Jennifer's Body is as simple as chocolate-spiked spit and as complicated as you want it to be. I like that in a movie.

Here's the simple part: Nice, nerdy Needy (the awesome Amanda Seyfried from Big Love) is BFFs with the bitchy hottie Jennifer (Megan Fox). They live in a small, Minnesota town where such an unlikely pairing is possible. There are so few kids in their town that two little girls who played in the sandbox together can stay friends as teens. But there's a problem. Jennifer is always pushing Needy around.

That's how the two wind up at a show for some lame indie rock band called Low Shoulder. A band whose lead singer Jennifer is scheming to hook up with. It turns out that Low Shoulder has a scheme, too: They want to sacrifice a virgin to Satan so that their band will achieve some success without having to do something "lame" like go on Letterman. Because they're in such a backwoods town, they assume Jennifer is a virgin. But as she says later, "I'm not even a backdoor virgin." Turns out when you sacrifice a non-virgin to Satan, it causes the sacrifice to go all undead demon on your ass.

And that's when things get sick. Jennifer has to drink blood to survive, and she's not satisfied just eating dumbass members of the football team. So she starts going after people Needy likes, including Needy's floppy-haired, cute boyfriend Chip. There's an amazing awkward/cute/horrifying scene where Chip and Needy are losing their virginity together, intercut with Jennifer sipping blood out of the ripped-open torso of another guy Needy has an unacknowledged crush on.

Once Needy figures out Jennifer is a demon, she sets out to stop her. Of course everything culminates in a Needy vs. Jennifer vs. Chip showdown at the prom, an event that is hellish for girls even if they don't have best frenemies who are monsters.

Sure it's a cliched structure; you've seen it a thousand times before. That's the way horror movies work, though. They offer up a generic story and the good parts, the original parts, come in the little tweaks and fucked-up details that offer you a glimpse of the real-life horrors that lurk beneath the CG fantasy. And that's why Jennifer's Body is so rewarding as a movie: Things get really complicated the more you think about how this movie overturns your expectations.

So now for the complicated part. Let's begin with how this flick breaks one of the cardinal rules of small-scale horror. Here you have a female monster menacing a female character. Usually female monsters - especially sexy ones like Jennifer - are out to get men. Female vampires chomp on men; Grendel's mom tries to smack down Beowulf; the Species chick murders guys who are boning her. There are exceptions, like the woman vs. woman fights in Aliens or Friday the 13th (the very first movie). But those movies are quite memorable because they fly in the face of our expectations.

Jennifer eats men, but she does it to get at Needy. She eats the men Needy loves. As director Karyn Kusama has said, Jennifer's Body is a movie about toxic friendships between women. By placing this story in the context of a monster movie, it also does something interesting. First, it acknowledges that women are horribly dangerous, which you already knew if you watched The Sarah Connor Chronicles. More importantly, it acknowledges that women are dangerous to other women. Not just in a mean girls way, but in an "I will rip your lungs out" way.

Although we've seen countless movies where men are dangerous to women, and to each other, you can probably count the number of stories that acknowledge female/female violence on one hand (please count all women-in-prison movies as one finger only). This is a topic we don't like to think about because it fundamentally undermines cultural stereotypes of women as bitchy but harmless. Here we see bitchiness treated the way male aggressiveness is treated in pretty much every single action movie you've ever seen. It's deadly, important, and potentially civilization-destroying.

At the same time, Jennifer's Body also plays with the pervasiveness of male/female violence in the real world. Jennifer returns to Needy's house after her proverbial ride in Low Shoulder's van looking like a rape victim, vacant-eyed and covered in blood. She vomits up a horrific stream of black, ferromagnetic fluid, then runs out the door. In that puddle of black goo, which Needy spends all night cleaning up, we see the first signs that this ain't no girly rape revenge movie.

When Jennifer is given superhuman power by a bunch of douchey guys, she doesn't go after the guys for vengeance. Hell, she's psyched to be a god. Instead she goes after the real source of all her agony: Her best friend, who manages to have a nice boyfriend and an interesting future as a "narrative nonfiction writer" despite being a total meganerd. She's not as pretty as Jennifer, and yet Jennifer suspects that Needy is somehow, sneakily, better than she is.

