The Grand Optimist

“It’s not just Jennifer’s Body’s subversive tone that distinguishes it from your standard demon possession movie. Horror is traditionally geared toward a young male audience, something that Kusama and Cody had little interest in. It was essential to both the director and screenwriter that the film have a specifically female perspective, whether or not that alienated anyone else who might watch it. Because they are both women, they were able to explore more challenging themes about female identity. “I wrote it for girls,” Cody said, bluntly. “If a guy wrote a movie with the line ‘hell is a teenage girl,’ I would reject that. But I’m allowed to say it because I was one. I think the fact that we were a female creative team gave us permission to make observations about some of the more toxic aspects of female friendship.” There are heady ideas at play here. In elaborating on Jennifer’s Body’s themes, Kusama explained, “Part of the problem of an imbalanced power structure like a patriarchy is that women participate in it. And so it’s important to have that conversation.“ Is it any wonder the studio was baffled? These are not themes that can be easily condensed into a pithy tagline, and the marketing team was jumping through the extra hoop of translating these ideas to a young male audience, because the idea that perhaps Jennifer’s Body just wasn’t for boys never seemed to occur to anyone working on how to sell the movie to audiences. It didn’t help that test screenings confirmed that young men in particular just weren’t buying what Jennifer’s Body was selling. Thus began the endless frustration of a nightmarish marketing campaign — the aforementioned suggestion that Fox host an amateur porn site [to promote the film], that “Jennifer sexy, she steal your boyfriend” email — with the primary goal of drawing in an audience who had been deliberately excluded by the film’s writer and director. In fact, Kusama said she felt outright hostility toward the young female audience she and Cody had made Jennifer’s Body for.”