The premiere of Transformers in 2007 made Megan Fox one of the biggest stars of the moment and the object of desire of thousands of people around the world.
Her status as a s-x symbol led her to monopolize all the magazine covers, both those of fashion and beauty and those oriented exclusively to the heteros-xual male public, publications that named her the s-xiest woman in the world on countless occasions. In 2009, Fox's body and face were everywhere, becoming the main commercial draw for a flashy horror movie called Jennifer's Body.
A year earlier, Diablo Cody had won his first (and so far only) Oscar for the screenplay for the breakout indie comedy Juno.
The success of the film starring Ellen Page opened doors for him in Hollywood and helped him find financing for his next project, an eccentric fantasy film that most studios would have said no to from a screenwriter without a golden statuette. under the arm.
Jennifer's Body came out ahead at Fox Atomic, a subdivision of 20th Century Fox created in 2006 to develop fantasy genre projects, with Karyn Kusama as director and Fox as main star.
With her, Cody wanted to pay homage to the classics of the genre (Howls, An American Werewolf in London, The Devil's Baby, Carrie or the Italian giallo) by telling a modern feminine story. But no one at that studio knew exactly what kind of movie he had in his hands, much less how to market it.
Jennifer's Body is a teen horror comedy about two best friends who have almost nothing in common. Needy Lesnicki (Amanda Seyfried) is reserved, nerdy and socially awkward, while Jennifer Check (Fox) is an arrogant cheerleader who is very popular with the boys.
After a dark ritual, Jennifer acquires a voracious thirst for human blood and begins to kill her male classmates in high school in order to preserve her beauty and strength.
In reality, Jennifer has been possessed by a succubus, a demon that in mythology takes the form of an attractive woman to seduce men. The young woman's monstrous new identity tests her friendship with Needy, who must find a way to stop her before she kills her boyfriend.
The film hit US theaters on September 18, 2009, and Spanish ones just a week later. Despite being baited by Fox and capturing the spirit of that particular moment in the 2000s (including an Adam Brody straight out of The O.C. looking like a rock star in eyeliner), the film was met with a negative reception from audiences. and a very poor box office takings, leading to the closure of Fox Atomic just three years after its inception.
In a recent interview for Variety held on the occasion of the film's 10th anniversary, Cody, Fox and Kusama met to discuss the film's commercial fiasco and its subsequent impact on popular culture.
Cody acknowledged that, months before the premiere, she knew the film would be a flop. The reason? The test passes that the studios organize to assess the commercial viability of a project.
“I'm not surprised at all that it didn't work. In fact, I predicted it months before”, revealed Cody, “This film was extensively tested in focus groups.
People hated her. I still have one of the cards. I will keep it forever. They played it to young men, of course, and to the question 'What would you improve about this movie?' one answered 'More boobs.' That's what we were up against. Looking back, it makes me sad."
The main problem with Jennifer's Body is that it was not sold to its target audience, the female, the geek and the LGBTQ +, but to the one that the studios believed they should sell a horror movie starring the hot girl of the moment: the male teenager.
One only has to take a look at the marketing campaign to realize that the promotion focused exclusively on the film's s-xual content (the premiere featured models dressed as Jennifer who looked like they came out of a porn movie), as well as the Fox's attractive and hypers-xualized physique.
She explains it in her own words in the same interview: "Most of the marketing was based on 'Megan Fox is s-xy, come see her'. And the movie wasn't about that. It was actually about mislabeling others, about people focusing on one thing and not seeing the point behind it, about s-xualizing someone who doesn't want to be s-xualized, about the helplessness of young girls and women."
The actress knows a lot about this, who for years faced harsh criticism from a sector of the industry and the public due to her explosive image, when the truth is that she was the main victim of that hypers-xualization by the media. .
In another recent interview with ET Online for the Jennifer's Body anniversary, Fox acknowledged having suffered "a real psychological crisis" as a result of being constantly objectified, especially during the film's promotional campaign, after which (at just 23 years old) was forced to move away from the spotlight and reduce the number of interventions in the cinema. "She didn't want to be seen," she explained.
“I didn't want to be photographed, appear in magazines, walk down a red carpet. I did not want to be seen in public at all, because of the fear I felt and because I was absolutely sure that they were going to make fun of me, they were going to spit on me or someone was going to yell at me.
This misgiving about the reception of his own image originated largely after his experience in Transformers and his very public dispute with the director of the franchise, Michael Bay, whom he came to compare to Hitler (which is why the producer of the saga, Steven Spielberg, decided to fire her.Years later, the interpreter publicly denounced the behavior she received from Bay, who according to her treated her like a piece of meat on the set.
Fox then had the support of her co-star and friend Shia LaBeouf, who in 2017 described the director as a "very lascivious filmmaker in his way of filming women." Bay has defended herself on several occasions, alluding to the actress's alleged lack of professionalism and downplaying her complaints, but in LaBeouf's words, the problem is that she never felt comfortable in her role as "the s-xiest woman in America." ” and was punished for it: “Megan developed a Spice Girl-like strength, a female empowerment that complicated her relationship with Michael.”
Ten years later, society is undergoing a process of transformation after the emergence of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements as a result of the Weinstein scandal, which has contributed to giving a voice to women who for years had to remain silent for fear of reprisals. Fox did not shut up, and he had to face them. In fact, the actress herself believes that she was a pioneer in this social revolution, but nobody paid attention to her because of the image that was had of her.
“I feel like I got ahead of the #MeToo movement. Before it existed, I was already talking out loud and saying 'Hey, this is happening to me and it's not right'. And everyone was like, 'Well, fuck you. We don't care, you deserve it, ”she declared very hurt last month, as collected by PaperMag.
Fortunately, the actress from Tennessee can now feel more heard and understood. Respect and acceptance come years after she needed it most, but she is better late than never. If you do a search on Twitter for the words “Megan Fox apology” you will discover hundreds of tweets from people demanding that the world apologize to the actress.
For not listening to her in her day, for not taking her problems seriously just because she is an attractive woman, for not believing her, and above all, for staying on the surface, in the body, and not bothering to get to know the woman behind .
Jennifer's Body has gone through a process similar to that of many other once misunderstood genre films that are rediscovered and revalued over time, currently enjoying a good reputation as a cult film. In 2019, a horror movie like this would have been released on a streaming platform like Netflix, where it would surely have found its audience more easily, along with related titles like The Babysitter or Perfection.
Precisely streaming (specifically HBO Spain, where it is currently available) gives us a good opportunity to see it again for what it is: a fun and self-conscious horror comedy created by women about friendship and female s-xuality that, without being any masterpiece (not pretending), it holds many more pleasures than it seems.
In the ten years that have passed since its premiere, its main managers have continued their career with success: Kusama is one of today's best-rated directors after The Invitation and Destroyer, and Cody has continued to evolve as a screenwriter with the very interesting Young Adult or Tully . Fox, for his part, is gradually returning to the light, to recover the place that belongs to him and receive that apology that we owe him. Because although sometimes it costs, time ends up putting everything in its place.
