A lightning storm of flashes goes off two feet from Megan
Fox’s face. Caught up in the assault is the rest of the creative team
behind Jennifer’s Body: producer Jason Reitman, screenwriter
Diablo Cody, actors Adam Brody, Amanda Seyfried and Johnny Simmons, and
director Karyn Kusama.
“Red hat, Megan!” a photographer shouts.
“I can’t see your red hat,” Fox replies.
The assembled journalists laugh. The storm dies down. In a crowded
Toronto hotel room, the press conference begins.
Jennifer’s Body (see review)—which stars Fox as a botched
sacrifice to Satan who eats teenage boys to survive, and opened the
Midnight Madness section of this year’s Toronto International Film
Festival—appears to be a departure for Kusama, whose first film was
the indie boxing drama Girlfight, and Cody, who won an Academy
Award for her first screenplay, the quirky comedy Juno. Both
women disagree.
“Horror films have a lot to do with adolescence,” says Kusama.
“They’re a repository for all your childhood anxieties.”
“I’ve loved horror movies my entire life,” adds Cody. “Now being
able to make a horror film is very delicious.”
Cody wrote Jennifer’s Body—named after a Hole song—right
after Juno. “I had finished Juno and the ball was rolling
on production, and I thought ‘Now what? What would I wanna see?’ I
wrote this on spec, not knowing there would be any success with
Juno. I couldn’t have planned it as well.”
For Fox, best known as a tabloid staple (and the girl in the
Transformers franchise), it was a chance to play something more
well-rounded than she’s used to. “The scripts I was getting offered
were not of this calibre,” she says. “They were straight-to-DVD,
your-wardrobe-is-a-bikini deals. I felt lucky to get to work in
something Diablo was involved with.”
Cody took a lot of heat for the language in Juno, but if you
watch her television series, The United States of Tara—or even
read her Entertainment Weekly column—it’s clear that it’s a
style, not an affectation, and it continues in Jennifer’s Body.
(“He’s salty.” “Do you have a tampon? You look like you’re
plugging.”)
“I don’t find it that unusual,” says Brody, who plays the eyelinered
leader of the emo band that sacrifices Jennifer and knows from coining
catchphrases thanks to his OC days. “The better something’s
written, the easier it is to say. It’s when something’s horrible that
you have to wrack your brain to figure out what to say.”
“The challenge is to make whatever they say sound real,” says
Kusama, sounding like she’s as tired of this conversation as the rest
of us. “Whether it’s banal or operatic—Diablo’s language has its own
vernacular, but it’s not theatre either.”
It’s not news that horror films—especially the last few years of
humourless, exploitative hack work—don’t traditionally care for the
ladies. So for two women to put a horror movie together, that stars two
women—one in the villain role, the other in the victim/hero
mold—about a monster that eats men doesn’t just fly in the face of
convention, it rips its guts out.
Fox, who caused controversy earlier this year for slagging her
Transformers director Michael Bay, enjoyed the filmmaking
experience more than usual, because “it’s different working for a
woman. She’s much much more sensitive to how I might be feeling on a
moment-to-moment basis, which is a very bizarre feeling. I’m not used
to that. But I feel like it was encouraged for us to be beautiful. Not
in the sense that we have our hair extensions in, or that I have my tan
on and need to be glowing all the time. We were real people in a real
town, and we showed the beauty in that—real is beautiful. You
don’t have to look like an airbrushed Cosmopolitan cover all the
time to be attractive. And I didn’t have to bend over a bike, which was
nice.”
Kusama sees it more as social commentary than straight-up feminism.
“The social idea of the Queen Bee is very real,” she says. “There are
girls who understand their power better than others. This riffs on
Mean Girls, Heathers and Clueless, but accesses
the tyranny.”
“There’s nothing scarier than a bitch,” Cody says bluntly. “The
Bitch should take her place in the catalogue of horror villains:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Bitch.”
This article appears in Sep 17-23, 2009.