“You’re killing people!”

“No, I’m killing boys.”

For the first 19 years of my life, I thought I hated horror movies. As a lifelong chick flick lover who rewatches Mean Girls and Clueless like they’re going out of style, I hated anything even slightly gory or disturbing. At age 10, I once left a sleepover early because Twilight was too intense for me.

But back in June, I decided to watch the cult classic Jennifer’s Body (2009), and with it, I discovered my new favorite genre: the late 90s/early 2000s Teen Girl Horror Comedy, which includes films like The Craft (1996), Jawbreaker (1999), and Ginger Snaps (2000). These films fascinate me with their campy, highly stylized dialogue; fantastic costume design; and marriage of the cutesiness of high school comedies to the darkness of horror.

Visual and media arts major and horror expert Mirabella Cue ‘24 says, “[This genre] completely flips the stereotype on its head...Normally women are in horror movies to be disposable; they’re there for the male gaze, but in this case, they’re films made for women.” This is what differentiates films in this hybrid genre from those classified as strictly horror, or typical teen comedies: when women are the villains, there is more of an opportunity for their characters to be multifaceted and complex.

I looked into the critical reception of these films and was surprised to find a pattern of “sleeper hits”—films that receive poor or neutral reviews and perform badly at the box office, but later gain cult status upon home video and/or streaming release. I was disappointed and confused. It was my understanding that anyone in their right mind would be obsessed with Jennifer’s Body the moment they saw it, so why did it only find success after almost 10 years?

Both horror films and teen comedies tend to reflect and respond to the social and cultural ideas of their respective eras. For the early 2000s, characters were crafted in opposition to the stereotype of the “Elena Gilbert, Victoria’s Secret model, virginal good-girl-next-door,” Cue says. Instead, the characters in these films are outsiders and considered odd or dark. In Ginger Snaps, sisters Ginger and Brigitte are outcasts with a suicide pact and an outspoken fascination with death; The Craft follows a friend group of witches discovering their powers, which they manipulate to get revenge on their classmates.

The otherness of the women in these films is also reflected in how they interact with male characters. In Ginger Snaps, Ginger turns her classmate Jason—who has been sexually harassing her—into a werewolf by having sex with him. The entire plot of Jennifer’s Body is that a popular cheerleader uses her powers of seduction to trap boys and eat them. The primary way in which the women in these films interact with men is through sexual empowerment and revenge.

A key reason why these films failed in the box office when they were first released is that they were incorrectly marketed to adolescent boys initially because of the horror and hot girls. In a patriarchal society—particularly that of the U.S. 20 years ago—most straight men don’t care to see a movie about the sexual liberation of women, especially as it relates to killing men. Despite these films having the horror and hot girls that they advertised, they are hyper-feminine and tackle themes of coming-of-age and sexuality in a way that has little to do with empowering men.

However, over the years, they have finally found their rightful audience, particularly with the evolving conversation surrounding feminism and the #MeToo movement. While they are, at times, far from perfect in tackling issues of sexual assault in a sensitive and accurate way, these new viewers are more prepared to see a feminist revenge film today than they might have been 20 years ago, especially when they are marketed correctly. The Teen Girl Horror Comedy of the late noughties and early aughts is the great forgotten genre, and like so many issues of representation in media, the reason comes back to the patriarchal standards in the industry. However, this genre has been reclaimed by a new generation of cheesy chick flick lovers who enjoy a hyper-feminine villain and some tasteful misandry—in my opinion, the best of all worlds.