This is a movie about female wrath. And it's not the clean, sympathetic wrath we saw in Thelma and Louise; it's not the trampy blankness we wanked over in Species. It's ugly, wrong, powerful wrath. The kind that builds empires and destroys towns. And men are irrelevant to this wrath, in the same way Jennifer's life was irrelevant to the guys in Low Shoulder who murdered her.

There's something deeply subversive about a movie that says women are angry, but not at men. Women have enough power now that men are hardly the issue. Now, we've got something to work out among ourselves.

I'm not sure what people are expecting when they go to see a movie like Jennifer's Body, but based on early negative reviews I'm pretty sure it wasn't this. All I can assume is that they expected something really highbrow, based on the fact that it was penned by "I have a vocab" writer Diablo Cody. Or maybe they thought it would just be long scenes of Megan Fox's tits, which would also be a letdown, since there are no tits.

Actually, that's not true. When Needy stabs Jennifer in the chest with a box cutter, Jennifer screams, "My tit!" and Needy corrects her: "No, your heart."

Jennifer's Body is in many ways just a horror trashfest, but there's also a raw, gaping wound of truth in its heart. Anyone who can take their eyes off Megan Fox's tits and look at the rage in her face will see just that.

io9: What's new about this horror film, why did it stand out to you?

Karyn Kusama: The humor comes from Diablo's vision of the world and I felt like the horror came out of the relationship. Which I thought was a really interesting idea, the idea that this toxic friendship could be the emotional foundation of the horror. A lot of times I think we watch horror movies that by default have a female character. But this movie - it's interesting to see that the so-called monster Jennifer is female, as is the heroine.

I really liked this relationship between the two girls, it's something many people experience. Was this always the foundation of the movie?

It was always supposed to be a relationship rooted in the past, rooted in childhood. And the toxic element of it developed between them as a sort of emotional codependence and role playing in which Jennifer always played the Alpha female in control and Needy was always willing to be her tagalong or sidekick and was subservient to her. I think there have been comedies and teen movies that explore that idea. But in this case that relationship is sort of realized into something pretty dark.

I really can't imagine anyone else playing that Alpha character - was Megan Fox always in mind?

She was an element to the movie very very early. Even before the producers came on.

She's pretty perfect for the role, how did you help her find her inner bitch for this character?

Well I'm sure all of us would love it if we could all find our inner bitchiness. She just relished the opportunity to have fun with that, she was very, very funny with that. But I really enjoyed working with her. She was very thoughtful, smart, very prepared. She brought a lot of humor to the role that I wouldn't have necessarily known she could do because that was something she hadn't done in Transformers.

There's been this new study out that says women watch more horror movies than men. Do you think that's accurate? What do you think about that?

I think actually women were probably always going to horror movies, we just weren't measuring it as religiously as we do now. I think it's a human condition to identify with being scared. There is something about the narrative of flight and survival that I think is very compelling for women. I find it very compelling. I don't watch all of the horror that's out there, because one, there's so much of it and two some of it is a little less emotionally engaging for me than others. I think there is something about watching women, well women and men, but often times young people fighting for their lives - it's a very compelling story. It's a way to deposit all of our anxieties about our own life. Particularly if those anxieties are more mundane but they feel like life and death. It's a way to articulate those anxieties in a safe place like a theater.

And this movie's focus on female relationships will probably bring out more female horror fans.

I feel like there have been plenty of horror movies where the main character is female. A lot of them that I really love. But this is one of those movies where the movie and the horror grows out of the female relationships. And I think that's pretty interesting.

And that relationship is pretty toxic. These two are friends but Jennifer, Megan, really goes after her friend. Can we talk about why you wanted this kind of a dynamic? Why is Jenny so angry with her best friend?

It's funny I was just talking about this with Megan the other day in another interview. And she had always approached this character as someone who was jealous of her best friend, Needy. Jealous of the attachments and the relationships that Needy has in her life. And that somehow there was some subconscious desire to take that away from her.

