Jennifer's Body is not a movie about teenage sexual politics. It's not about boys getting their just deserts for wanting girls for nothing more than their bodies. It's not about some virginal ability to survive demonic attack that pretty much leaves the only character standing at the end of every horror movie the only one who has yet to "give it up." Oddly enough, as a horror movie, Jennifer's Body isn't really even about the battle between good and evil. In the end, what it offers is quite possibly even scarier: a battle where evil is pretty much all that is left.

In a nutshell, Jennifer's Body is the story of a young woman named Jennifer (Megan Fox) whose demon possession has her roaming her small town of Devil's Kettle and gruesomely depleting the teenage male population. Along for the ride is her best friend Needy (Amanda Seyfried) who realizes what's going on and finds herself pretty much the only one with any idea how to ensure that her town keeps at least a few of its Y chromosomes. Written by Diablo Cody, the teen-talking Academy-Award-winning screenwriter of Juno, Jennifer's Body is predictably filled with pop culture, teen drama, and enough comedy to turn most of its horror into laughable, if a bit gruesome, cheesiness. But, in more ways than one, Jennifer's Body is also a very different movie than Juno.

Beyond the obvious genre and story differences, the first diversion that Jennifer's Body takes from Juno is that it truly is written, cast, and shot for my 16-year-old male neighbor, and as such, will not be grabbing a demographically diverse audience with wisdom beyond its main characters' years. The second, and perhaps both equally intriguing and disengaging detour that Jennifer's Body takes from Juno's crowd-pleasing recipe is that where Juno took some of the more difficult aspects of reality and found the rays of hope inside them, Jennifer's Body goes to pretty much the darkest of realities and tells us that hope was gone long ago... or as Needy puts it, "We believed that things could always get better. We had faith. We were stupid."

Like I said, Jennifer's Body isn't a tale of sexual revenge or symbolic castration. Really, it's pretty much a fairly straightforward story of how dabbling in the dark arts leads to demon possession leads to some pretty gruesome stuff. But what is interesting is that Jennifer's possession isn't just the unfortunate occurrence of innocently breaking out the Ouija board at a slumber party. As the movie shows us in one of several of its explain-every-detail-so-we-don't-have-to-figure-anything-out-for-ourselves sequences, while Jennifer's transformation into a flesh-eating monster wasn't exactly the plan, the actions that brought it about were definitely intentional, most certainly aware of their evil connotations, and directly addressed to Satan himself. You could call the scene in question The Fall. In some ways, it is a bit reminiscent of the Israelites and their unfaithful turn to the Golden Calf. But beginning before Jennifer and spiraling even further down into a sea of evil after, the picture Jennifer's Body paints from start to finish is that of a world after The Fall and without anyone there to redeem it.

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