Jennifer's Body is a 2009 American comedy horror film directed by Karyn Kusama and written by Diablo Cody. Starring Megan Fox, Amanda Seyfried, Johnny Simmons, J. K. Simmons, Amy Sedaris, and Adam Brody. The film follows Jennifer Check (Fox), a demonically possessed high school student, who kills her male classmates and devours their flesh in order to survive, while her bookworm best friend Anita "Needy" Lesnicki (Seyfried) must find a way to end her killing spree.
Jason Reitman, who has worked with Cody before on Juno (2007), stated he and his producers "want to make unusual films". Cody said she wanted the film to speak to female empowerment and explore the complex relationships between best friends. As a tie-in to the film, Boom! Studios produced a Jennifer's Body graphic novel, released in August 2009.
Jennifer's Body premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 10, 2009, and was released in theaters in the United States and Canada on September 18, 2009. The film was a commercial failure, grossing $31.6 million against its $16 million production budget, and received mixed reviews from critics, loving the dialogue, emotional resonance, and performance by cast, while critiquing the tone and narrative of the film.
In the years since Jennifer's Bodys release, there were revelations that the film's poor marketing campaign was the result of the studio's desire to capitalize on Fox's sex appeal and gear the film towards a younger male audience. Since then, the film has undergone a critical re-evaluation and has been described as a feminist cult classic.
Plot Anita "Needy" Lesnicki, once an insecure and studious teenager living in the small town of Devil's Kettle, Minnesota, has become a violent asylum inmate who narrates the story as a flashback while in solitary confinement.
Since childhood, Needy has been best friends with Jennifer Check, a popular and beautiful high school color guard flag spinner, despite the two having little in common. Jennifer often mistreats and dominates Needy, who is too in awe of her to stand up for herself. One night, Jennifer takes Needy to a local dive bar to attend a concert by the indie rock band Low Shoulder. A fire engulfs the bar, killing several people. Jennifer, in shock from the fire, leaves with the band even though Needy tells her not to. Later that evening, she appears in Needy's kitchen, covered in blood, and attempts to eat a rotisserie chicken. She immediately vomits a trail of black fluid and almost bites Needy's neck but retreats and leaves.
The next morning at school, Jennifer appears fine and dismisses Needy's concerns, appearing apathetic to the fire tragedy. She seduces Jonas, the school's football captain and lures him into the woods, where she disembowels and cannibalizes him. Meanwhile, Low Shoulder gains popularity due to their falsely rumored heroism during the fire and earns a cult following status.
A month later, Jennifer becomes ill and listless. She accepts a date with school alternative/emo Colin, whom she invites to an abandoned house; once there, she brutally kills and devours him. While Needy and her boyfriend Chip have sex, Needy senses something dreadful has happened and has a disturbing vision of a demonic Jennifer. She flees back home, but on the way, she runs into a blood-soaked Jennifer on the road. After returning home unhurt, Needy finds a revitalized and amorous Jennifer in her bed. Jennifer attempts to seduce Needy by kissing her; Needy initially reciprocates but then comes to her senses.
Jennifer reveals that Low Shoulder had taken her into the woods after the bar fire and offered her as a virgin ultimate sacrifice to Satan in exchange for fame and fortune. Although the sacrifice was a success, Jennifer was not actually a virgin, so she became permanently possessed. She became hungry, and Ahmet, a foreign exchange student who was thought to have died in the fire, was her first victim. She had intended to eat Needy first but left because she could not bring herself to hurt her best friend. Whenever she eats a victim, she can withstand any injury without pain and heal instantly.
Needy goes to the school library's occult section and determines that Jennifer is a succubus who must feed on flesh and can only be killed while she is hungry and weak. Needy tells Chip about Jennifer. He refuses to believe her, so she breaks up with him in order to protect him. Jennifer intercepts Chip on the way to the school dance and claims that Needy had been cheating on him with Colin. She tries to seduce him, but he is not interested. She takes him to an abandoned pool and begins feeding on him. Needy arrives, and as the two girls argue, Chip impales Jennifer through the stomach with a pool skimmer. However, Jennifer, having eaten enough to survive the injury, removes the pool skimmer and escapes while Chip dies.
Angry and heartbroken, Needy breaks into Jennifer's bedroom. The two fight, and Jennifer bites Needy's shoulder in the struggle. When Needy rips Jennifer's best friend necklace off her neck, Jennifer stops fighting back. Needy then stabs her in the heart with a utility knife, killing her and destroying the demon. Jennifer's mother enters and finds Needy on top of her daughter's body, resulting in Needy's imprisonment. After manifesting some of Jennifer's supernatural powers from the bite, Needy eventually escapes the mental facility, tracks down Low Shoulder, and murders them.
