because '[t]he general goal of feminist intervention is change,' 493 and while 'most [feminist horror films] are DIY shorts with high shock value, which aim to raise feminist and social issues while encouraging to take a stand,' 494 Jennifer's Body did exactly that but through one of Hollywood's biggest production companies-20 th century Fox-as to reach out to a larger audience.

On top of that, Kusama's film also inscribes itself in 'women's cinema' and in the 'woman's film' because not only does it adopt a feminist agenda and address issues that concerns women by reinventing the tropes and codes of the horror film genre to serve a feminist purpose, but because it also asks its audience to question society and to connect Jennifer's Body to the horrific reality that it emphasises. de Lauretis, in 'Strategies of Coherence', states that,

[T]he phrase 'feminist cinema' is a notation for a process rather than an aesthetic or typological category: the notation for a process of reinterpretation and retextualisation of cultural images and narratives whose strategies of coherence engage the spectator's identification through narrative and visual pleasure and yet succeed in drawing 'the Real' into the film's texture. 495 With this definition in mind, it seems only evident that, in 2009, Kusama and Cody, two feminist women, wanted to make a feminist film for women, for the purpose of denouncing and condemning the influence that the patriarchal hegemony has on men and women relationships, but also on women-to-women relationships. They wanted this film to resonate for women and to act as a trigger for misogynistic men who thought they would get a chance to see a naked Fox getting tortured. While Toril Moi argues that '[t]here is not, unfortunately, The Show Must Go on Until No Battle Is Needed Anymore 'Many people assume we are more "progressive" about gender issues now than we ever have been in the past, implying a linear view of history. However, as the backlashes against feminism show, societies have a tendency to move back as well as forward.' 508 Therefore, while Jennifer's Body did find its seemingly rightful place in society after the backlash it Crew,op. cit. 507 J. McCabe,Feminist Film Studies,op. cit.,114. 508 S. Chaudhuri,Feminist film Theorists,op;cit.,127. This remark is conterminous with something Janet Bergstrom and Mary Ann Doane noticed seventeen years prior to Chaudhuri when they said, '[It] is particularly tempting to write a history of feminist theoryprecisely because it is feministwhich stresses or even implies "progress". Yet, it is important to acknowledge that, even perhaps especially with feminism, there is the ever present potential of regression, uneven development, failure and disillusion, not to mention misunderstanding.' ('The Female Spectator: Contexts and Directions ', Camera Obscura, 20/21, 1989, 5-27, 15). It thus seems to be an ongoing process that might take another seventeen years to evolve. experienced at the time of its release, it still fails to win unanimous support in 2021. In March 2021, Eve Tuchnet wrote a negative review of Jennifer's Body regretting the fact that '[t]here is something insistently heteronormative about the movie' and that Chip plays 'too big of a role,' 509 which was, according to her, unnecessary. Critiques thus evolved, and the different elements noted in those critiques evolved with them, but it seems that Jennifer's Body still has its detractors and that its feminist tone is still a subject of debate more than ten years after its release.

However, 'If there's any wisdom to be taken away from Jennifer's Body, it's that Rotten Tomatoes is often wrong and should be regarded with skepticism.' 510 Reviews are made by individuals who have their own beliefs, conceptions and knowledge, and thus their reviews should be understood as such. They simply are 'opinion [s], dressed in an agenda, couched in propaganda.' 511 It is the consensus of the film and its evolution-which has not been updated on Rotten Tomatoes since 2009, for example-that needs to be taken into account to truly reflect on the reception at large. Moreover, 'we must take films and fiction in general for what they are: representations.' 512 Films, and especially horror films, represent society through fiction.

Jennifer's Body is not believable if read literally, but Cody and Kusama would not have resolved to create a film that comments on certain issues if these issues did not exist. 'Oftentimes, I think [horror] reveals something ugly about our world that is just too devastating to face in any sort of real way.' 513 confessed Kusama in 2009. When ugly means 'sexpot' Fox reduced to a gargoyle-like succubus, dripping with blood and other body fluids, it is even more devastating for the shallow and women-reducing patriarchal society of 2009 and still devastating for some who still seem unable to grasp Jennifer's Body's message.

Roche worked extensively on the way women were portrayed in 1970s and 1980s slasher films and the way they are portrayed in their 2000s remakes. 514 He argues that women and especially heroines in the 2000s are more assertive, more resourceful and at the same time more feminine, and more sexualised than they were in the 1970s and 1980s 515 -his most striking example concerns Erin (Jessica Biel) in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Marcus Nispel, 2003).

Jennifer's Body goes along those lines of presenting strong and assertive female protagonist who fend for themselves-and who become women who kill after their victimisation. 516 However, another element which is at core in Jennifer's Body has its importance in its discussion in 2021.

In 2021, society is mark with the rise of social media (Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and other online platforms) which enables activists such as those of the fourth-wave feminism to convey their ideologies globally and instantly share them with the whole world, but which also enhance people's and more specifically teenagers' toughness against each other online. Hence, adolescence and the horror it might represent is once again targeted as a major theme in horror genre. Unfriended (Levan Gabriadze, 2014) for example exploit the impunity of filming someone (a teenage girl) in a vulnerable moment (drunk and passed out), posting it online and unapologetically shaming that person until it has non-reversible consequences. Jennifer's Body exploits the same themes of unapologetic meanness between teenagers and unpunished violence, but it also comments on the fact that these issues are not new and must be addressed because 'if a political idea is showing up in mass culture, that's because it's happening somewhere else in a more concentrated, grassroots way.' 517 The inscription of Jennifer's Body in the late 2010s and early 2020s feminist and horror landscape thus act as a way to re-evaluate the film and to give it new meanings. It does not come as a surprise if thesis and dissertation concerning Jennifer's Body emerged in 2010s after the founding and more specifically after the explosion of the #MeToo movement in the United-States. 518 Jennifer's Body now acts as a classic teen horror film because it represents a milestone in the representation of women in the horror film and in the portrayal of victimisation, sexualisation, objectification of the female body and its reassertion, appropriation and celebration by women. Fourth-wave feminism and postfeminism make it a point of honour to prone women's empowerment and so did Jennifer's Body. The film and its filmmakers thus comment on how a woman is 'just as much of a human being as any man but [does not] always get treated like one,' 519 and the way it can be changed both in the horror film and in society.

Since 2009, multiple horror films followed the lines of Jennifer's Body in terms of representation of young female characters and their empowerment and acquired dangerousness through tragic events. The Moth Diaries (Mary Haron, 2011), American Mary (Jen and Sylvia Soska, 2012), It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014), Unfriend (Simon Verhoeven, 2014), Revenge (Coralie Fargeat, 2020), Promising Young Woman (Emerald Fennell, 2020) or Becky (Cary Murnion, 2020) are only few examples that illustrate how topical female adolescence, toxic relationships and violation of the female body and their consequences are in society and how they still have to be addressed and tackled.

Hell might be teenage girls, but '[i]n a society that's slowly waking up to the trauma of female adolescence-an experience often colored by unwanted sexual attention and objectificationit can be cathartic to see teen girls lose their shit on film.' 520 As Lena Wilson states, these #MeToo-horror films 'propose alternate universes in which some young women can escape their patriarchal confines by slicing their way out: Monster girls are more worried about how to get away with murder than they are about crossing their legs.' 521 Furthermore, and as concluding remarks, the discussions and research in film studies evolving around these films reveal that #MeToo horror films might have become a new category 522 where Jennifer's Body found its righteous place. In a sense, Jennifer's Body might have been a precursor in the #MeToo-related horror genre that has been flourishing ever since.

Figure 1 :

 1 Figure 1: Jennifer's Body movie poster.31 Fox is lasciviously sitting on a school desk, dressed in a revealing outfit and looking candidly at the camera while a hand is hanging from the front of the desk. Figure2: Coming Soon film poster.32 The poster is reminiscent of the True Blood (AlanBall, 2008-2014) teaser poster and emphasises Jennifer's luscious lips which she lasciviously licks as blood drips from them.

Figure 1 :

 1 Figure 1: Jennifer's yearbook picture. Jennifer is at the top of the high school food chain as head cheerleader.

Figure 2 :

 2 Figure 2: Bookish and dorky Needy as a stereotype of the mousy girl.

Figure 3 :

 3 Figure 3: Introduction of Needy's boyfriend Chip, whose stereotype matches his girlfriend's.

  opens the door and leans in[0:21:50]. At this instant, the open door is presented as the vanishing point (Figure3) [0:21:56] and, because every element suggests that this is a slasher scene-the built-up tension, the eerie music and the lengthening of time-, the viewers expect to find the killer behind that very door.

Figure 1 :

 1 Figure 1: Michael Myer's sister (Sandy Johnson) seen through the killer's eyes, Michael Myers (Will Sandin), in Halloween. Figure 2: Dorsal shot of Needy. The camera does not adopt the killer's point-of-view in Jennifer's Body.

Figure 2 :

 2 Figure 1: Michael Myer's sister (Sandy Johnson) seen through the killer's eyes, Michael Myers (Will Sandin), in Halloween. Figure 2: Dorsal shot of Needy. The camera does not adopt the killer's point-of-view in Jennifer's Body.

Figure 3 :

 3 Figure 3: The cellar door presented as vanishing point. Is there someone behind it?

  ) [0:22:56], thus introducing the monstrous-feminine: 126 the 'sexpot' Jennifer has been turned into a frightening zombie-like figure.

Figure 4 :

 4 Figure 4: Jennifer as monstrous-feminine, keeping her feminine attributes but disfigured by the monstrousness of her blood-dripping mouth.What the close-up shot of Jennifer reveals, as it occurred after numerous deceived jumpscares 127 is that Cody and Kusama twisted the most capital trope of the slasher film as the genre is 'marketed by a recurrent use of the point of view or the subjective shot taken from the perspective of the killer. This is not followed by a typical reverse shot; the identity of the killer

  )[0:31:35, 0:50:13, 1:06:03, 1:21:28], because 'Jennifer's victims don't view her as a threat because she is a girl and because they wanna have sex.' 131 However, as Clover warns, '[V]iolence and sex are not concomitant but alternatives,' in a slasher film, and Erin Harrington to add 'you can never have sex, because sex equals death.' 132 Both Clover's and Harrigton's warnings prove to be deadly right for men as every single male victim who agrees to follow Jennifer-to potentially have sex with her-perishes, as will be discussed in the second chapter of this thesis. 129 Thomas Sotinel, '"Jennifer's Body": Par la Vertue de l'Horreur et du Pastiche, le Sex-Symbol Devient Piège Mortel', Le Monde, 2009, https://www.lemonde.fr/cinema/article/2009/10/20/jennifer-s-body-par-la-vertu-de-lhorreur-et-du-pastiche-le-sex-symbol-devient-piege-mortel_1256314_3476.html (last accessed 15 March 2021), my translation. 130 A.Boutang and C. Sauvage, Teen Movies, op. cit., 28. ChrisStuckmann.com, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21LZ_O5fgRw (last accessed 14 March 2021), my emphasis. 132 ErinHarrington, Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film -Gyneahorror, London and New York, Routledge, 2018, 42.

Figures

  Figures 5, 6 and 7: Jonas (top left), Ahmet (Aman Johal) (bottom) and Chip (top right) willingly following Jennifer, unconscious of the premature death waiting for them.

and 7 :

 7 Figures 5, 6 and 7: Jonas (top left), Ahmet (Aman Johal) (bottom) and Chip (top right) willingly following Jennifer, unconscious of the premature death waiting for them.

