Jennifer's Body

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.

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.

Casting

Megan Fox was in negotiations to star as Jennifer Check since 2007, and was officially cast in October 2007. Fox said the reason she agreed to the role was her love for the script. "I think what I loved about the movie is it's so unapologetic and how completely inappropriate it is at all times," she said. "That was my favorite part about the script and about the character. It's fun to be able to say the shit that she got to say and get away with it and how people find it charming." Asked how acting in a film like this is different from acting in Transformers, Fox said "there's [no] distractions, like there's no robots to distract you from whatever performance I do give. So, if it's terrible, you're gonna fucking know that it's really terrible". She said despite this aspect of the business being intimidating, she enjoyed portraying the character. "I wasn't really sure what I was doing," said Fox. "I was just trying to have fun with it and I felt like I was able to make fun of my own image as to how some people might perceive Megan Fox to be. I was just sort of flying freely and I hope some of it works." In balancing out the film's horror with humor, she said she relied heavily on Diablo Cody's script and Karyn Kusama's direction to pull it off, stating, "I have a very specific sense of humor, things that I think are funny aren't going to fly with middle America. It's going to eliminate some of the audience, so you need someone there to tell you you can't do that."

In February 2008, Amanda Seyfried was cast as Anita "Needy" Lesnicki, the "plain Jane" best friend to Fox's character for whom she harbors a somewhat homoerotic infatuation. Seyfried said it was a relief to play the nerdy role opposite Fox. "Being a lead (like Megan), you have that weird pressure of feeling like you have to look attractive," she said. "In this movie, I didn't worry about any of that shit. I don't want to play the one that everybody is supposed to want to have sex with."

The filmmakers had hoped to cast an actual rock musician to portray Nikolai Wolf, with Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy and Joel Madden of Good Charlotte being their top choices. One Tree Hill star Chad Michael Murray was also considered for the role. In March 2008, Johnny Simmons was reportedly cast as Nikolai. However, Adam Brody was officially cast in the role, while Simmons then accepted the role of Chip Dove. Brody did not perform his own vocals, saying, "My singing voice is still going through puberty. They gave me a singing lesson or two, and it's not the worst thing in the world, but it's not anything anyone would choose to hear." His vocals were provided by Ryan Levine, who also played another member of the band.

Design and visual effects

Handling the film's visual effects were KNB EFX GROUP and Moving Picture Company (MPC). For Jennifer's demonic form, the creators used different techniques. "I actually wasn't in [the makeup chair] that much because they created an entire head. They did a live cast of me from the shoulders up. They created me and then put the teeth in", stated Fox. "To save my face, they had a photo double that would come in and do most of the crazy monster makeup - they would do that on her. So it would go from me, then in post-production it would somehow go to her and the fake head. They would mix them all together."

For the "vomit scene" where Jennifer has just arrived at Needy's house after being murdered and inhabited by a demon, Fox said the liquid she was given to spit out "was actually ... chocolate syrup initially". "We did a few takes where I would just do this scream and sort of puke Hershey's chocolate syrup. Scratch the Hershey's because I don't want to endorse that or anything", she stated. "And then, special effects did a rig that clamps onto my ear and you revisit it in the pool scene ..." Fox said it "clips on. It goes around the back of my ear and then I bite down on it on the side of my face, like this, and it projectiles. It's a tube ..."

Director Kusama said it had a classic feel. Fox agreed, "Yeah, and it projects whatever that material was. I'm not sure. It was pretty intense. I think it was worse for [Seyfried] because she's the one that got puked on. I was the one doing the puking."

For more practical special effects on the set as opposed to CGI, Kusama said it "was a choice that we all sort of made organically". She said they appreciate "those kind of effects in older movies and [questions] sometimes how much more effective it is to use a ton of CGI" and that they "always started with a practical effect and then moved forward from there to lay a groundwork of something that's actually physically, materially there". They found this to be more enjoyable.