Cast
Production
Development Jennifer's Body is the follow-up to writer and producer Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman's collaboration efforts on Juno. In October 2007, Fox Atomic pre-emptively purchased the rights to Cody's script with Megan Fox to star. Peter Rice, who at the time oversaw Fox Searchlight and Fox Atomic, brought in the project as Fox Searchlight had previously distributed Cody's film Juno. Mason Novick and Reitman's producing partner Dan Dubiecki signed as producers in November 2007 with plans to produce the film under Hard C, which is housed at Fox Searchlight. Reitman commented, "We want to make unusual films, and anything that turns a genre on its ear interests Dan and I." Karyn Kusama took over as director in January 2008. Kusama said she signed on to the project because of the script. "I was blessed to read this script at a moment where the producers were meeting with directors and it just knocked me out. It was just so original, so imaginative", she stated. "That's what it is about this script and the world is that it feels like a fairy tale gone psycho and I think that's what most fairy tales actually started as." Additionally, Cody, Reitman and Kusama knew the film would be R rated because of the language.
In February 2008, a cease and desist was given to a writer at CC2K.us after they posted an advance script review for the film. The Latino Review also posted an advance review. At the time CC2K.us received their cease and desist order, questions were raised why Latino Review's largely positive script review was allowed to stay posted while CC2K was being forced by Fox Searchlight to remove their mainly negative coverage. Although Latino Review was later asked to remove their review, numerous other websites and blogs published their own critiques of the script.
Cody stated that when writing the script, she was "simultaneously trying to pay tribute to some of the conventions that we've already seen in horror, yet, at the same time, kind of turn them on their ear". One of her influences from the 1980s horror genre was the film The Lost Boys. She wanted to "honor that, and at the same time, [she] had never really seen this particular subgenre done with girls and [she] tried to do a little of both". Despite this, she said she had noticed that "the last survivor standing in the typical horror film is a woman" and that because of this she feels "horror has always had kind of a feminist angle to it in a weird way and, at the same time, it's kind of delightfully exploitative". Jennifer's Body could play on both of these aspects. In terms of other influences, the film has been frequently compared to the 2001 film Ginger Snaps, though neither Diablo Cody nor Karyn Kusama have acknowledged it as an influence.
Cody said she wanted the film to speak to female empowerment and explore the complex relationships between best friends. "(Director) Karyn Kusama and I are both outspoken feminists", she said. "We wanted to subvert the classic horror model of women being terrorized. I want to write roles that service women. I want to tell stories from a female perspective. I want to create good parts for actresses where they're not just accessories to men." Addressing "the male-dominated" horror genre, Cody said "a key reason for writing the film was to bring to the screen a new way of expressing the intensity of female bonds" and that the adolescent female friendships she experienced were unparalleled in their intensity. She wanted to show the "almost horrific" aspect of such devotion and its relation to parasitism.
The producers decided to have the film open with the statement "Hell is a teenage girl" to reflect the "horrors" of puberty and that "the hellish emotions felt during high school often reappear as teenage girls mature into young women". Cody stated:
There's the scene where Jennifer's sitting alone smearing makeup on her face. I always thought that was such a sad image. She's so vulnerable. I don't know any woman who hasn't had a moment sitting in front of the mirror and thinking, 'Help me, I want to be somebody else.' What makes it extra affecting is that [Megan Fox] is stunning.
Cody crafted the story to follow a night that ends in a tragic fire, after which Jennifer is abducted and set up as a sacrifice which goes awry. Jennifer, now possessed by a demon and subsequently altered into a succubus, sets out on a bloody rampage in which she devours boys, and it is up to Needy to stop her. In sort of a reversal aspect of how puberty changes a girl's life, Jennifer must consume the blood of others once a month or she becomes weak and plain-looking. "It's a meek shall inherit the Earth sort of thing. I think it's always really satisfying and cathartic to see a character that was previously bullied become super human", said Cody. Cody said the script is not a reflection of any part of her own life, but that she is more like the character Needy. "I would say I was more of a Needy than a Jennifer. I was never an Alpha female, and I've never gotten off with bullying other people", she said. "If I had to choose, I was definitely the one being shoved, not the one shoving."
The nickname "Needy" was given to Seyfried's character to underline the essentially condescending dynamic in Jennifer and Needy's high school relationship, as Needy often admires Jennifer and feels she needs her. Cody said "Jennifer is a product of a culture that pressures girls to be skinny, beautiful and just like movie stars" and that she "hopes the film inspires girls to take life into their own hands and do with it, what they want". "If I had gone to this movie as a teenage girl, I would've come out of it feeling totally inspired", she stated. "I would've wanted to write, I would've wanted to create and I would've felt like I watched something that was speaking to me."
Assigned to direct the film, Kusama said, "I think also a lot of horror is about femaleness – whether it's Carrie or Rosemary's Baby." She said she feels "like there's a lot of fear of the female or kind of celebration of it in some weird way and something about this movie managed to take the fear and the sense that it's the female that ultimately survives and sort of marry that in a really interesting way".