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Diablo Cody has been sitting on something for fifteen years. Not a grudge, exactly, though she’d have every right to one, but more like a thesis statement that the world wasn’t ready for yet. Jennifer’s Body came out in 2009 to a chorus of confused reviews, a marketing campaign that should be studied in film school as a cautionary tale, and an audience that showed up expecting something it was never going to get. It made back its budget, barely, and then quietly became one of the most important feminist horror films of the 21st century while nobody was looking.
Now Cody is writing the sequel. Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried are both reportedly interested in returning. Director Karyn Kusama has described the script-in-progress as “fun and crazy” — which, if the first film is any indication, means we are in for something genuinely unhinged and probably brilliant.
We should probably talk about why it took this long to get here. And why getting here matters.
Who Diablo Cody Is, And Why That Question Has a More Complicated Answer Than You Think
Cody won an Oscar for Juno in 2008. If you’ve spent any time in film discourse online, you already know that this is somehow still controversial, which tells you everything you need to know about how the industry treats women who write with a specific, recognizable voice.
The thing about Cody’s voice is that it’s deliberate in ways that don’t always get credited as deliberate. Her stated approach to feminist screenwriting is almost deceptively simple: figure out what the best lines in the script are, and give them to the women. She’s acknowledged that this sounds unradical, but points out that it doesn’t happen that often. She’s not wrong. Watch any given Hollywood film from the era and count how many of the best lines go to men who are explaining things to women who are listening. Then watch Jennifer’s Body and notice who’s doing the talking.
Her filmography reads like a case study in what happens when a woman writes women as the subject of the story rather than the object. Juno, protagonist as her own unreliable narrator, making a decision about her body that the film takes seriously. Young Adult, a profoundly unpleasant female protagonist that the film refuses to redeem, which apparently made audiences very uncomfortable. Tully, an unflinching portrait of postpartum exhaustion that got called “too bleak” by people who have never had to wake up at 3am for a fifth consecutive night. Lisa Frankenstein, campy, gleeful, and built around a teenage girl’s desire in a way that doesn’t apologize for itself.
And then there’s Jennifer’s Body, which is doing everything those films are doing, wrapped in a slasher premise, with a budget and a marketing team that were actively working against it.
What Jennifer’s Body Was Actually About, And What The Studio Told You It Was About
Here is what Jennifer’s Body is: a film about female friendship, female sacrifice, the ways institutions fail girls, the ways girls sometimes fail each other, and a succubus. It’s funny and gory and genuinely strange, and its real subject, the thing it’s circling the whole time, is the horror of being a girl whose body is treated as a resource by everyone around her.
Here is what the marketing told you it was: Megan Fox is hot and sometimes wears a skirt. The trailer leaned heavily on a suggestive moment between Fox and Seyfried with the phrase “I go both ways” presented as a punchline, stripped entirely of the context that makes it meaningful in the film itself. The poster put Fox in a short skirt against a plain background, which is the visual equivalent of someone explaining your joke wrong and then looking at you expectantly.
When Cody and Kusama pushed back on this approach, executives reportedly explained their strategy as, and this is a real quote, “Jennifer sexy, she steal your boyfriend.” Which is one of the most succinct examples of institutional failure I have ever encountered, and I say that with full appreciation for how much competition it has.
Amanda Seyfried has been saying this plainly for years. The marketing ruined it. The film they sold was a male fantasy. The film Cody wrote was explicitly not that. It was written for girls, about girls, from a perspective that had no interest in being legible to the teenage boys who showed up to a horror-comedy and found themselves watching something with actual things to say. The box office reflected the mismatch. The decade of critical reassessment that followed reflected the truth.
The Part Where We Talk About Kill James Bond
If you haven’t listened to Kill James Bond, the feminist film podcast that watches movies through a political lens and rates them on how they reflect masculinity, a real methodology, a genuinely excellent podcast, their Jennifer’s Body episode is required listening.
The episode features the cast sitting around discussing the film, and the central question posed at the top is, with complete sincerity: “Is this movie about 9/11?”
The answer, for the record, is yes.
This is not a bit. Well, it’s partly a bit. Kill James Bond operates with a running thesis that most films made after the early 2000s , examined closely enough, are either about 9/11 or about being transgender, and the hosts approach each new film with the enthusiasm of researchers who suspect they’re about to confirm their hypothesis again.
In the Jennifer’s Body episode, they find evidence for both readings and cannot fully resolve the debate, which honestly feels like the correct outcome for a film this layered. The 9/11 reading has something to do with the way the town’s collective trauma gets exploited by men in positions of power for their own gain. The trans reading is, well, have you watched it recently? A girl who comes back from a ritual sacrifice fundamentally changed, whose body no longer fully belongs to her, who is dangerous and beautiful and hungry in ways that the people around her can’t comprehend or control.
Draw your own conclusions. Cody hasn’t confirmed anything. The film is seventeen years old and people are still pulling threads out of it.
That’s what good horror does.
What Cody Has Been Building Toward
The thing worth understanding about Cody’s career as a whole is that Jennifer’s Body isn’t an outlier. It’s the clearest expression of something she’s been doing across every project. She writes women who are inconvenient. Women who want things, make mistakes, take up space, refuse easy redemption arcs. Women who are sometimes the monster, and sometimes the hero, and sometimes both simultaneously, which is — not to get too philosophical about a film where Megan Fox eats a boy — what being a person actually involves.
Horror is the right genre for this because horror has always been the genre most willing to let women be dangerous. The slasher tradition, for all its legitimate problems, built its architecture around the final girl. The woman who survives, who fights back, who outlasts. Cody took that architecture and asked what it looks like when the dangerous woman isn’t punished for it. When Jennifer gets to be the monster and also, somehow, the protagonist. When the film’s emotional center is not the man she kills but the girl who loves her.
Fifteen years of critical conversation later, we understand this more clearly than we did in 2009. The reassessment happened, as these reassessments often do, when the culture caught up to what the film was already doing. MeToo gave critics a new framework for understanding a story about men sacrificing a girl’s body for professional advancement. The queer reading became more legible as queer readings became more legible everywhere. The jokes, which the original reviews sometimes dismissed as “quirky,” started landing the way Cody intended them to land, as armor, as deflection, as the specific humor of people who have learned to be funny about things that would otherwise be unbearable.
Why the Sequel Needs to Exist Right Now
We are not living in a gentle moment for women’s bodies, or for the institutions that claim to protect them. Cody has always written toward that, toward the specific horror of being a girl in a world that wants to use you, and there is no shortage of material.
The first Jennifer’s Body was a film about a town that watched a girl get destroyed and then figured out how to make her destruction mean something for them. The sequel, whatever it becomes, will land in a world where that dynamic has not gone anywhere. If anything, it has gotten louder.
Kusama calling the script “fun and crazy” is encouraging, because the original film’s willingness to hold horror and comedy together in the same frame, to let you laugh and then feel bad about laughing, was part of what made it work. We don’t need a grim sequel that lectures at the audience. We need Diablo Cody doing the thing she does, which is finding the sharpest possible version of the joke and giving it to the women.
The boys can have the poster. The movie’s for us.
