MEGAN FOX TALKS 'JENNIFER'S BODY' @ COMIC-CON

Most of the presentations at this year's Comic-Con were staged within the friendly confines of the San Diego Convention Center, and all the parties were held at various hotels downtown.  But Twentieth Century Fox picked San Diego's Manchester Grand Hyatt as the venue for an evening with JENNIFER'S BODY, which included a screening, Q&A with cast and crew, and afterparty at the hotel's Kin Lounge.  Screen Junkies was lucky enough to get the invite for all of the above, and we have the scoop - including more foxy pics of Fox - after the jump...

The screening started at 8pm sharp on Thursday night, and I had just finished frantically uploading the James Cameron AVATAR interview in the hotel's lobby, which explains in part why I was a little slow on the trigger to put this piece up on the site.  We were told by Fox PR that we'd be seeing the first 15 minutes of JENNIFER'S BODY, followed by a Q&A with star Megan Fox, writer Diablo Cody (JUNO), director Karyn Kusama (AEON FLUX, GIRLFIGHT) and producer Jason Reitman (JUNO, THANK YOU FOR SMOKING). 

The segment we saw was promising.  Without giving too much away that the trailer hasn't already, Needy (Amanda Seyfried) and her friend Jennifer (Megan Fox) head out to a local bar in their podunk town, where Jennifer is eyed as a target by the satan-worshipping rock band led by (Adam Brody).  During the band's set, the bar burns down in a freak electrical fire and everyone except Needy, Jennifer and the band perish.  Jennifer, still in shock, is led into the band's van and Needy is left behind.  That night, Needy is home alone and gets an unexpected visitor: Jennifer, covered in blood, who then promptly devours a whole chicken, vomits black ooze that seems to have a life of its own on the kitchen floor, and then tosses Needy around a bit.  It's all very brutal, and yet weirdly sexy... and for a horror flick still featured Cody's patented pop culture witticisms inherent in her "Diablogue."

My first impressions were that JENNIFER'S BODY definitely felt like a throwback to fun '80s horror flicks like LOST BOYS - movies that don't take themselves too seriously - and the filmmakers who came out for the Q&A confirmed that that's what they were going for. 

Here are a few tidbits from the sitdown:

MEGAN FOX ON JENNIFER'S BODY...

What I loved about the movie is that it's so unapologetic as to how inappropriate it is, and that was my favorite part about the script and about the character and it's fun to be able to say the sh*t that she says and get away with it and have people find it charming.

DIABLO CODY ON CREATING A NEW HORROR MYTHOLOGY...

For me, I was simultaneously trying to pay tribute to some of the conventions of horror and simultaneously turn them on their ear.  So it was truly kind of a postmodern thriller. on one hand, i grew up watching these amazing 80s genre movies, like LOST BOYS, and so I wanted to honor that, and at the same time, I had never really seen this particular sub-genre done with girls, and I tried to do a little bit of both.

ON CHICKS IN HORROR MOVIES...

It's been pointed out that the last survivor standing is usually a woman.  SO I think that horror has always had a kind of feminist bent to it, and at the same time, it's kind of delightfully exploitative.  My favorite thing about doing a horror movie is that it's actually a little bit of both.

Karyn Kusama: I think also a lot of horror is about female-ness, whether it's CARRIE or ROSEMARY'S BABY.  I think a lot of it is about the fear of the female or celbration about it in a weird way.  And this took the fear and the idea that it's the female that ultimately survives and marry them in a way.

Diablo Cody: The funny thing is when I set out to write this, I wanted to make something very dark, very brooding.  A traditional slasher movie.  And I realized about a third of the way through, I realized I was incapable of doing that.  The humor kept kind of sneaking in.  I have a macabre sense of humor. So a lot of the horrifying stuff in the movie was funny to me.

I've always said that horror movies and comedies are kind of similar in the sense that you can witness the audience having a physical release, whether it's laughing or screaming.  So I think they're similar in that way.