Figure 8 :

 8 Figure 8: Colin surprisingly happy to see Jennifer in the abandoned house she pretends is hers (and then theirs). Still, Jennifer intrudes a house, one very specific house, and she does so on two occasions. The first one has already been discussed as it occurs when Jennifer first appears after her transformation at Needy's house [0:22:56]. The second takes place when Jennifer joyfully initiates a slumber party at Needy's house [0:56:12] after ruining Needy's intercourse with her boyfriend, Chip, by appearing as a gargoyle-demon perched on Chip's armchair [0:52:59], in one of Needy's hallucinations-while she was actually drinking blood from a Fountain of Youth made of Colin's ribcage [0:54:14]. Thence, by using the slasher trope of the intrusion, Cody and Kusama stress the importance of the relationship between Jennifer and Needy. Jennifer

  -'The Devil Always Lies, Always' (Exorcismus,Manuel Carballo, 2010) 'On the face of it, the occult film is the most "female" of horror genres, telling as it regularly does tales of women or girls in the grip of the supernatural.' 140 It is thus no surprise if Jennifer's Body, a film whose main protagonists are both female and whose triggering factors involve a virgin sacrifice gone wrong, finds some of its roots in the occult film genre. Although the demonic portal was open by Low Shoulder themselves, and even if they are the ones messing the ritual up by sacrificing a non-virgin, the satanic possession, being gendered feminine no matter what the portal is, 141 ultimately falls upon Jennifer, who ends up being possessed by a flesh-eating demon.

Figures 1

 1 Figures 1 and 2: Jennifer's snake-like maw is contrasting with her feminine attributes and creates a metaphorical vagina dentata.

Figure 3 :

 3 Figure 3: Regan (The Exorcist) marked by the burden of her demonic possession as she is unable to fight it back.

Figure 4 :

 4 Figure 4: Jennifer looking 'rough' after the beneficial aspects of her possession worn off.

  Rape and revenge films can, quite literally, treat of an actual rape and the consequences of that rape being the revenge sought by the victim. It was the case for I Spit on Your Grave the original, but also the remake (Steven R.Monroe, 2010) and their sequels/reboots (I Spit on Your Grave 2 [Steven R. Monroe, 2013], I Spit on Your Grave 3: Vengeance is Mine [R.D. Braunstein, 2015], I Spit on Your Grave: Déjà vu [Meir

Figure 1 :

 1 Figure 1: Nikolai penetrating Jennifer with a knife as she is strapped to a stump as a martyr on the cross.

Figure 2 :

 2 Figure 2: Jennifer symbolically castrating Colin by devouring him with her vagina dentata.

Figure 3 :

 3 Figure 3: Low Shoulder's fanbase, solely made of young women who could be the next victims in their quest of fame and glory.

  : A Multi-Dimensional Monstrous Feminine Figure Jennifer Check, whose name says it all, is explicitly represented as the high school mean girl. She is the Regina George (Rachel McAdams in Mean Girls) of Devil's Kettle, as a frame of her, strolling through the high school hallway as if she owned the place [0:39:35] reminds the knowledgeable spectators of Mean Girls North Shore's very own 'Plastics' [0:44:01](Figures1 and 2). Seyfried played Regina's brainless minion, Karen Smith, who pretends she can predict the weather with her bosom in Mean Girls. In Jennifer's Body, she is Jennifer's one and only minion, the nerdy Anita 'Needy' Lesnicki who represents Jennifer's alter-ego as she embodies genuine kindness.

Figure 1 :

 1 Figure 1: Jennifer walking through Devil's Kettle High corridor in slow motion. She is thriving.Figure 2: Regina George and her minions (the Plastics) walking through North Shore High School corridor as if they owned the place. (from Mean Girls)

Figure 2 :

 2 Figure 1: Jennifer walking through Devil's Kettle High corridor in slow motion. She is thriving.Figure 2: Regina George and her minions (the Plastics) walking through North Shore High School corridor as if they owned the place. (from Mean Girls) Jennifer is high school evil, she openly belittles her fellow male classmates, stating about a boy named Craig (Jeremy Schetze) that, 'He thinks he's cute enough for [her].' adding 'No wonder he's in retard math' 203 [0:10:08]. Or, later on, claiming that her 'dick his bigger than [Colin's]' 204 [0:44:00]. Thus, although she is not a monstrous killer yet, Jennifer, right from the beginning, embodies the female bully who appears to mainly target boys and the gender norms which defines them and their masculinity.

Figure 3 :

 3 Figure 3: Representation of Jennifer's curse: trapped between herself and the image she projects onto others.

  Jennifer's bleeding wound is pictured by Kusama when Jennifer appears for the first time after her abduction in Needy's kitchen (Figure4)[0:22:36]. Indeed, when Jennifer retells the sacrifice story to Needy, the stabbing is filmed through a swish pan shot (Figure5) thus blurring the action [1:03:43-1:03:57]. The swish pan effect emphases the idea that, either the act is so atrocious that it cannot be displayed on screen, or that Jennifer refuses to revives the trauma of being symbolically raped in the flashback. What is more is that, by not presenting Jennifer's castration during Low Shoulder's butchering of her body, Cody and Kusama highlight the disregard Nikolai and his fellow musicians have for Jennifer's body and the fact that they merely punish her sexual displaying for their own gain.

Figure 4 :

 4 Figure 4: Jennifer as bleeding wound. The close-up on a blood-dripping bosom, and bloodstained jacket materialises her metaphorical castration.

Figure 5 :

 5 Figure 5: Swish pan shot of Jennifer's distorted screaming face as she it repeatedly getting stabbed by Nikolai.'While [Jennifer's] character in earlier scenes [such as the sacrifice scene] can be compared to the unfortunate women in slasher films who are invariably punished for their similar approach to sexuality, the feminist twist in Jennifer's Body is that Jennifer's sexuality ends up being a major source of power for her.' 213 Jennifer by becoming a succubus, becomes one of Creed's representations of the monstrous-feminine. She becomes a woman as castrator, an avenger of her own castration. Thus, Jennifer's monstrous femininity enables her to exploit her full potential as feminist figure who wants to show men 'the real deal,' 214 (Figure6).

Figure 6 :

 6 Figure 6: Jennifer's monstrous face reflecting in the mirror was she calls it 'the real deal.'

Figure 7 :

 7 Figure 7: Jonas being decapitated and disembowelled by Jennifer's monstrous and toothed shadow.

Figure 8 :

 8 Figure 8: Jennifer revealing her true nature as both beautiful and dangerous.

  Although Jennifer cannot be described as an intellectual, Bitomsky's definition of the neo noir femme fatale does suit her character rather well. The established figure of the femme fatale, as described by Cristelle Maury and David Roche, in reference to multiple authors and specialists, corresponds even more to Jennifer's character. Indeed, Maury and Roche argues that 'Authors Christine Gledhill, Sylvia Harvey, Janey Place, Pam Cook, E. Ann Kaplan, Richard Dyer, and Claire Johnston took the figure of the lethal femme fatale as a stepping-stone to denounce women's subjection to male dominance and challenge patriarchal order.' 227 Jennifer, by asserting her dominion over Colin and Ahmet completely challenges the order. Kusama's establishing shots in the style of traditional neo-noir films, 'with [their] unusual lighting (the constant opposition of light and shadow) […] and [their] off-center scene compositions,' 228 hint at Jennifer's nature as femme fatale. The first establishing shot of the sort is of Colin, leaving his car in the middle of a deserted, dark street lit solely by the moonlight (Figure 9) [0:47:39]. The middle of the road is lit, while the houses are plunged into darkness and both Colin and his car are placed on the right-hand side of the shot. This shot coupled with the shift from an intradiegetic playful cover of 'I Can See Clearly Now' by Screeching Weasel, to an extradiegetic eerie music enhances the gloomy atmosphere and the impression of danger. A similar establishing shot is presented later [1:06:03] as Jennifer retells Needy how she fed for the first time, off of Ahmet innards, in the middle of the forest (Figure 10) [1:06:06].

Figures 9 and 10 :

 10 Figures 9 and 10: Colin and Ahmet are respectively presented in neo-noir tableaux which hint on Jennifer's nature as femme fatale.

Figure 11 :

 11 Figure 11: Jennifer concluding on the way men identified her, neglecting her power by focusing merely on her beauty/body.

Figure 12 :

 12 Figure 12: Jennifer's eyes are locked on Nikolai's figure; she is totally blind to the brazing around her.

Figure 13 :

 13 Figure 13: Nikolai hypnotising Jennifer with is vampire-like intense gaze as to satiate his narcissistic personality.

Figure 14 :

 14 Figure 14: Nikolai and his band surrounded by teenage girls who could have been another Jennifer Check.One can, and many critics and moviegoers-such as Arnall-did, wonder where Cody and Kusama wanted to go with the antagonists getting off the situation lightly. This whole plot needs to be read as a satire of society. '[I]n short, the systemic sexism of heteronormative patriarchy is the monster.'253 The fact that Low Shoulder members do not get punished, until the very end of the film and by the hand of Needy, onto which it becomes incumbent to

Figure 1 :

 1 Figure 1: Needy hallucinating and seeing Jennifer as a monstrous creature on dead Jonas's shoulder, as a premonition of Jennifer's nature revealed to Needy in a following scene.

Figure 2 :

 2 Figure 2: Needy hallucinating and seeing Jennifer for what she really is, a voracious creature who is hungry for both admiration and blood. Kyle Christensen argues that 'the Final Girl can be a feminist character if altered slightly.' 271 I believe that Needy fits the characteristic of the feminist Final Girl. Indeed, as she runs through the park to try and save Chip [1:22:57], it is '[l]ike in a fairy tale, Needy runs through a forest

Figure 3 :

 3 Figure 3: Chip describing Needy as feminine, girly, but also strong and assertive when she tries to save him.

Figure 4 :

 4 Figure 4: Jennifer joyfully pushing Needy around to establish her dominion. Fradley explains that, '[T]he exhausted female victim-hero, tearful, bloodied and psychologically traumatized [...] holds a dark social mirror to the consumerist pleasures valorized by postfeminist culture.' 280 Needy's exhaustion, bloodied figure, traumatized body and mind are clearly visible at a breaking point in the film (Figure 5) [1:29:35] that marks the beginning of her makeover and consequential transformation into the ultimate hero. During this intense moment of silence and martyrdom, one can almost hear Riot Grrrl Sara Marcus's complaint: 'I felt powerless not because I was weak but because I lived in a society that drained girls of power [...], because I suspect, people didn't know how to treat the lives of teenage girlsas if they mattered.' 281 Needy at this very moment is torn, powerless and drained from her power. No one believes her, no one considers that she matters. But this powerlessness brings on one important aspect in Needy's life: anger. Anger, Marcus argues, is at the roots of female empowerment: 'Riot Grrrl, by encouraging girls to turn their anger outward, taught a crucial lesson: Always ask, Is there something wrong not with me but with the world at large? It also forced us to confront a second question: Once we've found our rage, where do we go from there?' 282 Needy seems to have find her answer, she is going to right what has been wronged and will turn her anger towards the ones at the origins of her percussions: Jennifer's Body's monsters and villains.