They dress very different as well. Small spoiler, at the formal Needy looks very 80s in a big pink dress with bad hair and make up while Jennifer has a lovely gown. Whose idea was this and why?

Diablo had always written that it was a really bad dress. By the time I was working with the costume designer I had shown her a lot of reference material, a lot of pretty terrible 80s prom dresses. The worse they got the better the look became. I always wanted her hair to be big and poofy and her makeup to be a little over-applied. I think our costume designer nailed it.

But why make them so different on the outside too?

I think the whole point with Needy was that she was an expression of some more 80s sensibility and that everyone else had been more attuned to the fashions of the times. Needy is a little more nostalgic in life, but also a little less tuned in to the relentless [fashion] magazine culture.

But Megan really was covered in blood half the time too. And the gore was pretty good.

There's a scene where she's literally scooping blood out of the carcass of one of our characters. I really wanted it to look as if she was at a fountain of youth and instead of drinking water, she was drinking blood. So I wanted it to look like she was slurping that blood and drinking it down. We could only get a couple of takes that were working because we had live rats in the scene at the same time which is a whole other absurd nightmare, especially rodents which are not highly trained animals. Meanwhile she's drinking this unholy combination of some kind of stand in for blood and corn syrup so she can ingest it. I felt like by the third take I was waiting for her to just puke into a pail. That scene was pretty painful for her because she was swallowing everything.

The side characters in this film really helped ground the movie in reality. Adam Brody was great and seriously disturbing in an off-putting way.

The great thing about Adam Brody he manages to keep things very charming and personable so it takes a while to really see the depth of his ambition and psychosis. There's a coldness to his single mindedness once he starts to reveal what his plan is and what he's done to Jennifer. So in an interesting way Jennifer gets to be the monster and he gets to be the villain.

When he looked towards the camera at the character Needy, it gave me chills.

It's funny because when we screened it and a lot of those looks generated really big laughs. And I wonder if that's just because people were nervously anticipating what's to come.

I'd bet it's also because they aren't used to seeing him that way either.

Yeah it's true, you have to get used to that the comedy is tied up with his very very bad intentions.

Jennifer's Body will be out in theaters this Friday.

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The graphic novel doesn't exactly adapt the movie, but instead works around it; we see some events in the movie from the perspective of Jennifer's victims, although we also get a prologue and epilogue from Jennifer's perspective herself. It's an interesting take on the tie-in format, and offers up a lot of potential for adding something to the movie - but, ultimately, it remains an additional part to the movie, as opposed to something that stands alone (It also seems to reveal the ending - or, at least, an ending - to the movie, which seems somewhat counter-intuitive, considering that the movie isn't released for another month. Maybe it should come with a note to skip the last chapter until you've seen the movie).

Storywise, what's on offer is a catalog of male teen neuroses and inability to see women as anything other than... well, "other" - Each narrator objectifies Jennifer, and sees her as something that would either solve some problem or magically improve their life in some ill-defined way, and the interest of the book is as much in the different ways in which each character does that (Will she cure the jock's shrunken testicle problem? Does she "understand" the introverted emo kid because she listens to the same music?) as it is in the dark comedy of high school politics that it wants to be. The problem is, the book objectifies Jennifer just as much as any of the characters; the few Jennifer-narrated sequences aside - and even then, she comes across as little more than a generic evil demon cliche - Jennifer is only in this book as a killing machine or an thing to lust over. She isn't given any depth or attention at all, and neither are any of the book's other female characters; it's really only all about the boys.

What the book becomes, then, is this odd thing where we're shown that objectifying women is wrong, but that women are also not really anything other than lust objects, killers, or plot devices of some shape or form. That's not entirely helped by the art, which goes between Frank Cho's cheesecake cover and Jim Mahfood's gloriously cartoony take in the first chapter (See top image for an example). The mix of artists and art styles helps reinforce the episodic nature of Rick Spears' writing, but not enough; Mahfood is the most extreme example of variety, and I ended up wishing we'd had more artists that took similar chances.

