Once Panned by Critics, This Provocative Megan Fox Horror Is Now a Cult Classic —And It Just Landed on Netflix

17 years since its original release, 20th Century Fox's Jennifer's Body will sink its teeth into a new audience at Netflix.

Per its official logline, Jennifer's Body follows "a gorgeous cheerleader," Jennifer Check, played by Megan Fox, who is later "possessed by a demon and starts feeding off the boys in a small Minnesota farming town." Later, Jennifer's less popular best friend,  Anita "Needy" Lesnicki (played by Amanda Seyfried) is tasked with killing her to save the school, before she must "escape from a correctional facility to go after the satan-worshipping rock band responsible for the horrible transformation."

The high school horror, which also stars Chris Pratt, Adam Brody, and J.K. Simmons, was a commercial and critical failure when it was first released in September 2009, earning a meagre $31 million after attempting to bank on its young cast's rising stars. Early reviews dismissed the raunchy, tongue-in-cheek black comedy as a shallow, sex-obsessed attempt at a cheap vixen movie off of Fox's recent Transformers fame, especially with male audiences.

However, recent reappraisals of the Karyn Kusama-directed film proclaim Jennifer's Body as being ahead of its time in its depiction of women in horror, balancing scares, sexiness, and campiness of classic horror into surprisingly mature and contemporary discussions around sexual harassment and exploitation — all in a supernatural, slasher-influenced teen movie completed in little over 90 minutes. Additionally, the same-sex romance between Fox and Seyfried's characters has helped seal its status as a cult film with a large LGBTQ+ following.

“I read the script and I think it just resonated with me because there's something about that, whether it's just perceived or not, I felt like I was being persecuted at that time in my career, and I was struggling a lot with fame and kind of traumatized by fame,” Fox told People in 2025, reflecting on the film's retrospective praise.

"I resonated with those deeper layers of... you know, before she becomes a monster, she's just a teenage girl who gets sacrificed for somebody else's gain,” she continued. 

Jennifer's Body was submitted to the Criterion Collection's prestigious online library in 2021, and has been subject to re-releases, cosplays, and countless Halloween costumes. Similarly, Seyfried, who referred to the horror as a "perfect" movie, teased a potential sequel last year. “I think we’re making another one,” Amanda told Bloody Disgusting. “I didn’t confirm it! I said, ‘I think.’ We’re working on it.”

Jennifer's Body arrives on Netflix U.S. on May 1.