Figure 5 :

 5 Figure 5: Needy, as a martyr on her bed, about to transform into the film's heroine.The makeover, a classic trope of teen movies and especially 'chick flicks',283 and one of the constituents of postfeminist media culture, 284 marks the beginning of Needy's new life as avenger and her transition from victim to hero. Needy's makeover almost resembles a makeunder. Indeed, she trades her girly pink dress and bright make-up for an all-black outfit, tied hair and fingerless gloves[1:30:18-1:30:30]. It also symbolises a rupture between innocence and experience, and ultimately between childhood and adulthood. Furthermore, the makeover epitomises 'a focus upon individualism, choice and empowerment,' 285 as Needy does not conform to the traditional makeover, which would imply her to'transform[] [herself] by following the advice of relationship, design or lifestyle experts, and practising appropriately modified consumption habits.' 286 Needy reverses this paradigm by transforming herself into what society would not celebrate, she morphs herself to stay unnoticed, to become an invisible righter of wronged, using sartorial codes at her advantage by being fully aware of society's treatment towards women's dress code. It is no coincidence if Needy wears nearly the same outfit when she goes after Jennifer (Figure6) [0:05:04] and when she ends her quests of righting what has been wronged in Low Shoulder's hotel suite (Figure7)[1:39:04].

Figures 6 and 7 :

 7 Figures6 and 7: Needy wearing the same outfit and the same expression on her face as she is about to kill Jennifer (on the left) and after she killed Low Shoulder's members (on the right).

  [s] [her] not to annihilate[her] but to possess[her].'289 In one of the most controversial scenes of the film-whose controversy has to do with either or not the scene is warranted, and either it serves a feminist purpose or a more traditional male pleasure-Jennifer and Needy are passionately kissing on Needy's bed [0:57:42-0:58:39]. While Needy seems to be asserting her dominion, Jennifer embraces her (Figure8) [0:58:29], hence trying to counterbalance the power struggle. Needy then stops kissing Jennifer and gets off-screen, leaving Jennifer as focal point, and shouts 'What the fuck is happening?' [0:58:39] At this point Needy gives her dominion up, leaving Jennifer in power. This fracture marks the beginning of Needy feeling 'loose around the edge' 290 [0:03:08]. It is the struggle between an imposed and seemingly healthy heteronormativity and a dangerous and manipulated homosexuality that awakes Needy to her vengeful destiny and to her monstrous acts. Hence, when the patriarchy destroys the body and mind of the girl Needy loves in the name of men's gain, she has to become a Killer Girl Hero and to avenge the one(s) she loves.

Figure 8 :

 8 Figure 8: Jennifer embracing Needy with her limbs, refusing to let go of the power she has had over Needy since the beginning of their friendship.

Figure 1 :

 1 Figure 1: Jennifer getting stabbed by Chip as she was about to attack Needy.The subversion of the New Hero figure, as Chip ends up being a tragic victim of his own naivety, reflects upon the slasher genre. Indeed, as Clover states 'if the traditional horror plot gave the male spectator a last-minute hero with whom to identify […] the slasher eliminator attenuated that role beyond any such function; would be rescuers are not unfrequently blown away for their trouble, leaving the girl to fight her own fight.' 302 Jennifer's Body makes no exception, Chip, who was deeply in love with Needy cannot help but let her fight Devil's Kettle's monster(s) on her own. The A-Team made of the New Hero and the New Heroine did not make the cut as in Jennifer's Body no man, who at one point or another objectifies the female body, can live to tell the tale.

Figure 2 :

 2 Figure 2: Jonas objectifying Jennifer by calling her a 'thing.'The bond between Jennifer and Needy and the fact that Jennifer chases Needy around and intrudes her house on several occasions, while she solely lures and kills boys appear to play a role in Jennifer's rampage.'[Boys] are literally side pieces or pawns in Jennifer's overall and surprisingly human plan of not hurting Needy.' 307 This interpretation of Jennifer's motive to kill once again alludes to the subtext of the film. As Grady stated, boys are beside the point, they are as important to Jennifer as she was to Low Shoulder. That is why she must see her victims hopeless and frightened, so she would not see Needy in this condition and she would get her revenge on society for what it makes girls go through. The importance of man in the film is simultaneously reduced and stressed. Males are pawns to Jennifer, but they are also at

  Kusama added this conclusion to the film in the form of photographs enacting what happened to Low Shoulder after Needy escaped from the mental institution-the same way Todd Philips used photographs in the end credits of The Hangover (2009) to reveal what had happened during the 'pack's' blackout.

Figures 4 and 5 :

 5 Figures 4 and 5: The forensic investigators focusing their research on the perpetrator of the murders, relegating Low Shoulder to the background.

Figure 1 :

 1 Figure 1: Jennifer looking almost angelic with a halo of light forming around her. The hypothesis that monstrosity, appearance and expectation are closely linked in Jennifer's interpretation of her curse seems to be proved in the final verbal confrontation between Jennifer and Needy by the abandoned pool [1:25:50-1:27:52]. This confrontation culminates in a quarrel between Needy and Jennifer. This argument is fuelled by girl-on-girl hatred and is made tense by the successive medium close-ups of Jennifer and reverse shots of Needy [1:26:15, 1:26:17, 1:26:20, 1:26:23, 1:26:26, etc.]. The argument starts with Needy calling Jennifer a 'jerk', which, according to Urban Dictionary, is '[a]n idiot or stupid person. An insensitive, selfish, ignorant, cocky person who is inconsiderate and does stupid things.' 362 The characterisation of Jennifer as selfish-she is constantly looking at her reflection [0:06:53, 0:37:21, 1:15:56]-, ignorant-when she states that Jesus invented the calendar [0:37:27]-and insensitive-when she mocks and belittles her peers [0:10:09, 0:43:59, 0:58:50]-has been perceptible since the very beginning, but Needy gives it a new meaning as she explains to Jennifer and to the spectatorsas she speaks facing the camera-that Jennifer is not purposefully a jerk, but she became one because she wants to fit the standards of what society expects from her. Egan encapsulated this

Figure 2 :

 2 Figure 2: Jennifer's figure soiled and spoilt by her own (and her victim's) body fluids: blood and vomit.

Jennifer [ 0

 0 :13:30] afterNikolai and Dirk discussed her virginity [0:12:50-0:13:28].At one point in this scene, a close-form two-shot presents Jennifer and Needy sharing an intense moment of friendship. Jennifer first looks at Needy-while she has been solely looking at Nikolai since the beginning of this scene-with a wide smile and her eyes filled with tears of joy (Figure3) [0:15:34]. This expression is troubling as it is the first, and the last time of the film that Jennifer will be shown with the truly human nature of a teenage girl and not with her high school evil nature that has been shown before this moment or the monstrous face that will be shown after. As Needy then looks at Jennifer, she is puzzled but pleased that Jennifer is looking at her with those eyes [0:15:35].

Figure 3 :

 3 Figure 3: Jennifer's human nature revealed as she shares genuine feelings with Needy to receive recognition from her. This moment is almost romantic 381 but the lyrics, intra-diegetically added to the scene, complexify the relationship as Nikolai sings 'the ruins left inside you' [0:15:32]. As a result, one may wonder if these ruins refer to the underlying homosexual feelings Needy has for Jennifer or to Jennifer's homosocial feelings towards Needy. As Needy's face, then, turns into a wide smile as she stares at Jennifer (Figure 4) [0:15:41], it seems that 'Needy les[bian]' 382

Figures 5 and 6 :

 6 Figures 5 and 6: Needy candidly enjoying sex with her boyfriend before it is ruined and turned traumatizing by hallucinations of Jennifer and her first victim, Jonas.

Figures 7

 7 Figures 7 and 8: Needy's illusion followed by her disillusion on her and Jennifer's love story. 'Jennifer's Body critically engages with the sexual double standard and the enduring virgin/whore dichotomy.' 397 Indeed, Jennifer's exhibition of her sexuality and the way she performed her virginity-she either assumes her non-virgin status to please or pretend to be a virgin to try to save her life-are what caused her suffering, as female suffering in horror film is based on 'their exhibition of femininity and sexuality' 398 and 'reinforce[s] the idea that female sexuality is costly [...] for females.' 399 Hence, Kusama and Cody comment on of the dichotomies made up by society. The one between accepted heterosexual relationships and repressed queer ones, and the one between accepted prudishly and shyly assumed sexuality and condemned, antagonized unapologetic and self-defined sexuality.

Figure 3 :

 3 Figure 3: Kevin and Chloe collapsing in tears at the thought that Colin's final instant was spent watching Aquamarine with Jennifer.

Figure 4 :

 4 Figure 4: Needy fighting her feelings for Jennifer, torn between envy and resistance. The power then shifts as Needy's is asserted then by her dominion over Jennifer in an establishing shot of the two on Needy's bed. She is on top of Jennifer as she kisses her passionately (Figure 5) [0:58:28]. She here endorses powerful feminine sexuality which she did not assume with Chip (Figure 6) [0:52:42], but which Jennifer assumed with Colin (Figure 7) [0:53:08]-although in the case of Jennifer and Colin, violence has been substituted to sex.

Figure 5 :

 5 Figure 5: Needy establishing her power over Jennifer as she is on top of her leading the kiss.

Figure 6 :

 6 Figure 6: Needy not even visible as she is physically dominated by Chip who is on top of her.Figure 7: Jennifer's total dominion over Colin is obvious as he is lying on the floor helpless, and she is standing over him ready to eat his innards.

Figure 7 :

 7 Figure 6: Needy not even visible as she is physically dominated by Chip who is on top of her.Figure 7: Jennifer's total dominion over Colin is obvious as he is lying on the floor helpless, and she is standing over him ready to eat his innards.

Figure 8 :

 8 Figure 8: Needy establishing her dominion over Jennifer as she is on top of her. This time violence has been substituted to sex. The passive-aggressive physical fight peaks as a close-up of Needy and Jennifer kissing is coupled with tense extra-diegetic music building [0:58:23]. Needy then stops kissing Jennifer

Figures 13 and 14 :

 14 Figures 13 and 14: Needy feeling the same sense of love and loss with Chip, although in a completely different way.

  )[1:04:23], she becomes a survivor who then seeks to render onto patriarchal societies the suffering many women endure at the hands of controlling men (Figure 11) [0:54:16]. Thence, Cody, through her script, 'explores both the victimizing and predatory nature of female sexuality,' 448 and does it almost as an echo to Alana Prochuk lines, when she states, 'We can't interrupt the culture of violence unless we are willing to see it for what it is.' 449 It seems that, for Cody, the best way for society to finally see it is to twist the common plot of torturing women.

Figures 10 and 11 :

 11 Figures 10 and 11: Similarities between Jennifer's and Colin's wounded bodies in the hands of their aggressors who used seduction to abuse of their victims and gain something from them.

  [1:11:57-1:12:01], the intercutting of Needy's and Chip's faces (framed through medium close-ups) shows that Chip is first puzzled, then concerned and finally disappointed as he states, 'Needy, I think you need help' [1:12:59]. Thus, not only is Chip not believing Needy, but he also blames her and put it on the account of paranoia-from which Needy suffers through her hallucinations [0:52:45-0:53:00, 1:11:03].

Figure 1 :

 1 Figure 1: The editing creates a close link between Needy, the secret holder, and Jennifer's secrets as Needy is about to find out the truth about Jennifer's transformation.

Figure 2 :

 2 Figure 2: Jennifer admiring her newly acquired supernatural glow after devouring Jonas's innards. Jonathan Markovitz notes in Quarterly Reviews of Film & Video that, 'To the extent that

Figures 3 and 4 :

 4 Figures 3 and 4: Similarity of the staging and filming techniques (point of view shot) between Jennifer's Body (right) and Carrie (1976) (left). Needy, after hearing Jennifer arguing that menstruation and sagging breasts are curses while devouring human's entrails to stay beautiful and strong is not, tries to reason her best friend by confronting her with the truth. 'You are killing people,' she argues, 'No, I'm killing boys,'

  is more is that the phallic representation of the knife thrust onto Nikolai's lower stomach bears a major significance to the vision Needy has of the patriarchy and the way she wants to fight it. Just as Jennifer Hills (Sarah Butler) fights her rapists back in I Spit on Your Grave (Steven R.Monroe, 2010) Needy seems to adopt the law of retaliation, 'Eye for an eye, Tooth for a tooth', violation and non-consensual penetration of a body for a violated and non-consensually penetrated body.

