If you listen closely, you can hear the sound of knives sharpening in anticipation of Diablo Cody’s screenwriting follow-up to Juno, the horror comedy Jennifer’s Body. A backlash is inevitable – really, it started almost simultaneously with the initial Juno hype, but it’s usually the sophomore effort that really takes it in the shins. If Cody is concerned, there’s not much evidence of it in the recent interviews she’s done to promote the film, which just wrapped shooting in Vancouver.
“I guess I was trying to think of something that was legitimately scary to me as opposed to a marketable horror idea,” Cody told The Province, which describes Jennifer’s Body as “another story about verbal teens -- bookish Needy (Amanda Seyfried) is horrified when a satanic rite turns best pal Jennifer (Megan Fox) into a ravenous man-killer.” Hey, we’ve already had a mumblecore horror movie, so why not one full of snappy, smart-alecky banter?
“All I could think of was girls -- teenaged women are terrifying,” says Cody. “They can be really frightening, really ruthless and irrational -- and evil. So I thought maybe I could literally make a teenaged girl a bogeyman in the classic sense.” Sounds a little Carrie to us, and indeed Cody makes that comparison herself in another interview with Fearnet, also citing The Virgin Suicides, Suspiria and Just One of the Guys, among others. “This is a horror movie--not to sound like a complete pretentious douche bag--but it is a horror movie made by filmmakers and made by people who genuinely care about film. [Director] Karyn [Kusama] was a total horror geek. I’m a horror geek. The producers are into this stuff. This was not a mercenary effort to make something that seemed like it was kind of profile. We wanted to make a horror movie, and we are extremely respectful of the great films that came before us. I think that people will see that in the finished product.”
Jennifer’s Body isn’t scheduled for release until next year. That should give us plenty of time to get these knives nice and sharp.