Although director Jackie Kong’s Blood Diner and director Karyn Kusama and writer Diablo Cody’s Jennifer’s Body differ in their approaches to the horror genre, they both integrate the supernatural into at least partial eco-feminist approaches to cannibalism. Blood Diner plays homage to Herschell Gordon Lewis’s B-horror Blood Feast (1963), transferring its tale of an Egyptian caterer combining body parts to resurrect a dormant Egyptian goddess to a late 1980s vegetarian restaurant. As an exploitation movie, Caryn James of The New York Times calls it “celluloid swill.” Blood Diner at its best is “bloody good fun,” according to Clint Morris of Film Threat, but at its worst, as Ken Hanke of the newspaper Mountain Xpress, suggests, the film is an “intentionally funny thriller [that] isn't as funny as the straight films it mocks.”
More satiric teen thriller than horror, Jennifer’s Body may be lampooned as “a premeditated cult classic” by Nick Pinkerton of The Village Voice, but it also received high marks from The New York Time’s A.O. Scott, Roger Ebert, and Dana Stevens of Slate.com. Scott declares, for example, “Ms. Cody and Ms. Kusama take up a theme shared by slasher films and teenage comedies—that queasy, panicky fascination with female sexuality that we all know and sublimate—and turn it inside out.” According to Scott, Jennifer’s Body “tak[es] the complication and confusion of being a young woman as its central problem and operating principle.” Dana Stevens asserts, “Jennifer’s body is luscious and powerful, sexy and scary, maddening at times, but impossible to stop watching. So is Jennifer’s Body.” And Roger Ebert declares, “This isn’t your assembly-line teen horror thriller. The portraits of Jennifer and Needy are a little too knowing, the dialogue is a little too off-center, the developments are a little too quirky …. I’d rather see Jennifer’s Body again than Twilight.”
Despite their glaring genre differences, however, Blood Diner and Jennifer’s Body both reverse representations of Wendigo/wetiko, exploring female bodies and the landscapes they are said to represent from an ecofeminist perspective. In Blood Diner and Jennifer’s Body, women successfully defeat their oppressors, at least in the context of their respective films.
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