MEGAN FOX ON ON-SCREEN VOMITING...

That day, I was actually throwing up chocolate syrup.  We did a few takes whee I would do the scream and then throw up Hershey's Syrup or something.  Scratch the Hershey's, cause I don't want to endorse it or anything. And then SFX did a rig that clamps onto my ear, and you revisit it in the pool scene, which you haven't seen yet.  But it basically clamps down onto my ear and then I bite down and it projectiles - it's a tube and it projects whatever that material was.  I'm not sure.  It was pretty intense; I mean, I think it was worse for Amanda [Seyfried] because I think she was the one that got puked on.

JASON REITMAN ON HIS FIRST FORAY INTO HORROR...

JR: I found THANK YOU FOR SMOKING to be terrifying, personally. I love horror movies and I probably see them more than any other genre at the movie theater.  I saw SEE NO EVIL and I still haven't seen THE 400 BLOWS.  I would love to.  I hope I'm as capable as Karyn was doing it.  It's an intimidating genre, because there are people who do it very well.

MEGAN FOX ON ACTING IN THIS VERSUS TRANSFORMERS...

Obviously there's not distractions... like there's no giant robots to distract you from the performance so if it's terrible you're gonna know that it's really f**kin' terrible.  That of course is intimidating but the character was so much fun for me. I wasn't really sure what I was doing, and I just had fun with it, and I also just had fun playing with my image, or how people might perceive "Megan Fox" to be.  And I was just sort of flying freely.

MEGAN FOX ON THE SEXINESS LEVEL OF JENNIFER'S BODY...

This movie is so sexy.  You better put on your f**in' sexy shoes for this movie. 

[crowd laughs]

There's a relationship between my character and Amanda's character and I guess depending on who you are and how you grew up, there's a little bit of a lesbian relationship that happens.  There's a girl-on-girl kiss.  It's an homage to that.  But we also poke fun at that in horror movies.  But also, before every kill, there is a seduction that occurs, so these boys have to be seduced into getting close enough to this dead girl for her to devour them.  But I think I'm pretty sexy in it.

[crowd laughs again, some women in crowd scowl]

JASON REITMAN ON HORROR MOVIES:

I remember cracking open my father's laserdisc of NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET and that being one of the coolest moments from my childhood.  And I can't imagine having that experience with any other genre.  I can't imagine dangerously opening a copy of a broad comedy in the middle of the night hoping I wouldn't get caught.  And the idea that there'll be a kid out there secretly opening a Blu-Ray of JENNIFER'S BODY is pretty exciting to all of us.

KK: This is totally gonna be that movie where the eleven-year old boy - and girl - do that. The first thing I thought after reading this script was, "Man, if I was seventeen.  If I was just a younger person right now, this is the movie I would see ten times in the theater. It's just a pull... the movie speaks to me... it's emotional, not intellectual.

MF: I don't ever watch scary movies.  I have a very intense fear of the dark.  The last horror movie I saw was TOOTH FAIRY I think, and I slept with my mom for a month afterward.  So for me to play something I'd normally be frightened by was really intriguing for me. 

THE FILMMAKERS ON THEIR FAVORITE HORROR FLICKS...

KK: I'm a NEAR DARK junki.

DC: My all times favorites are ROSEMARY'S BABY and DON'T LOOK BACK.

JR: I'm a SHINING GUY.  My father told me ALIEN as a campfire story.  Only it's continued.  The alien made it back down to earth.  And then I started watching ALIEN for real, and I was watching it and found I knew where it was going.  And I was young enough to have a moment where I thought... "Oh my god... they ripped my father off!"

[crowd laughs because that was an adorable story]

And with that, the Q&A came to an end.  As interested as I was in JENNIFER'S BODY, I couldn't muster up the energy to hang out at the afterparty, but here are some pics from it.  Sucks.  I could have chatted up Mintz-Plasse about how Matthew Vaughn's little indie KICK-ASS was the sleeper hit of Comic-Con 2009.