Comic-Con: 15 Minutes Of Jennifer’s Body Screened
By Russ Fischer/July 24, 2009 7:14 am EST
Many more details after the jump, but (obviously, since I’m talking about the first chunk of the movie) there are some potential spoilers. I’ll keep them to a minimum.
Essentially, what we see is a friendship between Jennifer (Megan Fox) and Needy (Amanda Seyfried). It reminded me of the Laura Palmer – Donna Hayward relationship from Twin Peaks. That is, Jennifer is hot and knows it, but has maybe some unexpected latent naivete; Needy looks like a wallflower at first blush, but is perceptive and has some backbone. When she and Jennifer go out to a crappy roadhouse to catch a lousy rock band from the ‘big city’, Needy wastes no time calling out the singer’s cocky bullshit as he tries to skeeve on a very willing Jennifer.
And listening to Cody talk about writing the film, I think that slotting Jennifer’s Body in alongside Drag Me to Hell might not be very far off base, at least as far as the horror/comedy mix is concerned:
Oh, you mean from Transformers to this movie? How are they different? [There aren’t] distractions, like there aren’t robots to distract you from whatever performance I do give. So if it’s terrible, you’re going to fucking know it’s really terrible. So that, of course, is intimidating.
And Kusama wanted to have a practical base for the effects as much as possible:
When I first set out to write this, I intended to write something very dark, very brooding, traditional slasher movie, and then I realized about a third of the way into the process that I was incapable of doing that, because the humor kept seeping in. I have a macabre sense of humor; a lot of the things in the movie that are horrifying are funny to me. I’ve always said that I think comedy films and horror films are kind of similar, in that you can witness the audience having a physical release. They’re laughing, they’re screaming, it’s not a passive experience.
It was a choice that we all made organically; I think we appreciate those [practical] effects in older movies, and I question sometimes how much more effective it is to use a ton of CG, so we always started with a practical effect and then moved forward from there, to lay a groundwork of something that is actually physically there. It was more fun, too.