Figure 6 :

 6 Figure 6: Nikolai narcissistically admiring his reflection after he killed Jennifer, the same way she admires herself after she killed Jonas. '[P]atriarchy remains the norm in American culture and that what subverts the phallocentric order […] is disturbing.' 484 Hence, addressing societal issues and commenting on the controversial topics through a horror-comedy might have surprised some moviegoers as well as critics back in 2009. But that is exactly what makes it possible for the film to be understood

  such a thing as an intrinsically feminist text: given the right historical and social context, all text can be recuperated by the ruling powers-or appropriated by the feminist opposition,' 496 it seems difficult to imagine Jennifer's Body being appropriated by anything but the feminist opposition.fundamental as 'audiences are as important as authorship and representation, since consumers can play an active role in what characters are developed and what products are deemed commercially viable.' 505 Scriptwriter and director both knew, in 2009, that Jennifer's Body 'was a specific type of film that was gonna have a specific kind of audience.' 506 Admittedly, this specific kind of audience was made up of young girls and perhaps members of the LGBTQ+ community. However, through the years and through the lessening of the critiques reviewing Jennifer's Body as sexist and misandrist, by the means of a less sexist and misogynistic society, Kusama's film was able to touch a large public and to retrospectively comment on the evolution Kusama and Cody wanted to see in society with Jennifer's Body.'The point here is that what is chosen from the archive to be retrieved and analysed is dependent on how well the filmmaker fits the feminist political world-view.' 507 It seems that the current era is the best suited to Jennifer's Body in terms of Kusama and Cody's feminist political worldview. People now praise Jennifer's Body's message because it gets along with what society now condemns legally and through the medium of fiction. For instance, the rape case of Steubenville has been silenced for six years until the documentary Red Roll Red came out and pointed out that men who collectively rape a woman, laugh about it through a video posted online and get covered by their school administration should not be accepted in society.Kusama and Cody denounced this very same system and conceptions in 2009, and once again, it had to wait almost a decade to find its voice in the political environment.

  ).

	44	James	Berardinelli,	'Jennifer's	Body	(United	States,	2009)',	Reel	Views,	2009,
	https://www.reelviews.net/reelviews/jennifer-s-body (last accessed 7 March 2021)
	45

  I. Teen Horror -'Hell Is a Teenage Girl,' A Yearbook Picture Teenage Girl 'Hell is a teenage girl' are the first words uttered by Jennifer's Body's (2009) narrator

	Anita 'Needy' Lesnicki in Karyn Kusama's theatrical cut [0:01:35]. 89 This sentence is
	somewhat reminiscent of Jean-Paul Sartre's 'Hell is other people' written in his play Huis
	Clos, 90 in which Sartre comments on the objectification of the Other and the shame of
	projecting oneself onto the Other. 91 In her screenplay, Cody returns to Sartre to comment on
	female adolescence, on the objectification of the teenage girl, but also on girl-on-girl hatred.

  The Science/Fiction of Sex: Feminist Deconstruction and the Vocabularies ofHeterosex, London and New York, Routledge, 2002, 213.

Jennifer's 'vagina dentata can be reframed as a discursive strategy through which [she] can reclaim [her body], resist corporeal colonisation, or retaliate against a conceptual framing of masculine sexual prowess that serves to denigrate, objectify and subjugate [her].' 151 It thus appears that Jennifer, by embracing her second chance at life, in the form of a succubus curse, becomes one of those 'women who embrace violence as a refusal of victimhood.' 152 Which is a key trope in postfeminist cinema. Indeed, Sarah Gamble states, 'Very generally speaking [...], postfeminist debate tends to crystallise around issues of victimisation, autonomy and responsibility.' 153 This interpretation of postfeminism goes back to Mary Ann Doane interpretation of 'woman's film' as she 'claims that it is through such scenarios of victimization and suffering that the 1940s woman's film addressed a specifically female spectator.' 154 Cody and Kusama tied this postfeminism aspect to another subgenre particularly attached to women 151 Annie Potts, 152 Martin Fradley, '"Hell Is a Teenage Girl"?: Postfeminism and Contemporary Teen Horror', in Joel Gwynne

and Nadine Muller, eds., Postfeminism and Cotemporary Hollywood Cinema, Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 204-221, 214. 153 Sarah Gamble, '4. Postfeminism', in Sarah Gamble, ed., The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism (1998), London and New York, Routledge, 2006, 36-45, 36. 154

Pam Cook, 'No Fixed Address: The Women's Picture from Outrage to Blue Steel

', in Christine Gledhill, ed., Gender Meets Genre in Postwar Cinema, University of Illinois Press, 2012, 29-40, 32.

  subgenre, made popular by Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left (WesCraven, 1972) and Meir Zarchi's I Spit on Your Grave(Meir Zarchi, 1978), emerged because, in the 1970s and 1980s, 'rape becomes a problem for women themselves to solve.' 156 Jennifer, and later Needy, thus take revenge upon themselves as they consider society unfit to tackle the burden of victimhood and incapable of blaming it on the perpetrators instead, the same way women did back in the 1940s, and 1970s and 1980s.

Jennifer's Body can be identified to the rape/revenge subgenre because it 'react[s] not just to individual wrong, but to systemic violence.' 157 Indeed, Jennifer answers the to the violence she has been the victim of by externalizing her own anger against perpetrators at large, hence luring and killing boys who dared to objectify her-or, in other words, men who objectify women's bodies. Needy, on the other hand, exteriorizes her trauma on people directly responsible for the violence perpetrated. Those perpetrators being, first Jennifer, who killed her boyfriend, Chip, and her friend, Colin, and second, Low Shoulder, who are responsible for the physical and psychological loss of her best friend, Jennifer. Jennifer's Body, thus, diverges from the linear narrative of rape/revenge films in which '[y]ou start out with a healthy, unmarked woman

[who] is abused, suffers, strikes back, and destroy her tormenter.' 158 A. The Revenge of a 'Rape in All but Name'

159

  s fault for not loving them, or the wife who couldn't satisfy them, or the pretty girl who rejected them. Why are we always the scapegoat for sick men to blame their bullshit on?169 This tirade reflects on what happens in the sacrifice scene in Jennifer's Body as, while Jennifer's murderous acts are meant to be stopped, first by the (incompetent) officer Warzak (Juno Rinaldi) who want to 'get [] the man who did this'170 [0:35:31] and second and foremost by Needy; Low Shoulder's act of violence only brings them what they wanted: fame and fortune, until they are stopped by, once again, Needy. Thus, 'it could be argued that Jennifer's monstrosity exposes a cultural double standard. When a man acts this way toward women, it is expected. When a woman acts this way, she is monstrous.' 171 This idea could help us better grasp why the subtext was not understood in 2009 as the issue of men's benefits over women's well-being was not yet overtly and politically addressed.

In the eighth episode of American Horror

Story, 1984 (Gwyneth Horder-Payton, 2019)

a female character, Montana Duke (Billie Lourd), pronounces the following tirade, Men do heinous things all the time. Carve up tits, fuck dead corpses. And, you know what? They're treated like rock stars. Fan mails, movies and books up the wazoo. And, somehow, it's always Mommy'However, this sort of issue was and still is familiar,

'[n]

ot in the sense that being a literal blood sacrifice is common, but [Jennifer's] total loss of control and bodily autonomy at the hands of men that wish to grow into a place of power feels all too familiar.' 172 Its relevance is even more equivocal 'in a post MeToo context, [in which] the idea of a woman's body being used for men's gain

[…]

, and her coping with this violation by using her sexuality to entrap and feed on those who once objectified her, feels like something to be celebrated, not mocked.' 173 Therefore, while the issue addressed in 2009 through Jennifer's sacrifice might not have been understood back then, the satire was justified and still is, more than 10 years later, as it is now spoken about and overtly and publicly addressed.

174

As John Sayles states, in Christine Smallwood's article for The New York Time Magazine, Kusama makes 'psychological horror films with sociological impact.' 175 She, and Cody, use the horror genre to comment on societal issues, and they might have chosen the horror genre because it 'is a constantly evolving genre, and while some tropes never die, it is in fact horror's

169 Montana Duke in Gwyneth Horder-Payton, American Horror Story: 1984, 20th Century Fox, episode 8, 2019. 170

Officer Warzak in D.

Cody, Jennifer's Body, op. cit.,[START_REF]Since only twelve reviews of Jennifer's Body dating from 2016 to 2021 are[END_REF] my emphasis. 171 C. Egan, 'Hell Is a Teenage Girl', op. ci.t,[START_REF] Twitchell | Dreadful Pleasures[END_REF][START_REF] Simon | Why "Jennifer's Body" Got So Much Hate[END_REF]

M. Philips, Re/Visionist, op. cit. 173 A.

Cohen, Refinery29, op. cit. 174

See, for example, Phillips who states, 'The sacrifice of Jennifer speaks to personal and publicized stories of assault by the hands of privileged white men that hold high positions of power politically and sociallyfor example, the case of Christine Blasey Ford against Brett Kavanaugh [which started in 2018 but goes back to 1986].' (The Re/Visionist, op. cit.) 175 Christine Smallwood, 'The Filmmaker Karyn Kusama Explores the Many Dimensions of Women's Rage', The New York Times Magazine, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/magazine/destroyer-movie-karynkusama.html (last accessed

14 March 2021)

  Body, in this sense, addresses and comments on societal issues such as female friendships in a patriarchal society, amorous relationships in a heteronormative society and girl-on-girl, boyon-girl and girl-on-boy hatred in a gender-divided society.Kusama and Cody, to emphasise and amplify the manipulation of codes and tropes, go even further than simply commenting on genres and subgenres, but work on their characters in depth 'by resist[ing] to normative female roles' and 'refusing to be reconciled to patriarchal requirements,' 181 just as woman's films are supposed to, according to Kaplan. Not only are Jennifer and Needy three-dimensional characters who literally and figuratively, physically and mentally change throughout the film. The secondary characters also present specific features which, at first, seem to contribute to the genre and subgenre they belong to, but are then turned inside out to reflect on the filmmakers' feminist agenda and to link Jennifer's Body to the process of 'feminist cinema' 182 by aiming at reinterpreting the horror genre. The troubling Body tells the familiar story of a coming-of-(r)age teenager girl, it does it first, by varying the subgenres of the horror film and second, by turning the familiar characters inside out and presenting a singular set of characters who break the horror codes and subvert the definition of their roles(victims, killers, monsters, villains).In this way, 'dorks [in Jennifer's

	Chapter 2: Breaking Codes -Monsters, Victims and
	Female Empowerment
	'[G]enre movies are those commercial feature films which, through repetition and
	variation, tell familiar stories with familiar characters in familiar situations.' 183 Although
	Jennifer's City Paper, 2009,
	https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/227810/body-and-mole-jennifers-body-and-the-informant/	(last
	accessed 2 April 2021)
	185 Morgan Milobar, 'Sugar, Spice & Everything Nice: Gender Roles, Meta Horror & the Female Horror Fan',

. By infusing all of those subgenres into one film, Jennifer's Body's filmmakers made what Harrington called a 'gyneahorror' film, that is a film that 'inform[s] and reflect[s] broader social and cultural processes of meaning-making within a patriarchal culture that situate women's sexual, erotic and reproductive lives largely in the context of their relationships with and between men, and in service of the ongoing construction of male subjectivity.' 180 Jennifer's characters, their multi-layering and their categorization and recategorization in terms of hero vs. villain scheme unsettled the viewers when the film was released. Therefore, knowledge on the horror genre solely is not enough to understand the complexity and the profound comment on society of Kusama's film.

