Film

JENNIFER (1978)

During Halloween season folks are often looking for scary movies to watch. When it comes to movies made in the Gen X era, we all know about Jason, Freddie, and Michael. They ushered in the modern era of horror and their names are right up there with Dracula, The Wolfman, and Frankenstein as the greatest characters in the history of the genre.

While the Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Halloween franchises will always reign supreme in Gen X horror, there were plenty of other movies made during the era. With this in mind, for the rest of October, we have decided to introduce, or re-introduce to you some scary movies of our generation that you might have missed or just forgotten about.

The first one up is Jennifer from 1978. This is the story of a snake-handling girl from West Virginia who moves to a big city and gets a scholarship to an elite private school for girls. Of course, the snobs at the school are cruel to her because she is poor and from Appalachia. Jennifer doesn’t just have the ability to handle serpents, she can control them with her mind and she lets loose with that power on her enemies after they go too far one too many times with their cruelty.

The film stars Lisa Pelikan in the title role and also features game show host, Bert Convy as a sympathetic teacher at the school. Jennifer was, of course, compared to Carrie which came out a few years before. While the film is no Carrie, it’s a good effective low budget movie that will be fun to watch for first wave Gen Xers to look back on the time when they were teenagers or the period right before they became high schoolers. It’s definitely worth watching now and should have been a bigger hit when released back in the day.