![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lucymonsterI've slowed my horror movie roll a bit, mainly because the work I'm doing on my fanbinding project lends itself to the same headspace and timeslot as movie-watching. But I have not lost interest! Today's unintentional mini-theme is toxic female friendship, yay.
Jennifer's Body (2009): A struggling indie band turns to Satan to give them their big break, but the girl they chose for their virgin sacrifice was unfortunately not a virgin. Instead of dying, the ritual causes Jennifer to become possessed by a demon, and leaves her devoted best friend Anita ("Needy") struggling to come to terms with a Jennifer who is mostly the same cool, hot, vacuous, slightly mean teenage girl she's always been, only now she feeds off the flesh of her male classmates.
I'm boggling that I never saw this in cinemas when it came out, because it was fucking laser-targeted at my demographic (emo kids who were coming of age in the late 2000s), but I can't recall any of my friends even talking about it. I recognised almost every band on the soundtrack. I recognised a lot of faces too: Megan Fox, Amanda Seyfried, Amy Sedaris, Chris Pratt, that guy from The O.C. Anyway, it was a great time! If I hadn't been out and rug-munching for several years by the time it was released, that Jennifer/Needy makeout scene would have given me the mother of all sexual awakenings too, lol. Those heady teenage hormones were off the charts.
Fall (2022): A year after her husband's death in a rock climbing accident, Becky allows her best friend Hunter (a youtuber who has built her brand on daredevil stunts) to goad her into climbing a decommissioned TV tower together. The tower is 2000ft/610m high, rusted through, and due to be demolished soon. They tell no one what they're doing and pack no food or survival gear. The ladder gives way beneath them, and the two end up trapped on a tiny open platform right at the top.
I fucking loved this, okay? Looking at reviews after I'd finished watching made me feel kind of dumb, because everyone else was all "too much suspension of disbelief" and "saw the twist coming a mile off" and "leads are so dumb they deserve it" while I was just there like 🤯🤯🤯. Hot women with a dangerous physical hobby! Extreme heights! Confined to a single location with literally no room to maneuver, and somehow still heart-stoppingly tense and exciting the whole way through! Yes the leads are a bit dumb and yes the filmmakers are less than 100% married to realism the whole way through. (There's no point me defending the twist, because I am a very naive viewer; most twists catch me off guard, whether they're well executed or not.) But all I really wanted was attractive, dysfunctional women and vertigo-inducing aerial shots and to spend a decent portion of the runtime yelling "no no no don't do that!" through my fingers, and you couldn't get a purer, more intense experience of those things than this film if you injected them intravenously.
In Fall-adjacent news, I am greatly amused by the existence of this Getting Stuck in Terrible Places Cinematic Universe list on letterboxd. Some of these films I have already seen over the years; some are on my watch list; others I have never even heard of. But a person who can put Saw, The Hunger Games, Snowpiercer and The Blair Witch Project all together on a themed list and have it make perfect, intuitive sense is a person I can respect.
Jennifer's Body (2009): A struggling indie band turns to Satan to give them their big break, but the girl they chose for their virgin sacrifice was unfortunately not a virgin. Instead of dying, the ritual causes Jennifer to become possessed by a demon, and leaves her devoted best friend Anita ("Needy") struggling to come to terms with a Jennifer who is mostly the same cool, hot, vacuous, slightly mean teenage girl she's always been, only now she feeds off the flesh of her male classmates.
I'm boggling that I never saw this in cinemas when it came out, because it was fucking laser-targeted at my demographic (emo kids who were coming of age in the late 2000s), but I can't recall any of my friends even talking about it. I recognised almost every band on the soundtrack. I recognised a lot of faces too: Megan Fox, Amanda Seyfried, Amy Sedaris, Chris Pratt, that guy from The O.C. Anyway, it was a great time! If I hadn't been out and rug-munching for several years by the time it was released, that Jennifer/Needy makeout scene would have given me the mother of all sexual awakenings too, lol. Those heady teenage hormones were off the charts.
Fall (2022): A year after her husband's death in a rock climbing accident, Becky allows her best friend Hunter (a youtuber who has built her brand on daredevil stunts) to goad her into climbing a decommissioned TV tower together. The tower is 2000ft/610m high, rusted through, and due to be demolished soon. They tell no one what they're doing and pack no food or survival gear. The ladder gives way beneath them, and the two end up trapped on a tiny open platform right at the top.
I fucking loved this, okay? Looking at reviews after I'd finished watching made me feel kind of dumb, because everyone else was all "too much suspension of disbelief" and "saw the twist coming a mile off" and "leads are so dumb they deserve it" while I was just there like 🤯🤯🤯. Hot women with a dangerous physical hobby! Extreme heights! Confined to a single location with literally no room to maneuver, and somehow still heart-stoppingly tense and exciting the whole way through! Yes the leads are a bit dumb and yes the filmmakers are less than 100% married to realism the whole way through. (There's no point me defending the twist, because I am a very naive viewer; most twists catch me off guard, whether they're well executed or not.) But all I really wanted was attractive, dysfunctional women and vertigo-inducing aerial shots and to spend a decent portion of the runtime yelling "no no no don't do that!" through my fingers, and you couldn't get a purer, more intense experience of those things than this film if you injected them intravenously.
In Fall-adjacent news, I am greatly amused by the existence of this Getting Stuck in Terrible Places Cinematic Universe list on letterboxd. Some of these films I have already seen over the years; some are on my watch list; others I have never even heard of. But a person who can put Saw, The Hunger Games, Snowpiercer and The Blair Witch Project all together on a themed list and have it make perfect, intuitive sense is a person I can respect.
no subject
Date: 2026-04-29 02:24 pm (UTC)