181 E.

Kaplan, Gender Meets Genre in Postwar Cinemas, op. cit., 73. 182

Teresa de Lauretis, 'Strategies of Coherence -Narrative Cinema, Feminist Poetics, and Yvonne Rainer', Technologies of Gender:

Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction, Indiana UP, 1987, 107-126, 115.

Body] aren't virginial. [The] slut doesn't die (technically),' 184 and female lead characters seem to be twofold, torn between good and evil. Screenwriter Cody created, with Jennifer's Body, a horror film narrative free of male lead characters as the plot revolves almost solely around Jennifer and Needy, while the men around them, although accurately specific in terms of stereotypes, are secondary. The choice of female lead characters seems to subvert the genre already as 'horror is notorious for portraying women as victims, brutalized by killers that are often men.' 185 While Jennifer is indeed brutalised by Low Shoulder the night she is sacrificed [1:00:56-1:03:57], she, and not Low Shoulder, becomes the killer who brutalises male victims throughout the film.

In the horror genre, the macabre resides in the destruction of the protagonists' physical and/or mental well-being, enlivened by terror.

186

Jennifer's body is what is at the same time objectified 187 and destroyed in the eponymous film, while Needy ends up being mentally disturbed. However, these destructions are not annihilating but empowering for those female lead characters as they enable Jennifer to rise against the heteronormative objectification of her body and allow Needy to literally fight the patriarchy which reduces 'woman [to being] the 183 Barry Keith Grant, 'Introduction', in Barry Keith Grant, ed., Film Genre Reader, Austin, University of Texas Press, xi-xvi, xi. 184 Tricia Olszewski, 'Body and Mole: Jennifer's Body and The informant', Washington

  , Jennifer's motive is overtly psychosexual. Jennifer is victim of a symbolical rape, 'one of the most traumatic events and [one that] produces rates of [Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD)] higher than that produced by other events' 210 and 'it would appear that monsters, most specifically the undead monsters such as vampires, zombies and Frankenstein, are merely hyperbolic representation of human post-traumatic symptoms.' 211 Jennifer's Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders manifest themselves in her demonisation which involves a cannibalistic sexual appetite that re-enacts the sexual violence she endured with Low Shoulder.

Jennifer was castrated by Low Shoulder in the way Creed describes women's literal castrations in horror films as 'her body is repeatedly knifed until it resembles a bleeding wound.' 212

  In fact, Cody and Kusama use 'specifically cinematic structures of subjectivity-primarily the voice-over, point-of-view shots, and the marking of certain sequences as [...], hallucinations or flashbacks-memories-in relation to a female character:' 262 Needy, hence making two statements. First, Needy is the focal point of the film. I chose the term New Heroine as a reference to the figure of the New Woman that emerged in the 19 th century.The New Woman 'was [...] a fictional construct, a discursive response to the activities of the late nineteenthcentury women's movement.' (Sally Ledger, The New Woman; Fiction and Feminism at the fin-de siècle, Manchester UP, 1997, 1). In some ways, Needy is a fictional construct who shakes patriarchal norms to serve feminist purposes of more recent eras. Furthermore, the term New Heroine echoes the New Hero who Chip represents in some ways.

	260 Needy's screen time exceeds 85 minutes out of the 107 minutes of the film, while Jennifer's screen time, for
	example, is about 70 minutes.
	261 K. Kusama, Jennifer's Body, op. cit.
	262 M. A. Doane, The Desire to Desire, op. cit., 34-35.
	263 Jessica Parant, 'Thrilling Eve -Becoming "Dangerous Women"', Grim, 7, 2020, 10-12, 10,
	https://anatomyofascream.files.wordpress.com/2020/08/grim-no7-teenage-wasteland-digital.pdf (last accessed
	27 March 2021)

Second, the film, by engaging in female subjectivity through cinematic structures, aligns itself with the women's film. Furthermore, the role of the heroine is incumbent upon Needy for one specific reason, because Needy and no other character in the film has 'sparks of independence and defiance that allow

[s] [her]

to break free of patriarchal oppression,' 263 and to right whom she judges have been wronged. Thus, establishing her character in a feminist discourse.

Needy is probably the most multi-dimensional character of the film: 'she begins the movie insecure and unsure of herself, content to follow the lead of a pretty and popular girl,' 264 she is a 'smart girl,' and smart girls are often depreciated in films. But Jennifer's Body, which has less to do with Jennifer's actual body than with Needy's mental health, sees Needy 'transform[] from wallflower girl to power-kicking badass.' 265 Indeed, her coming-of-(r)age story is one of 259 264 Megan Fox in Michael Williams, 'Teenage Fury: The Modern Drama Queen's Coming-of-Age

', Grim, 7, 2020, 43-45, 43, https

://anatomyofascream.files.wordpress.com/2020/08/grim-no7-teenage-wasteland-digital.pdf (last accessed 17 May 2021) 265 Katey Rich, 'Jennifer's Body', Cinema Blend, 2009, https://www.cinemablend.com/reviews/Jennifer-s-Body-4182.html (last accessed 2 April 2021)

  Cody, through her characters and their fate, goes against the classic horror film codes which states that, '[W]omen make the best victims' 291 as most of the victims, in her script, are boys/men. They are, for the most part innocent, and still make perfectly adequate victims, both for the plot and for the subtext of the film. Constance Grady, in her 2018 article claims that,

'The men in this movie are really beside the point. Some of them are victims other are antagonists, but none of them are as important as Needy and Jennifer-either to each other or to the audience.' 292 It is a fact that Jennifer and Needy are the protagonists, but Kusama and Cody chose the secondary characters, and most importantly those teenage girls' victims, carefully. It is 'all part of the film's program,' for Cody and Kusama, 'to render unto men the violence the slasher [and other horror subgenres] traditionally inflicts on women.' 293 Gloria Cowan and Margaret O'Brien, in an empirical study conducted in 1990, 294 'found that

  . The Psychopaths Vanquished: Low Shoulder, the Pathetic Villains Who End Up as Victims By the end of Jennifer's Body, one can wonder if Low Shoulder will get away with murder and abuse of naivety the same way Bridget Gregory (Linda Fiorentino) does in the noir film The Last Seduction (John

308 Pascal Françaix to Jean-Sébastien Massart, 'Teen Horror -Rencontre avec Pascal Françaix', Critikat, 2020, https://www.critikat.com/panorama/entretien/teen-horror-rencontre-avec-pascal-francaix/ (last accessed 30 March 2021), my translation.

309

Nick Antosca, 'Jennifer's Body

', Film Threat, 2009, https

://filmthreat.com/uncategorized/jennifers-body/ (last accessed 2 April 2021) 310 Karyn Kusama to D. Cody, Jennifer's Body, op. cit. 311 C. Grady, Vox, op. cit.

C

  in Le Bistro de L'Horreur(François Cognard, Fausto Fasulo and Christophe Lemaire, 'Femina Furiosa', Le Bistro de l'Horreur, episode 52, FilmoTV, 2016.)

318

Hilary Neroni, The Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative, and Violence in Contemporary American Cinema, Albany, State University of New

York, 2005, 45.

  Hence, for Cody, Jennifer's Body '[i]s about how teenage girls are objectified, it [i]s about [...] the female sexual appetites, it [i]s a classic trope about puberty, which [she] know[s] we've seen in movies before, and the idea of puberty being a transformative thing using a sort of monstrous transformation as a way of talking about that.' 359

  Turek, Coming Soon, op. cit. 356 R. Gill, European Journal of Cultural Studies, op. cit., 149.

357

Ibid., 166. 358 C.

Egan, "Hell is a Teenage Girl", op. cit., 3. 359

Diablo Cody to Eli Roth, '4. Diablo Cody', Eli Roth's History of Horror: Uncut, episode 4, 2019, https://podtail.com/fr/podcast/eli-roth-s-history-of-horror-uncut/4-diablo-cody/ (last accessed 16 April 2021)

360

This scene was added to the film as there is no mention of it in Cody's original script. As stated in the editorial note, this scene is not timed as it was not part of the theatrical version nor was it part of the extended version. 361 Needy Lesnicki in K.

Kusama, Jennifer's Body, op. cit.

  Egan encapsulated this idea in her thesis when she says, '[T]he systemic sexism of heteronormative patriarchy is the monster and the character type of the "mean girl" symbolizes and satirizes this social mechanism.' 363 However, the establishment of Jennifer's meanness by Needy goes back to Urban Dictionary, https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=jerk (last accessed 7 December 2020) 363 C. Egan, 'Hell is a Teenage Girl', op. cit., 42. Jennifer's insecurity is the focus of this dialogue. Needy, in a medium close-up, states: 'Why do you need him? You could have anybody that you want, Jennifer. So... Why Chip? Is it just to tick me off? Or is it because you're just really insecure?' 364[1:26:17-1:26:30] To which

	childhood, as Needy states that Jennifer has never been a good friend [1:26:05], and thus is
	prior to Jennifer's transformation into a succubus.

362 'Jerk',

  Girlfight: Betrayal and Rejection Among Girls, New York UP, 2005, 5. 370 'Jennifer's Body (2009) -Five Facts', Human Echoes, 2017, http://humanechoes.com/jennifers-body-fivefacts/ (last accessed 11 April 2021) 371 L.Ivins, IUCinema, op. cit. 372 T.Grierson, Screen Daily, op. cit. Needy's side at least-at Melody Lane [0:15:31-0:15:41], or the slow-motion scene of intense gazing and hands waving at the pep rally [0:06:09-0:06:24].As stated by Rodriguez in his review, 'One of the themes Kusama and Cody explore in Jennifer's Body is the love-hate nature at the center of friendships between girls as they edge into adolescence-the unspoken rivalry and jealousies that become interwoven into their relationships.' 373 Hence, while the visual horror of the film consecutively involves Low Shoulder and Jennifer, Jennifer and her male victims, Needy and Jennifer, and Needy and Low Shoulder, 'The film centers not on Jennifer and her male oppressors/victims but on Jennifer and her BFF, Anita, or "Needy,"' 374 and on the complexity of their relationship. The complexity resides in the fact that their friendship is incongruous, unbelievable and above all highly toxic. 'Sandbox friendships, opines Needy in her voice-over narration, are the truest.Not necessarily the most healthy ones, not necessarily the ones that establish heterosexual credibility, but the ones that [are] rock solid.' 375 It is rare, in teen movies, to see united female communities, but Jennifer and Needy's relationship is at the same time different and gives a 'realistic look at how some friendships actually are for women. They have one of those passiveaggressive, intense and codependent friendships that young women often experience.' 376 Jennifer represents everything for Needy, and the episode at Melody Lane, before and during the fire illustrates it perfectly. It is so because the whole message is transmitted without dialogues between the protagonists, but is created through camera frames and shots, as 'each image is much more than a sign; it is a sentence.' 377 These sentences are spoken through the use of open and close forms, through contrasts in lightings and colours, and through the intra-diegetic lyrics of Low Shoulder's song 'Through the Trees.' Kusama, here, highlights the idea that 'Needy is always watching Jennifer, it's not really the other way around. Because it's always about Jennifer for Needy.' 378 She also emphasises the fact that 'Needy [...] doesn't have anyone to consistently lean on as she tries to find her identity as a person separated from [Jennifer].' 379 Indeed, Jennifer does not show any interest in Needy other than making herself feel more beautiful as she is 'so self-absorbed she has a picture of herself on her dressing table, [and she] likes having

	The scene, a short one as it only lasts one minute and thirty-four seconds [0:14:23-0:15:57], is
	intense.

