Puzzling over the newfound box-office success of horror flicks with female audiences, the New York Times looks into what's happening with Jennifer's Body. With its theme of demon-assisted vengeance of a woman done wrong, the movie is making a fairly obvious play for the women in the audience. It allows women, as the paper puts it, to "take back the knife."
Beyond that, the movie's creators tell the Times that they set out from the beginning to insert some feminist themes without sabotaging the movie's appeal for 15-year-old boys. By sticking to the tried-and-true genre formula of "screams, skin and death" — and having Megan Fox play Jennifer — an audience of young boys seems pretty much guaranteed. As for the feminists, writer Diablo Cody explains:
The tricky thing is if you're going to subvert [the sex and violence], they have to be there.... We were constantly bobbing and weaving. [Director Karyn Kusama] and I talk about the film as a kind of Trojan horse. We wanted to package our beliefs in a way that's appealing to a mainstream audience.
They were, she says, under a lot of pressure to give up the feminist subtext and just make a straight horror film, but ultimately her original script survived more or less intact, Trojan horse and all.