Erik Nordby of KNB (known for his work on The Haunting in Connecticut, which also features co-star Kyle Gallner) stated, "We immediately went into pitch mode in January and spent a solid two weeks trying to not only bid the script but also collect as much reference material and stuff for the first client get together." He said the director and producers wanted an "old-school, hands-off, lo-fi approach to the visual effects" so that the horror elements would not overpower the storyline. Based on the script, MPC similarly came to the same conclusion and "provided a clear direction" for Nordby and his team. "At that point when we met with them, they had already met with KNB, who had already done up a stylized still of what, at the time, they were calling 'Evil Jennifer,'" he said. "There was a lot of info yet to come, but based on the script, Jennifer goes from very beautiful Megan Fox to a very ghoulish, succubus creature whose jaw distends half-way down her face." Nordby said the look was eventually toned down at the wishes of MPC. From there, KNB "produced some tests, grabbing a bunch of stills from [Fox] and [did their] work to indicate how that balance could exist between visual effects and special effects and still maintain a level of subtlety" and that "[MPC] responded really well".

Filming

In late 2007, Fox Atomic had plans to film Jennifer's Body before a possible writer's strike. When the Writers Guild of America strike began, shooting was then moved to March 7, 2008, in Burnaby, British Columbia, specifically at Robert Burnaby Park near Cariboo Hill Secondary School. Some of the scenes, particularly those situated in a school setting, were filmed in local Vancouver-area schools such as Vancouver Technical Secondary School, Langley Secondary School and University Hill Secondary School. The waterfalls scene was filmed at Cascade Falls in Cascade Falls Regional Park in British Columbia.

Fox said that while filming her highly anticipated kissing scene with Seyfried that Seyfried was "extremely uncomfortable" but that she herself was not. "I feel much safer with girls, so I felt more comfortable kissing [Seyfried] than kissing any of the other people that I had to kiss", she said. Seyfried's uneasiness in the scene caused "giggling fits" between takes. Seyfried said that neither of them wanted to do the kiss because they felt it was just for promotional purposes. She agreed with Fox that she was uneasy about acting out the scene. "It was my first time doing a real kissing scene with a woman", she stated. "It is just weird. It is a woman. With a woman's smell—soft and floraly—and maybe the pheromones are different. Something about it felt uncomfortable for me."

Music

Music was incorporated as an essential part of the film; there are "very specific bands" placed in band posters in some parts, such as in the selection of the band poster on the walls of the bar. Kusama said "[t]he music was a huge component of the movie" and this is first evident with "the songs that we see and hear performed, but then, just the vibe of the movie actually". She said, "As the movie progresses, it becomes a pretty clearly music-oriented movie. It's sort of a youth movie. Some of those bands were totally made up and some of them are not."

Release

Critical response

The review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes reports that 46% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 212 reviews, and an average rating of 5.20/10. The website's critical consensus states, "Jennifer's Body features occasionally clever dialogue but the horror/comic premise fails to be either funny or scary enough to satisfy." At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average rating to reviews from mainstream critics, the film holds a score of 47 out of 100 based on 29 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C−" on an A+ to F scale.

Film critic Roger Ebert enjoyed the film, dubbing it a "Twilight for boys" and saying "as a movie about a flesh-eating cheerleader, it's better than it has to be." Ebert said that within Cody there is "the soul of an artist, and her screenplay brings to this material a certain edge, a kind of gleeful relish, that's uncompromising. This isn't your assembly-line teen horror thriller". Additionally, he complimented Fox as "[coming] through" in her portrayal and "play[ing] the role straight". He gave the film three out of four stars. Rick Groen of The Globe and Mail gave the film three out of four stars. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone stated it is "Hot! Hot! Hot!" and that "Director Karyn Kusama is torn between duty to female empowerment and slasher convention". He credited Fox's portrayal as showing "a comic flair" that Transformers "never investigated". Tom Charity of CNN said "[the] last time a horror flick tried for a distinctly female point of view the result was Twilight, which was more of a wan gothic romance than a chiller" and "Fox makes a convincing vixen, callously picking up victims whenever her luster begins to fade. It's not hard to imagine she can have anyone who takes her fancy". Charity credited the dialogue as "bitingly smart, funny teen-speak ... along with sharp pop culture references".