Despite all of this, though, there's something engaging about the book. Spears' take on the characters allows you to feel movie scriptwriter Diablo Cody's touch, but also harkens back to Kevin Williamson's work on Scream, or the movie The Faculty, and even with all the problems surrounding the book's confused sexual politics, there's something winning about not only the victims' inner turmoil, but also seeing them get dispatched in their individual manners. More than anything, though, the book achieves its main purpose without breaking a sweat - By being so confused, and leaving Jennifer (and Needy, her best friend, who plays an important role in the book later on) so vague and incomplete, it leaves me wanting to see the movie, in order to find out if there's more to this story than meets the eye. I'm just trying to work out if I should feel cheated about that or not.

Jennifer's Body is out on September 18th.

In a nutshell, this movie is exactly what it's being labeled as, A Diablo Cody Horror film. One girl's hot, the other is adorably awkward and relatable, the side characters are semi-intersting, there's an adorable puberty-stricken boyfriend, we get emo jokes at hipsters' expenses (they don't know they're laughing at themselves) and of course the extra-glib talky talk that defines a Diablo Cody movie.

It's becoming apparent that cheeseball dialog gleaned from the slang of fake teenage tongues are to Diablo Cody what sunsets and sepia tones are to Michael Bay. You know you're going to get it, no matter what you do or how much you protest. So you're either on for the ride, or get the heck off. If you can listen to Megan Fox say:

"You're totally Jell-O, you're lime green Jell-O and you can't even admit it to yourself,"

to her best friend's jealous boyfriend without digging your pencil into the side of your leg just to feel a different type of pain, then you can continue on the Diablo horror path knowing (and possibly enjoying) what you're getting. At its heart, this movie will be a litmus test for pure Cody fans — those that can hack it through the slutty girl from High School, complaining that she couldn't go to Flag's the day after losing her back door virginity and having to sit on a bag of iced peas for a day. Megan is the girl who says such things, while her blonde, innocent buddy Needy Lesnicky, played by Amanda Seyfried, is the "straight man" victim of the horror plot.

The film begins with a over-the-top-slutty Megan Fox, as Jennifer Check, beckoning her bestie away from a night out with her boyfriend to the local shit-hole pub. The place is full of students, locals, and people Jennifer has fucked or at least thought about fucking. Oh yeah, they say fuck...a lot, because you know teenagers and their swear words. In comparison when Needy gets super scared she blurts out replacement curse words "cheese fries," honest to blog.

Anyway, at said crap watering hole, Jennifer decides that they are going to sleep with the totally hot band that just so happens to be playing their terrible little town. The band is fronted by a side neck-tattooed, eyeliner smudged intentionally stereotyped Nikolai Wolf, (Adam Brody). The Megan and Adam back-and-forth was actually the cutest part of the footage we saw — say what you will about Fox's acting talents, she's learned the art of comedic timing. "Your....band....is....(ceiling eyes)...super good." I'm not sure if it was intentional, but I laughed.

So Jennifer has her heart set on becoming the next groupie, and runs off to bring back some 9/11 red, white and blue tribute shots served up by the bartender, Ms. Cody herself (irony or somethin' har har). Adam Brody then launches into a five-minute-long song that sets the bar on fire and mesmerizes young Jennifer. While the song was, for all intents and purposes, "nice," I have no doubt that it will now be a colossal hit, racing up the itunes charts and Adam Brody's lip sync video will no doubt be played over and over and over again on the youtubes.

We slowly discover that the Adam Brody band wants to get its mitts on Jennifer's body because they think she's a virgin (and as we discover, if they kill a virgin their band will continue down its path towards fame). But the hitch in the road for the next Panic At The Disco, that we all discover after Jennifer so sweetly tells us that she'd like to sex up the local Indian student because she's always wanted to sleep with a sea cucumber, Jennifer ain't no virgin. Thus, murdering her in this ritual turns her into a boy-eating demon (none of which we saw in this screening). We're left to assume most of this, when Jennifer appears in Needy's home covered in blood and feasting on her Mother's old Boston Market chicken. This is when it gets good. Jennifer spews out black vomit from the chicken, screams like a banshee and throws her best friend sexually up against the wall.