369

Lyn Mikel Brown,

  However, 'what is repressed must always strive to return.' 388 Hence, '[w]hat Jennifer's Body is really telling us is that patriarchy is making young girls fight each other and that women are constantly punished and sexualised by the masculine media.' 389 But it is also telling us that the punishment and oversexualisation is outdated and that girls' sexuality, bisexuality and teen sex will return, thrive and become normalised in society.C. Teen Sex and the Demystification of Teenage Girls' SexualityJennifer has been read as a monster, a victim and a tragic figure throughout this thesis, but she is also a pathetic character. She is incapable of having an honest friendship or relationship; everything about Jennifer is fake, but she desperately needs Needy's approval to feel that she genuinely means something-not solely because Needy is her best friend, but also because she seems to be her only and thus most precious friend. The film comments on society's shallowness and superficiality when it comes to women's appearance and women's value. What is more is that Jennifer seeks beauty and strength in her male victims and through the voyeurism that is attached to first society and second the omnipresent male gaze in horror film. But she actually gains power through Needy's love. There is a power imbalance in this relationship as it often is the case in high school girls' relationships and this imbalance, according to Kusama and Cody, needed to be addressed. Jennifer's Body is thus about 'the horror of abusive female friendships instead of the more common female sexuality angle.' 390The abuse here is about Jennifer's manipulating Needy's feelings to quench her own thirst for recognition and love. Nonetheless, Kusama and Cody used this element to, once again, turn one of the most recognizable classic horror tropes on its head. That is, the sexuality of teenage girls.'In the 21 st century horror film, the heroine is finally able to have a sex life without repercussion, albeit safety and within the confines of heteronormative and monogamous relationship.' 391 That is precisely what Kusama and Cody are commenting on when they 387 R. Wood, The Monster TheoryReady, op. cit., 118.

388

Ibid.

389

L.

Escribano, 'You're Killing People! No, I'm Killing Boys", op. cit., 7. 390

Vic Holtreman, 'Jennifer's Body Review', Screen Rant, 2009, https://screenrant.com/jennifers-body-reviews/ (last accessed 11 April 2021) 391 J.

  Kusama and Cody, in Jennifer's Body, decided not to adhere to this gaze, or rather to play with it, comment on it and ultimately condemn it by ironically mocking it.Women in society are assailed by images on-screen of what they should be, what they should look like, how they should act and what society expects from them. Because in a postfeminist media culture 'it appears that femininity is defined as a bodily property rather than (say) a social structural or psychological one.' 407 But these constructs are made by a male-dominated society and perpetuated by both men and women-through every single media, 'from talk shows to lad magazines, and from chick lit to advertising.'408 The main perpetrators of these constructs, however, because of the physical, psychological and mental changes they have to go through during this period, are probably teenagers, and most specifically teenage girls.Indeed, for teenage girls, beauty and thus society's approval of their body image 'is[...] positioned as the mean to attain love and social acceptance,' 409 two key elements in Jennifer'sThe most blatant scene, in Jennifer's Body, which comments on 'the social horror of high school for adolescent girls' 410 was not kept in the final editing of the film. However, this scene appears both in Cody's script and in the DVD extras as a deleted scene called 'Jennifer Check is Gross.' 411 As if the name of the scene was not sufficiently revealing, one of Colin's friends, Chloe (Eve Harlow), takes Colin's funeral as an opportunity to publicly critique Jennifer's figure in society. In this scene, Chloe seems to settle a score with Colin's parents as she demands to know whether Colin was with Jennifer the night he died. Colin's parents first look shocked (Figure1) at the inappropriateness of the question in such a time, but they soon appear Figures 1 and 2: The faces of Colin's parents go from shock to shame as Chloe indirectly blames Colin for having gone on a date with a 'bitch' 417 like Jennifer.Cody playfully manipulates this dichotomy throughout the film, making Jennifer a 'bad-girlgone-really-bad' 418 and ironically establishing what is bad and what is worst when it comes to high schoolers' social life. Indeed, as the scene progresses, Kevin (Michael Brock), another goth friend of Colin's, reacts to Chloe's targeting Jennifer as he says, 'Maybe you should be mad at whomever murdered Colin, ok? 'Cause, all Jennifer Check did was to invite him over to watch Aquamarine.' To which Chloe answers, '[T]hat's even worst.' before collapsing onto

	Body.

  exactly going.'427 From the moment Needy is shown from a medium close-up shot as she is looking at Jennifer with puzzlement and envy (Figure4) [0:58:12] a shift of power occurs.Needy's conflicted mind shows that 'she's certainly aware of the fact that Jennifer uses her for cover (Jennifer thinks she looks especially luscious when she's standing next to Needy), but Needy still likes going on adventures otherwise above her station.' 428 Most importantly, what Needy likes is Jennifer herself as Cody states, 'Needy is madly in love with Jennifer in that movie, there's no objection to that.'429 Thence, Needy uses Jennifer to quench her love thirst for her; while Jennifer uses Needy to, first, keep her quiet about who she really is and, second, because she 'feeds off Needy's admiration to fuel her own sense of self-worth.'430

Cody, Jennifer's Body, op. cit., 80. 418

Justin Chang, 'Jennifer's Body', Variety, 2009, https://variety.com/2009/film/markets-festivals/jennifer-sbody-1200476311/ (last accessed 16 April 2021) 419 Simon Foster, 'Jennifer's Body Review', SBS Movies, 2010, https://www.sbs.com.au/movies/review/jennifersbody-review (last accessed 16 April 2021) is

  At this point Needy gives her dominion up, leaving Jennifer in power. This fracture marks the beginning of Needy feeling 'loose around the edge' 433 [0:03:08], as Jennifer states that she had never heard Needy swear like this before. Jennifer's manipulation of Needy's feelings is what made the latter certain that her torment is coming from Jennifer. Before that moment, Needy was not sure on where to place Jennifer on the Fear-Love spectrum,434 Needy was as afraid of Jennifer as she wanted her, but Jennifer's aggressive sexuality is what made her realise that it was not true love but manipulation and thus torment, which should be feared.

	Throughout the film, and through Needy's gaze, 'Kusama and Cody created a unique and
	honest depiction of a lesbian relationship; one filled with longing, resentment, joy and love,' 435
	but which ultimately ended up with blood as it is one-sided.

and gets off-screen, leaving Jennifer as focal point, and shouts 'What the fuck is happening?

' [0:58:26]

.

Jennifer and Needy kissing scene thus acts as closure to Jennifer and Needy's relationship, but it does not establish itself in isolation to the rest of the film. Indeed, Needy's gaze at Jennifer throughout the film evolves. From the first flashback in which Needy seems to be proud of her friend in an almost romantic way (Figure

9

) [0:05:47], to the terrified and worried way she looks at her in her kitchen the first night after Jennifer's transformation (Figure

10

) [0:22:41], to jealousy expressed towards Colin as he gets invited by Jennifer (Figure 11) [0:44:26], to outraged and determinedness to kill Jennifer in the final confrontation (Figure 12) [1:31:08].

433 Needy Lesnicki's voice-over in D.

Cody, Jennifer's Body, op. cit., 4. 434

The idea of the Fear-Love spectrum was taken from the film Donnie Darko (Richard

Kelly, 2001)

. In this film, Kitty Farmer (Beth Grant) as she teaches Jim Cunningham's (Patrick Swayze) 'attitude lessons' to her students, states that, 'Fear and love are the deepest of human emotions

' [0:48:28

]. These two emotions are exactly what Needy is simultaneously experiencing in this scene. 435 M. Philips, Re/visionist, op. cit.

Figures 9 through 12: Needy's slow realization of the love and loss she feels about Jennifer.

  Body falls into the 'body horror'437 and presents two women kissing in one scene of the film that this kiss is presented to display gratuitous lesbianism to satisfy the male gaze, men's erotic fantasy about woman-on-woman kisses or horror film's spectators' voyeuristic gaze. Grady, in her article on the renaissance of Jennifer's Body since 2017 phrases this idea perfectly when she states that 'the much-hyped kiss between Jennifer and Needy is less steamy girl-on-girl action served to the male gaze on a platter than it is an awkward, confused act of manipulation between two girls bound together equally by affection and egodriven codependence.' 438 It is by freeing herself from this dependence that Needy finds her inner self and grows into Cody and Kusama's representation of the female ideal: an unapologetic female figure who frees herself from the heteronormative ties of the patriarchy and who fights to the death to make the world a safer and less judgmental place for every woman.Before her transformation, Jennifer seems to fill the description of a 'vamp,' 'a woman who uses her charm or wiles to seduce and exploit men.' 440 This term is closely linked to the figure of the femme fatale as suggested by Urban Dictionary, '[A] woman who, while not necessarily attractive, has a certain allure (usually this striking, exotic, overtly sexy glamour), and is usually a heartless, man-eating seductress.' 441 The latter part of this definition, then, moves from figurative to literal with the transformation of Jennifer into a succubus.

Thence, it is not

436

Lincoln Geraghty and Mark Jancovich, The Shifting Definition of Genre essays on labeling films, television shows and media,

Jefferson, NC, McFarland, 2008, 3.

because Jennifer's While Cipolla argues that 'an underlying sense of compulsive heterosexuality influenc[es] the characters' decisions,' 439 I would argue that Needy releases herself from such influence because, while she is a young woman under the influence of teenage hormones, she does not let herself get led by her sexuality. She learns to control it and does not use it to get her way with people the same way Jennifer does but empowers herself from within, while Jennifer needs outer forces to figuratively and quite literally feed her ego.

C. Turning Tables: Sex as a Prelude to Murder

  hide her crimes, because she knows better, and she is right. No one ever suspects Jennifer to be at the origin of such blood-soaked murders, because, first, 'a teenager doesn't do this' 472 and second, 'No one ever thinks chicks do shit like this. A girl can only be a slut, a bitch, a tease, or the virgin next door.' 473 It is for these reasons specifically that Jonas's father tirade, 'I'll kill him myself. I will! You hear me, you bastard? I'll cut off your nutsack and nail it to my door! Like one of those lion doorknockers rich folks got! That'll be your balls!,'474

	Jennifer kills at night [0:53:14, 1:06:04, 1:24:47], she kills in bright daylight [0:33:06], she
	kills in abandoned buildings [0:47:17, 1:21:30] or in the forest [0:31:37, 1:06:06], but she never
	truly tries to [0:35:35-0:35:55] is both resonant and ironic. Not only does Jonas's father masculinise the
	killer, but he also aims at castrating him, which is exactly what Jennifer did to Jonas with her

470

Karyn Kusama to L.

Peitzman, Buzzfeed News, op. cit., his modification. 471

Alan Jones, The Rough Guide to Horror Movies, London and New York, Rough Guide, 2005, x.

472

Jeff Kohlver (Patrick Wilson) in

David Slade, Hard Candy (2005)

, Vulcan Productions, Launchpad Productions, 2006.

473

Ginger Fitzgerald (Katharine Isabelle) in John

[START_REF] Fawcett | [END_REF]), Motion International, 2001. 474

Jonas's father in K.

