“When Juno came out and it was successful and people said you can write whatever you want now, that was my first idea.
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“To write a kind of feminist horror movie with a vintage vibe was a fantasy for me,” she said. But Jennifer’s Body - a wickedly funny retro slasher pastiche - is the movie Cody always wanted to write. Juno, in which Ellen Page starred as the titular teenager who gets pregnant and decides to give her baby up for adoption, is an offbeat but heartfelt coming-of-age movie.
The film wasn’t exactly the expected follow-up to Cody’s first movie. The new, homicidal Jennifer gains her strength by killing and eating her male classmates - as Needy struggles to keep her best friend’s murderous instincts in check. After devil-worshipping indie rock band Low Shoulder attempts to sacrifice Jennifer, she becomes possessed by a demon who is hungry for human flesh. In Devil’s Kettle, Minnesota, Jennifer and Needy have been best friends since childhood: Jennifer is a popular cheerleader while Needy is her shy, virginal follower. On paper, Jennifer’s Body sounds like familiar horror fare, with some notable quirks. “For those of us who have been alive, it’s like - maybe on a zeitgeist-y level it’s timely,” Cody said. The story of Jennifer’s Body is not just about why its feminist themes might have been better suited to our current climate, but also about why they were rejected so strongly less than a decade ago, with the film dismissed as mindless exploitation. Kusama and Cody were feminists when they made the film, and they created something that spoke to their feelings and concerns then, not in anticipation of a movement for hearing and believing women would. But there’s something particularly frustrating about the way Jennifer’s Body is suddenly being called “timely” in the #MeToo era, as though the abuse and exploitation of women in a patriarchal society is merely part of a recent trend. It’s certainly not unprecedented for a movie everyone seemed to hate - the film has a 44% on Rotten Tomatoes - to reemerge as a misunderstood classic years later. More precisely, Jennifer’s Body was always good, and everyone is just now starting to get on its level.”
Bloody Disgusting insisted the film deserves cult status, while Refinery29 dubbed the title character a “ feminist revenge hero who came too early.” Vox’s Constance Grady summed it up best: “ Jennifer’s Body is good now. “ Jennifer’s Body Would Kill If It Came Out Today,” a Vice headline declared in October. And while the same could not be said of Cody, the incredible success of her debut feature, 2007’s Juno, meant the industry was on high alert for any possible missteps: Hollywood loves to elevate rising talent, but not as much as it loves watching them fall.īut although Jennifer’s Body may have had a slew of biases and preconceptions working against it, the film clearly tapped into something that - just nine years after it debuted to poor reviews and box office numbers - has helped it become a modern-day horror classic. Kusama’s last film, Æon Flux, was a massive flop. It starred, in the title role, Megan Fox, an actor best known for her thankless part in the critically reviled Transformers film series. This was a horror movie - a still misunderstood genre that was even more stigmatized several years back - that focused on teen girls, whose stories are rarely taken as seriously as those of their male counterparts. “And at the time it was painful, but now I’m realizing this is evident of the world at large.”Įven with less disastrous marketing, it’s likely Jennifer’s Body was always going to be a tough sell. “In those conversations, I was like, Oh, OK, we are seeing either we made a movie that they see completely differently, or what’s in front of them is something they don’t want to see,” she said. Meetings with marketing were a wake-up call for Kusama. “The response said, ‘Jennifer sexy, she steal your boyfriend.’ As if a caveman had written it.
The email “wasn’t even grammatically correct,” Cody noted. And when Kusama asked for an explanation behind another ad that was fixated on Jennifer’s hotness, she and Cody received a reply that still lives in infamy for the screenwriter.