William Rayfet Hunter: I Like to Watch
"Jennifer's Body is a Trojan horse of a movie: sold as a sleazy Megan Fox vehicle for teenage boys, but secretly a blistering, blood-soaked revenge fantasy about girlhood, rage, and survival."
William Rayfet Hunter is a British-Jamaican author, poet and screenwriter from the north-west of England. They write about love, power and the delicate, messy parts of being alive. Their debut novel, Sunstruck, was published on May 15.
Megan Fox stars as Jennifer, a high-school girl possessed by a demon, who must eat her male classmates to survive. Amanda Seyfried plays Jennifer’s best friend Needy, who tries to solve the mystery behind her bestie’s unholy transformation. A minor critical and financial success on release, this rare Hollywood film written and directed by women (the screenplay is by Juno scribe Diablo Cody) has undergone a critical reevaluation since, especially after #MeToo.
WHY I LOVE IT
“A perfect film that was unsuccessfully marketed to the straights and now belongs – rightly – to the girls, the gays, and the ungovernable. It’s a Trojan horse of a movie: sold as a sleazy Megan Fox vehicle for teenage boys, but secretly a blistering, blood-soaked revenge fantasy about girlhood, rage, and survival. It’s horror not as punishment, but as liberation. As a closeted teenager, horror offered an escape route: an alternate reality where being monstrous wasn't a failure, but a source of power. Jennifer’s Body gets that — and then turns it into an art form, complete with demonic possession and blood-soaked cheerleader outfits.
JUST THE FACT
The film shares a title with a song by Hole, the fifth track on the band’s 1994 album Live Through This. The opening track, Violet, plays during the film’s end sequence.
FIRST TIME I SAW IT
“At a sleepover at a friend’s house. We used to go to Blockbuster and pick up two horror movies, a comedy to take the edge off and as many bags of popcorn and Minstrels as we could carry, then set ourselves up for a movie marathon. I remember the other boys saying it was rubbish and fawning over The Hills Have Eyes – we were 13 and had recently discovered the awesome power of ritually disturbing ourselves with egregious violence – but I couldn’t stop thinking about Megan Fox tearing through town murdering men.”
LAST TIME I WATCHED IT
“Last night – I’ll take literally any excuse for a rewatch. By conservative estimate, I’ve seen it several hundred times. It was in constant rotation through most of my adolescence, becoming less a film and more a personality trait. I downloaded it onto my battered iPod Video, which feels almost sacrilegious now – but it also feels right. Grainy, pixelated, secretive. I would watch it repeatedly on long car journeys or when I couldn’t sleep. The definitive viewing was a special Halloween screening at BFI Southbank a couple of years ago. Watching it writ large on a cinema screen, surrounded by people who got it, felt almost disturbingly emotional. When Jennifer savaged her first victim, everybody cheered.”
JUST THE FACT
Blake Lively turned down the role of Jennifer Check, due to scheduling conflicts with her TV show Gossip Girl. Emma Stone and Brie Larson were considered for the role of Needy.
MY LOVE GOES DEEP
“I had a screenshot of Jennifer burning her tongue with a lighter as my phone background for most of my teenage years. And honestly, I might change it back. It’s the hottest scene in cinema history. And I kept the ticket stub from the BFI screening, to use in rituals.”
FAVOURITE CHARACTER
“It has to be Jennifer Check, although Amanda Seyfried’s nerdy, bespectacled Needy is a close second. Jennifer is an apex predator in cherry-red lip gloss. Megan Fox plays her with such furious charisma you almost forget the film tried to pretend she wasn’t the protagonist. She’s rage and loneliness weaponised – fearsome and cruel on the outside with this raw heartbreak simmering underneath. Jennifer isn't evil; she's the inevitable result of a system that chews up girls and spits them out. She just decided to bite back first.