Kusama, Jennifer's Body, op. cit., my emphasis.

  505 Xavier Aldana Reyes, 'Introduction: Gothic and Horror Heroinism in the Age of Postfeminism', Revenant: /www.revenantjournal.com/issues/gothic-feminisms-guest-editors-frances-kamm-and-tamarjeffersmcdonald/ (last accessed 7 February 2021) 506 Diablo Cody in The Boo

	Critical	Stand	Creative	Studies	of	the	Supernatural,	2019,	8-21,	14,
	http:/

The Figure on the left-hand side comes from Rick Spears's 'Epilogue' as well and the frame is accompanied, in the caption, by the first half of the quotation 'So look out big bad world...' (R.Spears, Jennifer's Body, op. cit., n.p.).

Ryan Turek, 'Exclusive Interview: Jennifer's Body Director Karyn Kusama', Coming Soon, 2009, https://www.comingsoon.net/horror/news/714823-exclusive-interview-jennifers-body-director-karyn-kusama (last accessed 5 April 2021)

J.Casali, Terror of Girlhood, op. cit.,[25][26] my emphasis.

See for exampleAnna Biller's The Love Witch (2016),[START_REF] Bigelow | [END_REF] or Julia Ducourneau's Raw (2017).

Maude Michaud, 'Horror Grrrls -Feminist Horror Filmmakers and Agency', Offscreen, 18:6-7, 2014, https://offscreen.com/view/horror-grrrls (last accessed7 March 2021)

Janet McCabe, Feminist Film Studies -Writing the Woman into Cinema, London and New York, Wallflower, 2004, 18.

In an interview for ET Live, Diablo Cody stated that one of the emails from the marketing team of the film was made of only three words: 'Megan Fox Hot' and that it summarized the idea the team had on the film and its target audience. ('Jennifer's Body Reunion: Megan Fox and Diablo Cody Get Candid About Hollywood (Exclusive)', ET Live, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2JLRtWlq0o [last accessed 5 April 2021])

Jordan Crucchiola, '"It Was a Dark Time": Megan Fox and Karyn Kusama Revisit the Jennifer's Body backlash', Vulture, 2019, https://www.vulture.com/2019/10/megan-fox-karyn-kusama-talk-jennifers-body-atbeyond-fest.html (last accessed 5 April 2021)

 29 One might explain this choice by quoting Rick Altman who states that actors' names' 'designate more than just actors and actressthey guarantee a certain style, a particular atmosphere and a well-known set of attitudes.' (Film/Genre, London, British Film Institute, 1999, 25) Fox's precedent roles presented her as a sexual object, present on screen to satisfy the male gaze, and while Jennifer's Body completely turned this representation of the actress on its head, the marketing team and subsequently the audience did not understand this change in

characters. 30 D.Cody, Jennifer's Body Script, op. cit., 70, my emphasis. Note that this line was not kept in the film and was changed to a tamed version that reads, 'You don't have to talk if you don't wanna.' (K.Kusama, Jennifer's

Body, op. cit.).31 The poster was retrieved online, from the following website: https://www.amazon.fr/JENNIFERS-BODY-FILM-MOVIE-POSTER-DIMENSIONS/dp/B00D1YCA2S (last accessed 5 April 2021)

Karyn Kusama in K.Kusama, Jennifer's Body, op. cit.

C.Egan, 'Hell Is a Teenage Girl', op. cit.,[START_REF] Hutcheon | A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory[END_REF]

M.Dujsik, Mark Review Movies, op. cit.

F.Blichert, Vice, op. cit.

Pamela Craig and Martin Fradley, 'Teenage Trauma -Youth, Affective Politics, and the Contemporary American Horror Film', in Steffen Hantke, ed., American Horror Film -The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium, Mississippi UP, 2010,77-102, 95-96.

Pascal Françaix, 'Teen Horror', MadMovies, 343, 2020, 46.

J.Belando, Les Slashers Ou La Pureté Cinématographique, op. cit.,[START_REF] Creed | The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis[END_REF]

I.Hoesterey, Pastiche, op. cit.,[START_REF] Schmitz | Horrifying Stereotypes: The Construction of New Gender Roles in "Jennifer's Body[END_REF]

J.Belando, Les Slashers Ou La Pureté Cinématographique, op. cit.,[START_REF] Maury | Transgénéricité et Subversion dans le Cinéma de Todd Haynes[END_REF]

Roger Erbert, 'Popular Girl Goes Bad, Begins to Devour Teen Flesh', RogerErbert.com, 2009, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/jennifers-body-2009 (last accessed 14 March 2021)

J.Belando, Les Slashers Ou La Pureté Cinématographique, op. cit., 18.

The title of Eggers's film is sometimes spelt 'The Witch' but appears as 'The VVitch' on the film poster and on DVD covers.

C.Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saw, op. cit., 65.

Ibid., 72.

J.Casali, Terrors of Girlhood, 39.

L.Peitzman, Buzzfeed News, op. cit.

The term bourgeois must be read here as 'marked by a concern for material interests and respectability and a tendency toward mediocrity.' ('Bourgeois', Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/bourgeois [last accessed 20 May 2021])

 150 Nikolai Wolf in K.Kusama, Jennifer's Body, op. cit.

In this thesis 'rape and revenge' and 'rape/revenge' are used interchangeably as they refer to the same subgenre with no distinctive subtilty in their meanings.

C.Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saw, op. cit., 138.

C.Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saw, op. cit., 150.

M.Fradley, Postfeminism and Cotemporary Hollywood Cinema, op. cit., 214.

N. Berlatsky, Fecund Horror, op. cit., 80.

C.Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saw, op. cit., 151.

Ibid.

Asking-for-it-ness is used to term the way women are questioned on the role they played in their rape and are made feel guilty for being too compliant or not assertive enough.

Barbara Creed, Phallic Panic: Film Horror and the Primal Uncanny, Melbourne UP, 2005, xv.

M.Philips, Re/visionist, op. cit.

C.Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saws, op. cit., 144.

B. Creed, The Monstrous Feminine, op. cit., 80.

M.Fradley, Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, 214.

Roman Duda in D.Cody, Jennifer's Body, op. cit., 21.

Dana Stevens, 'Jennifer's Body', Slate, 2009, https://slate.com/culture/2009/09/jennifer-s-body-is-impossibleto-stop-watching.html (last accessed 2 April 2021)

Megan Fox to ET Live, 'Megan Fox Talks to ET About Kissing Amanda Seyfried and Behind the Scenes of "Jennifer's Body"', ET LIVE, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tpr8LRdS3QU (last accessed 24 March 2021)

S.Bunch, Washington Times, op. cit.

Diablo Cody to Jennifer Kwan, 'Cody Exorcises Demons from "Jennifer's Body"', Reuters, 2009, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-toronto-cody-idUSTRE58C0ZI20090914 (last accessed 24 March 2021)

C.Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saws, op. cit., 29.

Ibid.

Lynn S. Arnault, 'Cruelty, Horror and the Will to Redemption', Hyptia, Inc., 18:2, 2003, 155-188, 160.

Sarah Bell, 'Monster as Victim, Victim as Monster: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Redemptive Suffering and the "Undead"', Monsters & the Monstrous, 1:2, 2011, 29-37, 29.

B. Creed, op. cit., 122.

J.Kristeva, Power of Horror, op. cit.

P.Françaix, Teen Horror, op. cit., 233.

B. Creed, op. cit.,[START_REF] Casali | Terror of Girlhood: Ideological Representations of the Adolescent Female in Jennifer's Body, Thesis presented at the Rhode Island College[END_REF]

Ibid.The third form of the image of woman as castrator in the castrating mother, which is not represented in Jennifer's Body.

N. Berlatsky, Fecund Horror, op. cit., 107.

Donna Chambers (Angelica Ross) in Mary Wigmore, American Horror Story: 1984, 20 th centuryFox, episode 3, 2019.

Nikolai Wolf in K.Kusama, Jennifer's Body, op. cit.

Nikolai Wolf in D.Cody, Jennifer's Body, op. cit., 72.

C.Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saws, op. cit., 226.

E.Harrington, Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film, op. cit.,[START_REF] Schmitz | Horrifying Stereotypes: The Construction of New Gender Roles in "Jennifer's Body[END_REF]

D.Roche, Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s, op. cit., 91.

See for exampleCasali (2013) or[START_REF] Caillet | Girls Power[END_REF].

P.Françaix, Teen Horror, op. cit., 147.

R.Schmitz, The Maastricht Journal of Liberal Arts, op. cit.,[37][38]

Amanda Seyfried to ET LIVE, 'Megan Fox Talks to ET About Kissing Amanda Seyfried and Behind the Scenes of "Jennifer's Body"', op. cit.

Meagan Navarro, 'Hell Is a Teenage Girl: "Jennifer's Body" Deserves a Cult Classic Status', Bloody Disgusting, 2018, https://bloody-disgusting.com/editorials/3516475/hell-teenage-girl-jennifers-body-cultclassic-making/ (last accessed 28 March 2021)

288 C. Berlyn, Teen Angst with a BodyCount, op. cit.,[START_REF] Cook | Melodrama and the Women's Picture[END_REF]

Ibid., 37.

 Jennifer's Body, op. cit., 4.

Linda Williams, 'Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess', Film Quarterly, 44:4, 1991, 2-13, 5.

C.Grady, Vox, op. cit.

David Roche, 'Remaking Horror According to the Feminists or How to Have Your Cake and Eat It, Too', Représentations: La Revue Électronique du CEMRA, Centre d'Etudes sur les Modes de la ReprésentationAnglophone, 2017, 10-16, 15.

Gloria Cowan and Margaret O'Brien, 'Gender and Survival vs. Death in Slasher Films: A Content Analysis', Sex Roles, 23:3/4, 1990, 187-196.

C.Brewer, The Stereotyping Portrayal of Women in Slasher Films, op. cit.,[START_REF] Marcus | Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution[END_REF] referring to Cowan and O'Brien's findings.

Ibid., 30.

John Beynon, Masculinities and Culture, Buckingham, Open UP, 2002.

R.Spears, Jennifer's Body, op. cit., n.p.

Amy Burns, 'The Chick's "New Hero": (Re)Constructing Masculinity in the Postfeminist "Chick Flick"', in JoelGwynne and Nadine Muller, eds., Postfeminism and Cotemporary Hollywood Cinema, Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 131-148, 140.

Ibid., 134.

Edward Raube-Wilson in Orlando Segarra and Edward Raube-Wilson, 'S1E30 -Jennifer's Body', Gratuitous Sex and Violence, season 1, episode 30, 2020.

C.Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saws, op. cit., 44.

Mélanie Boisonneau in Mélanie Boissoneau, Erwan Chaffiot and Christophe Lemaire, 'Scream Queens', Le Bistro de L'Horreur, episode 95, FilmoTV, 2020.

C.Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saws, op. cit., 34.

L.Ivins, IU Cinema, op. cit.

A. Burns, Postfeminism and Cotemporary Hollywood Cinema, op. cit., 131.

C.Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saws, op. cit., 231.

Christy Lemire, '"Jennifer's Body" Is a Little Too Full of Wit', Opelika Auburn News, 2009, https://oanow.com/archives/jennifers-body-is-a-little-too-full-of-wit/article_e7d34ed2-bdcf-58fc-b86a-0192ab18df6d.html (last accessed 21 April 2021), my emphasis.

H.Neroni, The Violent Woman, op. cit., 33.

Steve Newton, 'Jennifer's Body', Straight, 2009, https://www.straight.com/article-258140/jennifers-body (last accessed16 April 2021)

D.Roche, Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s, op. cit., 37.

