How obsessed are you with your best friend? How far would you go to protect them? How close could you come to betraying them? Would you die for them — or more importantly, would you kill for them? The uncomfortably dark consequences that can arise from peer pressure and a destructive group mentality litter thriller narratives — from dark academia novels like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, to cult hits like Michael Lehmann’s Heathers and Peter Jackson’s critically acclaimed Heavenly Creatures. At once there’s an unsettling paradox between the youthful nature of these characters — just at the beginning of their lives, really — and the macabre acts of violence they seek. There lingers the chilling suggestion that, if left vulnerable around the wrong people, any one of us could relinquish our hold on morality.
In Cory Finley’s 2017 comedy-thriller Thoroughbreds, Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy) is reintroduced to her old childhood acquaintance, Amanda (Olivia Cooke), when she agrees to tutor her for SAT prep. Amanda is cool; emotionless; blunt. Lily, on the other hand, presents as somewhat conventionally normal, but is morbidly ‘fascinated’ by Amanda’s apparent psychopathy.
LILY: You’re incredibly off-putting and you freak me out.
AMANDA: There you go.
LILY: In a kind of a fascinating way — like a YouTube video of a giant zit being popped or a baby born without a face.
AMANDA: Love those videos.
They soon hatch a plan to murder Lily’s step-father, who is an all-too-common embodiment of toxic masculine traits — but also not an unforgivably evil villain (certainly not deserving of murder, anyway). He’s not a serial killer or a war criminal, he’s just “a dick” hellbent on shipping Lily off to a correctional school to fix her “behavioural issues.” In the original script, titled just “Thoroughbred”, Lily says:
LILY: I invited you over because Mark explicitly told me not to. He’s afraid of you.
Amanda represents exactly what a young woman shouldn’t be, traditionally. She’s callous, sarcastic, impolite, and honest to a fault. It’s no wonder a man symbolic of oppressive, patriarchal values doesn’t like her. And he doesn’t like that she’s spending so much time with Lily either — in a few select scenes, Mark casts a suspicious look over the pair when he encounters them alone together.
In a 2018 interview with Vulture, Finley talks about what these young female relationships signify for men. “A gender combination I can never be a part of is one between two women without a man present,” he says. “So there’s a curiosity about what those conversations are like, and talking to…any of the women in my life about their female friendships — particularly in high school and early in life — there always seems to be such a complication to those friendships. There’s such an intensity.” Where something is innately unknowable, it threatens structures of control. It boils down to nothing less than a classic fear of the unknown.
Equally intense — and certainly more fraught with history — is the relationship between Needy (Amanda Seyfried) and Jennifer (Megan Fox) in Karyn Kusama and Diablo Cody’s 2009 cult comedy-horror Jennifer’s Body. Here, Jennifer, the hottest, most popular girl in Devil’s Kettle, becomes a succubus when a boyband intent on securing eternal fame mistakenly sacrifices her as a virgin in a satanic ritual. Needy, her dorky childhood best friend, can only watch as her sandbox buddy adopts strange patterns of behaviour — namely, murdering and devouring a stream of local young men. Even pre-transformation, both Jennifer and Needy are unhealthily obsessed with each other, and by extension, each other’s bodies. Needy visibly disapproves of Jennifer’s promiscuity, while Jennifer continually exercises control over what Needy wears and does:
NEEDY: ‘Wear something cute’ meant something very specific in Jennifer-speak. It meant I couldn’t look like a total zero, but I couldn’t upstage her either.
Both of them, of course, consider this totally normal ‘best friend’ stuff, though it’s clear from the beginning that Needy has harboured a crush on Jennifer for a while (“You’re totally lesbi-gay,” her classmate eloquently observes), which no doubt muddies the waters further. The kiss they share later on confirms the queer feelings that lie at the film’s heart. Some have argued for the dangers in writing lesbian love as this toxic and damaging thing — but it’s made plain that Needy and Jennifer behave as awfully they do precisely because of what prevents them from just being open with each other about it. (Though a queer reading of Thoroughbreds is definitely valid as well, Finley notably skirts around the topic, opting instead to focus solely on Lily and Amanda’s “sadomasachist push-pull”, as he puts it.)
It’s no wonder Lily, Amanda, Needy, and Jennifer develop such intense connections with each other, looking at the moulds they’re trapped in. Coming from different genres and decades, both movies paint adolescence in distinct lights — one in its overtly physical mutations and mutilations, a common metaphor for puberty in body horror; one in the increasingly gymnastic mental politics we grapple with as we navigate through to adulthood. As a result, the sexualisation of young women becomes a key concern of Jennifer’s Body (not least as an all-too-real commentary on Megan Fox’s gross sexualisation by the media up until this point), whereas in Thoroughbreds, the issue is largely ignored. Instead, it touches on the subtler and sometimes more insidious elements of patriarchal oppression, which persist despite the ostentatious wealth and privilege Lily and Amanda enjoy. The films complement each other neatly in this way: one a visceral (but clever) scream in the face, the other a fine-drawn psychological suggestion. “Hell is a teenage girl” states Jennifer’s Body’s tagline — but for whom? More so for the girl than anyone else, really.
It’s towards the end of both movies though that things begin to shift. Exposed to counterparts who employ tantalisingly rebellious, non-conformist attitudes — Amanda refuses to submit to societal expectations, whereas Jennifer utilises those very expectations to take revenge on the system — Lily and Needy’s mild, placatory facades begin to peel away. In Thoroughbreds’ final act, Lily murders her step-father and frames Amanda, only to coldly reject her friend’s heartfelt correspondence from prison without even opening it; in Jennifer’s Body, Needy kills Jennifer, but in doing so inherits her demonic powers and bloodlust, breaking out of her psychiatric facility to start a murder spree of her own.
These girls have been so laden with the exhausting constrictions of an unattainable ‘perfect’ femininity — labelled as too slutty, too nerdy, too emotional, too emotionless — that when one sees the other seemingly thriving in subversion, she takes on her characteristics. Where other narratives code their protagonists’ devolution into murderousness as collective, here there’s a clear pipeline — a transferral — from one girl to another, through the intensity of their bond.However unintentionally, these are stories that haunt us right here, right now. Infection has recently become something very real and invasive: it intrudes upon every thought, every action. But when we’ve been deprived of intimacy for so long, any memory of its existence exposes another anxiety. We fear losing friends, but what if the in-person friendships we’ve let decay over Zoom are more potent than we remember? What if we’ve forgotten how to handle them; what if we don’t know how to deal with them anymore?
