Vampires are so in right now.

I walked away from Jennifer's Body last night feeling really confused, but the more I've thought about it the more I've decided that I really love it. It's not that Jennifer's Body is really a movie worth loving per se, because it is conflictual in nature, but in the spirit of campy high school horror flicks I feel it warrants more credit than it may receive. Because the predominant cultural paradigm, that being Men, anything related to masculinity, and the male gaze, do not want to see horny teenage boys being dismembered, especially while they are succeeding at downplaying a currently nationally covered rape trial. (Meanwhile, little girls are abducted every day, fathers carry on incestuous relationships with their daughters, and women are murdered by their husbands only to be identified by the serial numbers on their fake tits and the public feigns upset, but they are not nearly OUTRAGED enough...)

Diablo Cody has utilized her snappy Gilmore Girls/Katherine Hepburn era cinema quality dialogue to much better effect in Jennifer's Body than in Juno. And like the aforementioned Gilmore Girls the movie features Adam Brody as a band leader, except this time he's not a nice boy trying to score a date with Lane by pretending to be a good Christian. Brody does an excellent job at playing a phony-Satanic emo rock star that violates poor Megan Fox as Jennifer, sending her on the highway to hell. The "sacrifice scene" is one of the most ridiculous in the entire movie.

Jennifer goes cRaZy, seeking revenge as an evil undead succubus/vampire babe, feeding on the local population of dumb boys (although not all the boys are deserving, like the totally heinous feeding fodder of Jess Weixler in the equally campy flick, Teeth.) In the beginning of the film it seems as though Jennifer owns her sexuality since it is mentioned she has been a sexualized and sexually active person since she was in junior high. Still, once she's become an undead vampire zombie, one gets the feeling that although she is the master of her sexual universe, all those leering eyes and grabby manhands have taken their toll on her psyche and for this she must tear dudes limb for limb. (It should be mentioned that Megan Fox is famously insecure in real life.) I don't know how I feel about Megan Fox and her freak thumbs, but I have to say, after seeing Jennifer's Body I'm warming up to her. She is undeniably sexy, in a frosty, yet seemingly oversexed, yet cheesy-alluring way.

Jennifer's Body gets right what Juno got totally, totally wrong. I am a just as much a sucker for a feel good indie flick with quick, quirky lines and a coooool soundtrack as the next guy, but all that enticing trickery aside, Juno was an epic bum out with its HAVE THE BABY rhetoric. I mean, Diablo Cody is a feminist, right? And she is supposedly cool and funny and smart, so why was that decision doled out without any larger discussion of its tremendous ramifications? There is a totally awesome safe sex scene in Jennifer's Body, which I couldn't be more pleased with in all its awkward glory. You rarely see that dialog and stupid pause to put on a condom in a movie or on TV, because I guess it's not sexy enough to protect one's self from STDs, HIV or pregnancy. Better yet, the sex is consensual sex between nerdy Needy and her boyfriend. What! Everyone knows nerds don't have sex!!!

Jennifer's Body playfully uses all the conventions of the teen-marketed horror genre without being OTT campy, but for some reason the film still feels a little flimsy. Why? I must say that I am disappointed in the depiction of the relationship between main character Needy (the name says it all) and Jennifer, "best friends since the sandbox". Their relationship is set up to be the classic nerd girl/hot girl jealousy fest, with the duh-factor being that the hot girl has always been a shitty friend and is, in fact, monstrously jealous of the nerd girl for her moral righteousness, her goody-two-shoes behavior and her healthy self-assuredness. I think this is a lame trope and it should be retired, as it is reductive, reinforces girl-on-girl competition and teaches skepticism of lady friends. Discouraging healthy (Keyword: healthy, Needy and Jennifer's relationship can be characterized as anything but...) female friendships is a surefire way to set back any feminist progress.

That being said, I secretly loved the sexualization of the Needy/Jennifer relationship, although I think it stopped short of fully exploring the sometimes implicit lesbian nature of intense girl/friend love. And then there's the whole succubus/vampire as a sexual metaphor thing. Maybe this is a stretch, but I detected a whiff of Daughters of Darkness, Vampyros Lesbos , or even The Hunger. Ian Svenonius writes in his book The Psychic Soviet,

"[The Vampire] seems damned for eternity to be an all-purpose metaphorical sex device, the hapless agent of identity politicians everywhere."

Tis true, and I much prefer Jennifer's slutty succubus to Edward's chaste vampire in the Twilight series, yet another flimsy anti-sex/pro-abstinence ploy in the hands of right wing media propagandists. (Although I must admit that I still love Twilight, all shitty Christian dogmatic trickery aside.)

And I loved Loved LOVED the use of Hole on the soundtrack in Jennifer's Body last scenes.