L.Peitzman, Buzzfeed News, op. cit.

Acknowledgments

Annex 2 -Hierarchy of Jennifer's Victims and the Correlations with Needy's Level of Affection Toward Them

interests to do so (Goldman, 1992).' 236 But this subjectivity operates throughout the film, hence the spectator-and more specifically the female spectator-is 'invited to witness her own commodification and, furthermore, to buy an image of herself insofar as the female star is proposed as the ideal feminine beauty.' 237 Hence, through Jennifer's transformation, the spectator witnesses a shift from men's agency over the female body-which is not sexualising but purely self-centred as it is used for men's gain-to women's agency with Jennifer's willingness to be sexualised and objectified to achieve her aims and thus reversing the gaze.

Jennifer's Body's filmmakers here, again, seem to adhere to traditional objectification of the woman's body in the horror genre, only to better turn it upside-down to condemn the patriarchy and its demeaning vision of women and to empower women and their agency concerning their bodies. In sum, Jennifer's transformation 'represents a shift in the way that power operates: a shift from an external, male judging gaze to a self policing narcissistic gaze.' 238

B. The Patriarchal Hegemony as Villain Through the Indie Band Low Shoulder

Daily, '[D]irector Karyn Kusama and star Megan Fox seem uncertain if they're satirising the conventions of teen gore-fests or simply catering to their core audience expectations.' 324 Since 2018, the discourse has changed, and critics, for the most part, consider the film to be accurately depicting the reality of a sexist and still gender-dichotomizing society. 325 It took society ten years, controversial issues regarding gender relations, and a global media coverage of these issues to fully grasp the subtext of Jennifer's Body. One explanation could be that the subtext of the film is complex, both to understand and to interpret. Because it requires knowledge in the horror genre, but also and most substantially in feminist theory. Different genres involve different hypertexts and different understandings of codes and tropes.

The horror genre relies heavily on genealogic hypertextuality because original models (e.g., [Alfred Hitchcock, 1960], Friday the 13 th , Night of the Living Dead [George A.

Psycho

Romero, 1968]) shape both their sequels, prequels, remakes, reboots, 326 but also their legacyfilms labelled under the same genre/subgenre. Because '[t]he woman's film undoubtedly does not constitute a genre in the technical sense of the term' 327 but 'is frequently combined with other genres-the film noir and the gothic or the horror film,' 328 and because it 'attempts to engage female subjectivity,' 329 Jennifer's Body requires more that genealogic hypertextuality to understand its ins and outs. Indeed, analogic hypertextuality both in the cinematic field and in the academic field are required in order to fully grasp the way Jennifer's Body, through its establishment of violent women in the horror genre, falls within an approach of (post)feminism.

The film provides an intricate and seemingly paradoxical look on young women's experience in a heteronormative, male-made and male-governed society which shapes women and provides them with a model from which they apparently cannot escape, until they become monstrous.

finally got the attention she had always wanted from her best friend. Nevertheless, this intense bonding between the women is short-lived as Jennifer's gaze goes back to Nikolai and never comes back to Needy, whose smile is frozen for a second as the camera executes a deep focus on Needy's face, blurring Jennifer who has no interest in Needy anymore [0: 15:46]. Cody,Jennifer's Body,op. cit.,102. 384 Jennifer Check in D. Cody,Jennifer's Body,op. cit.,102. 385 M. Woerner, IO9, op. cit. 386 A diagram of Jennifer's victims and their degree of relationship with Needy is presented in Annex 2 to illustrate Jennifer's killing scheme. address teen sexuality in Jennifer's Body. The Friday the 13 th franchise throughout its twelve films (1980, 1981, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1993, 2002, 2003 and 2009) makes it a point of honour to not only condemn but punish teen sex by death. Kusama and Cody on the other hand, make it a point of honour not to condemn any form of teen sex, either it is part of the heteronormative and monogamous frame created by society or part of a larger spectrum of sexuality that has been so often repressed in the cinematic field and in society at large. The filmmakers thus reflect on the 'recent feminist interventions into the question of virginity' which 'have focused not only on the way in which it functions as an oppressive framework which works to control and define women by their sexuality, but also on questioning the nature of virginity itself.' 392 Because 'virginity is not personal but social, not private but public, not natural but constructed, and not obvious but invisible.' 393 That is specifically for these reasons that the way Jennifer's Body plays with Jennifer's virginity or non-virginity as well as with Needy's unapologetic sexual activity are innovative when it comes to the horror genre.

Needy, the Final Girl who has been represented as asexual in classic slashers, 'has a nerdy boyfriend, Chip, whom she sleeps with sans guilt, but she seemingly can't resist any request from her best female friend.' 394 The fact that, the same night Needy is amorously involved with both her boyfriend and her female best friend creates a new way of understanding teen sexuality. First, '[t]he sexualisation of the Final Girl goes hand in hand with a banalization of female sexuality in general, that debunks traditional patriarchal opposition between "good" and "bad" women, mothers and prostitutes.' 395 Second, the sapphic undertone of the film highlights the idea that Cody 'doesn't punish teens for having sex […] There's not judgment about its appropriateness, just acceptance that it will happen.' 396 The fact that Needy's sex scene with Chip begins in a joyful way (Figure 5) [0:51:20] and ends up in a tragic hallucinatory experience (Figure 6) [0:53:37], the same way her love experience with Jennifer starts as an innocent and playful game (Figure 7) [0:58:18] and ends in a fight (Figure 8) [1:07:04], emphasises the idea that Cody and Kusama make no distinction between a heteronormative relationship and a homosexual relationship. However, they underline a distinction that society off-screen) and society in general. As the film is told from a female perspective (on every level), the misogyny perceived in the film resonates differently from one critic to another and from one era to another. Thereupon, in 2009, when a woman treats men like 'morsels ' [0:11:23] she is a monster who must be stopped, but when men treat a woman as sacrificial material [1:01:52], that makes them rock stars. In Jennifer's Body this double standard seems to be first applied to the letter in the script only to be turned upside-down by the end credits [1:37:48-1:38:59].

II.

Misogyny, Patriarchy and the Hegemony of the Male Power Literally and Figuratively Annihilated Jennifer's Body, in the character of Jennifer but also in the character of Needy, 'presents revenge against toxic masculinity as its protagonists' only viable solution.' 403

A. Defining and Redefining Women in a Patriarchal Society

Women in cinema have always had a place that they did not define themselves, but which was rather dictated by males: male actors, male directors, male producers and even male spectators. 404 It seems that the cinematic tradition wants women on screen to fulfil two hence emphasising the idea that while she does not condone Jennifer's acts, she is still willing to help her, because Jennifer's monstrosity, according to Needy, is only a product of Low Shoulder's evil project and she is not responsible for it. However, she adds 'but I won't let you kill again.' She here hints that, while she can keep it to herself that Jennifer killed Jonas, Colin and Ahmet, she cannot let Jennifer kill more boys, which will prove to be wrong as Jennifer's next victim will be Needy's very own boyfriend, Chip. Jennifer then brings one of the lines that will prove Needy that she cannot rely on Jennifer and that Jennifer is simply manipulating her and her feelings as she states, 'That's a lose lose. I lose me and you lose me and then, Needy, you have nothing.' 482 Jennifer through this line establishes both the idea that the only thing that matters to Jennifer is herself and that everything 480 Jennifer Check in K. Kusama, Jennifer's Body, op. cit In 2013, Casali commented on Jennifer's Body's paradoxical feminist agenda when she stated:

Though the intent of this role reversal in Jennifer's Body is to appropriate and invert the gender bias in the popular American horror genre, it is paradoxical to plug female characters into roles once written for men and then label them empowered. 489 While this remark seems well-founded, Casali still made shortcuts on the film's genre and the film's aims as she states that Kusama and Cody only borrowed character's roles and inverted them to serve a feminist purpose. Instead of particularizing it in order to see it as an individual piece of work established in a transgeneric picture, she chose to 'identify [the film] with stable, monolithic and non-particularizing generic categories.' 490 I would argue that Casali's shortcut might be related to the general idea that horror codes are stringent and cannot be conceptualised outside of their given purpose.

When the (cinematic) world shallowly depicts women as weak, disposable and interchangeable, 491 especially in the horror genre-and most particularly in the slasher film-, that is when feminist filmmakers willingly attack the system by twisting it from the inside. In the recent years, it seems that more and more filmmakers, in the cinema industry at large-see Annex 3 for an extensive representation of what 'cinema' means nowadays-address the issue of women's representation and women's voices in society. This globalisation of the issues and their representations has had an impact on the reception of Jennifer's Body and on its legitimacy in the field of feminist film studies.

Feminist Horror or How Entertainment Mirrors Society in Jennifer's Body

'Research shows that stereotypes portrayed in horror films can affect the social perceptions of [their] viewers.' 492 states Brewer, and that could be the exact reason why Cody chose to address all the themes of girl-on-girl hatred, harmful relationship and toxic society for

Cultural Changes: When the Political Invites Itself in the Popular Culture

In 2018, 'the culture may have changed, but Jennifer's Body hasn't.' 497 The culture mainly changed-regarding Jennifer's Body's reception-due to one of the 'effect[s] of the #MeToo movement [which] is that it has brought to the fore a broad range of feminist discourses,' 498 which were not as openly addressed back in 2009. The audience now better understands what was at stake in Jennifer's Body-the girl-on-girl hatred, the unpunished violence against women, the legitimacy of openly sexually active women-which was not portrayed in the trailer, or the posters, or the DVD covers, but which was at the heart of Jennifer's Body nonetheless. That distinction might come from the fact that,

[d]ependent on where the individual is positioned within the social structure, and how they are shaped by affiliations associated with class, gender, sexuality and/or ethnicity, reader/spectator response is determined either by aligning with, negotiating or even opposing the 'preferred' meanings at the moment of reception. 499 Consequently, because the feminist political landscape was not, in 2009, the way it has been since 2018 and the 4 th wave feminism, spectators' response was not the same either.

What is more to the change in the reception of Jennifer's Body, and which might carry even more weight, is that:

There has been a shift in like who gets to criticise films. So, like back in 2009 it was like, you know, predominantly straight white males that were making more or less opinions, in online film forums. But now, I think we're getting to a place where this straight male gaze isn't seen as the end of it all. There are definitely more voices. 500 Hence, the feminist dimension of the film and its queer elements have touched a larger audience than classic horror films are expected to. It is thus reaching for a public which might have been ostracized in the past but can finally relate to a film and its theme and openly comment about it.

Wood, Robin, 'An Introduction to the American Horror Film', in Andrew Britton, Richard

Secondary Sources

Films 523

Horror Films 524

Horror Films of the 1960s

Hitchcock, Alfred, Psycho (1960), Paramount Pictures, 1999.

Romero, George A., Night of the Living Dead (1968), Continental Distributing, 2000.

Horror Films of the 1970s

Carpenter , John, Halloween (1978), Compass International Picture Aquarius, 2002.

523 Some of the films may fall into different genres but they have been sorted here according to the way they have been treated in the thesis. 524 'Horror Films' here is to be understood as the horror genre at large and does not particularise the different genres that can be observed in Annex 1.

Noxon, Marti, Dietland (2018), season 1, AMC.

Schwartz, Sherwood, The Brady Bunch (1969-1974), seasons 1-5, ABC.

SONG CITED

Low Shoulder, ' This infographic illustrates the concept that cinema in the 21 st century is multi-dimensional and is more than ever representative of the culture it evolves inwhich is more connect and which heavily relies on technologies.