Mary Pols of Time magazine called the film entertaining and reasoned "[t]here is a lot of intelligent camp here, and some sharply observed characterizations" and Cody and Kusama's "depiction of the ways in which women like Needy are willing to compromise themselves to indulge an ultimately less secure friend is spot-on". Dana Stevens of Slate praised the film for being "luscious and powerful, sexy and scary, maddening at times, but impossible to stop watching" and a "wicked black comedy with unexpected emotional resonance, one of the most purely pleasurable movies of the year so far". Elle's Karen Durbin said the film not only puts "a fresh spin on female-centric pop genres but also own[s] them outright" and is "rich with first-rate performances".

Box office

Though the film was expected to pull in a significant number of the late teenage/young adult audience, particularly males aged 17 and older, and though Cody hoped for a large female turnout, it earned a "disappointing" $2.8 million on its opening Friday and $6.8 million in its opening weekend at the North American box office; the film placed #5, while 3D animated film Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs placed #1 with $30.1 million. Produced for $16 million, Jennifer's Body did manage to attract the sizable female audience Cody wanted; 51% were female, with 70% of patrons under age 25. The film had been expected to benefit somewhat from its heavily marketed lesbian kissing scene between Fox and Seyfried, which, in addition to Fox being in the film, was thought to entice and successfully attract male viewers. Critic Jim Vejvoda at IGN stated that such a scene is not as shocking as it was in past decades and cannot be expected to significantly pull in an audience. The film grossed $16,204,793 domestically and $15,351,268 in international sales, for a worldwide total of $31,556,061.

Box-office analysts and critics debated the film's underperformance. Analyst Jeff Bock, of Exhibitor Relations, reasoned the film underperformed at the box office due to two reasons; the first, he said, is the genre. Bock stated that Americans get horror and comedy, but with the idea "of those two things together in one place, people suddenly get very dumb". "The horror-comedy genre is the toughest sell in Hollywood", he said. He noted films Tremors, Slither, Shaun of the Dead, Eight Legged Freaks and the Evil Dead series, and said that while many of those are considered critical and business successes, "none of them have brought in the megabucks that a simple horror or comedy can." In addition, he labeled the Scream franchise as more "straight-up horror" than comedy and stated Zombieland's box office performance would determine the horror-comedy genre's current viability.

Despite other R-rated horror films having centered around teenagers, some such as Scream having been successful, Bock said the second reason Jennifer's Body under-performed at the box office is the R-rating, which he described as a "killer" for the film. He said the film is set in high school and "sounds like the perfect package for teens" but that "the R rating banned many teens from the theaters" and the studio was left with "an R-rated film marketed to whom, exactly?" Nicole Sperling of Entertainment Weekly felt that it was a slow and disappointing weekend for the box office in general; 3D animated film Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs was steep competition, and with low box office performances by the Matt Damon film The Informant! and Jennifer Aniston film Love Happens, she concluded that this may support "the current hypothesis floating around Hollywood, that movie stars no longer matter" and that it takes more than a name to open a film. S.T. VanAirsdale of Movieline echoed Sperling's sentiment about the weekend, as "some of the stinkiest high-profile openings in recent memory". He concluded five reasons for Jennifer's Body's underperformance at the box office. The first, he said, is the distributor. "20th Century Fox's genre wing, Fox Atomic, had Jennifer's Body in the can by the time the mother ship shut it down last spring", he said. "Instead of offloading the film to Fox Searchlight, which nimbly maneuvered Diablo Cody's previous brainchild Juno to awards-season lucre in 2007, a decision was somehow reached to fill a gap in Big Fox's early fall slate with a gory" and "post-feminist horror romp starring Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried". VanAirsdale classified this as a "[b]ig mistake" and that "[y]ou'd have to go back to The Devil Wears Prada to find an example of a Fox release that worked without a genuine male lead; you'd probably have to go back to Aliens to find a genre example of such that they pulled off successfully." He named the second reason as the marketing, stating that the film was not well-marketed (whether by billboards, transit posters, lobby standees, or other promotional venues), even in New York City.