JUST THE FACT
In 2016, director Karyn Kusama told the New York Times in 2016 how the studio's all-male marketing team proposed a PR campaign where Megan Fox would do live chats on amateur porn sites, an idea Kusama found so degrading that she pleaded with the team not to bring it up with Fox. “She will become so dispirited,” Kusama said. “It was crushing.”
THE OUTFIT
“For me it’s Jennifer’s low-rise jeans with the pink-and-red love heart hoody. It plays so well with the tension in the character, youth and innocence thrown off balance by her sexualisation. It’s the perfect mean girl outfit. I would absolutely wear it. In fact, I think I have.”
ONE SCENE TO RULE THEM ALL
“It’s the quietest moment in the film: Jennifer, alone, standing in front of her mirror, staring at her own reflection as the glamour slips. She tries to use concealer to cover up the dark circles under her eyes – a result of not having feasted enough. She’s hollowed out, grey, and for a fraction of a second, she cries. It’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it vulnerability in a film otherwise dripping with bravado and blood, and it’s the scene that cracks her wide open. You realise the monster costume doesn’t quite fit anymore. It’s not rage or lust or hunger in that moment – it’s grief. For her body, for her girlhood, for whatever might’ve been left of her before the world got its claws in. Megan Fox gives us devastation in a single blink, and we almost don’t deserve it.”
JUST THE FACT
This is one of Dame Helen Mirren's favorite movies, according to Rotten Tomatoes.
KILLER DIALOGUE
Nerdy: "You’re killing people."
Jennifer: "No, I’m killing boys."
Two sentences, infinite wisdom.
PINPOINT NEEDLE DROP
“I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance With You by Black Kids. It plays during the prom scene and it’s perfect. There’s something about that bratty synth-pop bounce mixed with barely-suppressed resentment that feels so right for a film about queer longing, teenage betrayal, and ritual slaughter. It's the soundtrack to watching your crush dance with someone else while you fantasise about burning the entire gym down – which, conveniently, is also the plot.”
JUST ONE MORE THING…
“When Jennifer’s Body was first released, it was critically dismissed and badly marketed, reduced to cheap jokes about Megan Fox’s body, rather than the razor-sharp satire it actually is. It was a victim of its time: pre-#MeToo, pre-lesbian renaissance, when teenage girls’ rage was still treated as an inconvenience instead of a culture-defining force. Now, thankfully, it’s getting the recognition it always deserved – not just as a cult classic, but as a feral, funny, painfully prescient portrait of what it means to be consumed, and what it means to survive. It was never just a horror film. It was a battle cry. We just weren’t ready to hear it yet.”
JUST THE FACT
On a budget of $16m, the film made $32m at the global box-office and a further $9m in US domestic DVD and Blu-ray sales.
Certainly! Here's an updated list of Jennifer's Body screenings in June 2025, including specific times and additional locations:
WHERE TO WATCH during Pride month
Los Angeles, CA
Rooftop Cinema Club DTLA
📅 June 26, 2025
🕗 Doors: 7:40 PM | Screening: 8:40 PM
🎟️ Tickets & Info (rooftopcinemaclub.com)
New York, NY
Brooklyn Comedy Collective
📅 June 26, 2025
🕗 Time: 7:00 PM
🎟️ Event DetailsRoxy Cinema New York
📅 June 27, 2025
🕗 Time: 5:00 PM
🎟️ Screening Info (State Theatre of Modesto)
London, UK
Prince Charles Cinema
📅 June 3, 2025
🕗 Time: 3:15 PM
🎟️ Book Tickets
Manchester, UK
Cultplex (GASP! Horror Film Festival)
📅 June 27–29, 2025
🕗 Specific time TBA
🎟️ Festival Details
Modesto, CA
State Theatre of Modesto
📅 June 27, 2025
🕗 Time: 10:00 PM
🎟️ Buy Tickets (State Theatre of Modesto)
Brisbane, Australia
New Farm Cinemas
📅 June 21, 2025
🕗 Time: 7:00 PM AEST
🎟️ Event Info
