Extra Salty: Jennifer’s Body
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Featuring an original interview with director Karyn Kusama
What would be an easy sell in 2021 — women at the helm (screenwriter Diablo Cody, director Karyn Kusama), a bankable cast (Megan Fox, Amanda Seyfried), and a deceptively complex skewering of gender politics — was a box office flop in 2009. In Extra Salty, Frederick Blichert flips the script on how Jennifer’s Body was labeled a failure to celebrate all that is scrumptious (as Jennifer would say) about it: supernatural horror, dark comedy, queer love, and a nuanced handling of gendered violence. The movie could have been to the aughts what Heathers was to the eighties, and it’s finally getting its due — whether in the flood of tenth-anniversary praise, the parade of Jennifer Halloween costumes, or Halsey’s nod to it (“Killing Boys”) on her platinum-selling album.
With insight into the genre’s cinematic tropes, our current cultural reckoning with misogyny, and an original interview with director Karyn Kusama, Extra Salty solidifies the status of Jennifer’s Body as a cult classic.
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Frederick Blichert is a communications specialist and freelance entertainment writer. His writing has appeared in VICE, Paste, Xtra, Senses of Cinema, The Tyee, and more. His first book, a monograph on Joss Whedon’s Serenity, was published by Columbia University Press in 2017. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.