Home media

20th Century Fox Home Entertainment released the film on DVD and Blu-ray on December 29, 2009, in the United States and Canada. In Australia, the DVD and Blu-ray was released on May 18, 2010 by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment South Pacific. The film opened at #11 at the DVD sales chart, making $1.6 million in the first week off 104,000 DVD units. There is a rated and an unrated version of the film, with the unrated version running about five minutes longer than the theatrical version. The UK Blu-ray lacks most of the extras found on the locked US release.

On March 20, 2019, Rupert Murdoch sold most of 21st Century Fox's film and television assets to Disney, and Jennifer's Body was one of the films included in the deal. In 2025, Jennifer's Body was made available on streaming service Hulu, which was one of the additional assets Disney acquired from Fox.

Soundtrack

The film's soundtrack was released by Fueled by Ramen on August 25, 2009, and featured previously released music by various indie rock and alternative rock bands such as White Lies, Florence + The Machine, Silversun Pickups and Black Kids. It also features pop punk band All Time Low and electropop singer Little Boots. In addition, the album features new songs from pop rock artists such as Cobra Starship and Panic! at the Disco and Paramore's lead singer Hayley Williams. The first single from the soundtrack is "New Perspective" by Panic! at the Disco.

The ending sequence of the film itself features a song, "Violet", from the album Live Through This by Hole. This same album also features a song titled "Jennifer's Body". In total, the film features 22 songs, most of which are included on the soundtrack.

Graphic novel

As a tie-in to the film, Boom! Studios produced a Jennifer's Body graphic novel. The graphic novel expands on the film's universe and Jennifer's murders of the boys. It was written by Black Metal's Rick Spears, with the first nine pages illustrated by Jim Mahfood (Clerks). Two covers, in Fox's likeness, were designed; one for the direct market by Eric Jones (available only in comic specialty stores), and the other by Frank Cho for the mass market focusing more on "hellish Jennifer stories" with art by Mahfood, Hack/Slash's Tim Seely, DMZ's Nikki Cook, and Popgun's Ming Doyle. The novel was released in August 2009.

The novel features less of Jennifer than the film, but does capture her "going in for the kill" several times. It focuses heavily on following her soon-to-be victims and provides information on their personalities not elaborated on in the film so that readers can better conclude whether the boys deserved to be murdered. The novel consists of four chapters, with a prologue and an epilogue, with art provided for each by different artists. Each one follows a different boy and what is happening in his life just before Jennifer kills him.

On creating the story, Spears stated, "The best part for me as a writer was to show some events from the movie from a different point of view, sort of like Rashomon for you Kurosawa fans. And with comics we can get into the character's [sic] heads in a way that works well in comics and novels more so than in film." He stated, "... I was using the medium to change what we really know about these characters and twist around what we see in the movies. All the academics aside, it's also very funny and gore splattered."

Spears stated that while writing the stories, the film was still being made and he had not seen any of it at the time. He mainly learned about the characters through the script. "I got to read the screenplay. It was kinda crazy writing characters that were being changed on set and in the editing process. I had to bob and weave to keep up but that was all part of the fun", he said.

Possible sequel

In January 2024, screenwriter Diablo Cody expressed her interest in a possible sequel sixteen years after the first film. She said, "Nothing makes me happier than when a person approaches me and tells me that they love this movie."