October Horror Movie Challenge: Jennifer (1978)

Tonight's movie is a complete attack of opportunity, but I am glad I found it.

If the Exorcist spawned hundreds of imitators, then Carrie (1976) spawned at least a dozen or so as well. 

Marketed at the time as a kind of Carrie knock-off (and yeah, the comparisons are impossible to avoid), this one has a twist: instead of telekinesis, the outcast girl at the center of it all has the ability to control snakes. This comes seven years before Jennifer Connelly's bug-controlling powers in Phenomena (1985).

Lisa Pelikan stars as Jennifer, a poor girl from West Virginia who earns a scholarship to an elite girls’ school. She doesn’t fit in, wrong background, wrong accent, and, well, she has that weird “snake thing.” The wealthy students torment her endlessly, and like in Carrie, the cruelty builds until it finally explodes in a climax where Jennifer unleashes her reptilian powers in full. The bullies learn the hard way that mocking the psychic girl is always a very bad idea.

The movie sits in an interesting middle ground. On one hand, it wants to be a serious supernatural thriller, and there are moments where it almost works, Pelikan does a great job selling Jennifer as fragile but simmering with potential rage. On the other hand, it’s also a 70s exploitation horror film, which means you get plenty of lurid bullying sequences, nudity, sexual assault, melodramatic overacting, and snakes crawling across every possible surface. The tone veers from tragic to campy to horror, sometimes in the same scene.

Star Lisa Pelikan was quite good in this. Better than the movie actually deserves to be honest. I can't help but think I have seen this one already; something about her performance was so familiar to me. I may have seen a lot of 70s/80s horror featuring a redhead outcast girl with psychic powers.  I am going to say "First Time View."

Occult D&D & NIGHT SHIFT

One of the big bads of the various Appendix N books are Snake Men and Serpent Men. Jennifer could very well be the offspring of these serpent men surviving into modern times. Or at least the 1970s.   

October Horror Movie Challenge 2025
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