Jennifer is truly at her best when she's bad. I have to say, once I got over the initial Cody shock, I really wanted to continue watching this film. I like Jennifer all messed up, with her smile coated in fresh blood. I want to see her realize her demonic goal, to seduce and kill all the bad boys in her town, but not before the girl-on-girl kissing scene that Cody promised. And not because it's pervy, but because it's a parody or silly homage to horror — so they know you know it's stupid to have girls kissing in a flick, they just want you to know they know, DIABLO!

Banter aside, it looks like good old fashioned fun that comes complete with a soundtrack that will go out of style in three to two months.

Horror site Shock has posted the first pages from of the Jennifer's Body comic, illustrated by Jim Mahfood. The book introduces you to all the other characters in Jennifer's world, and the pages released seem to focus on a steroid injecting dim-witted jock. Let's hope he gets it first. The comic book will be released in August.

To read the entire section check out Shock Til You Drop.

UPDATE: Here's the trailer from Shock Til You Drop.

I'm normally not a fan of Cody and after watching Megan Fox allow a tiny robot to hump her leg, I'd given up all hope for both of them. Jennifer's Body looks like, dare I say it, a return to actually funny horror. Granted, I'm going to need to see a few more comedy scenes, but the vibe is there...

Jennifer's Body will be released into theaters on September 18th.

The film, written by Juno writer Diablo Cody, follows one high school kid's revenge after a couple of coeds offer up her body as an sacrifice in exchange for fame. Trouble is, they needed a virgin and they got their wires crossed. So instead of getting rich and famous, they turned Megan Fox into a man-eating demon from beyond the grave, ready for revenge. As you can see from these pictures from Empire Magazine, it's going to get bloody.

Jennifer's Body will be released on September 18, 2009. For additional stills of Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried, check out Film School Rejects.

In an interview with MTV Fox explained how it was she ended up with the taste for teenage boys in the new movie, on whose set she was photographed topless save for some silicone stickers.

"I'm sort of a zombie, but not really. I get improperly sacrificed [and it possesses me]… my character is a frighteningly vapid high school girl who's captain of her flag team."

"She gets improperly sacrificed by Adam Brody's band, who have sold their souls to Satan in order to get a record deal," Fox laughed. "And what happens when you improperly sacrifice someone is the victim gets taken over by a demon. They thought I was a virgin - and I was not a virgin."

Megan becomes possessed by a demon who needs the flesh humans to stay alive. So Megan Fox, kicking ass and possibly beating up adorable Adam Brody? Yeah, we're in. The film, written by Juno scribe Diablo Cody, will be released on September 18, 2009.

With Breathers, Browne stakes out his own radically different take on the zombie mythos, which may annoy purists but opens up a whole range of story possibilities. In Browne's world, zombies have been around for at least 100 years, and everybody knows about them. But zombie-ism is not contagious or transmitted via zombie bites, and not everybody who dies becomes a zombie. Only a tiny minority of dead people reanimate, and it appears to be totally random who reanimates and who doesn't. And the undead are able to keep all of the faculties they have when they were alive, even as their bodies tend to decay slowly unless they take in large amounts of formaldehyde.

So if you can accept that drastically different take on zombie lore, you get a wry, self-aware story told from the point of view of Andy, who dies in a car accident and then comes back a few days later after he's already embalmed. (Andy's wife also dies, but doesn't come back.) Andy has all his old memories and attitudes, but his body is horribly damaged and the living treat him like something less than human. He can't go out of the house without having people throw food at him, and his expeditions out of the house tend to wind up with him being carted off to Animal Control. (In one of the book's more random contrivances, stray zombies get locked up at the dog pound.)

The whole thing, in its early passages, reminds me of the short-lived but awesome comic A. Bizarro, told from the point of view of a bizarro duplicate of a random guy. Andy still feels like the same person, but he's been transformed in both his body and somewhat in his faculties, and nobody will accept him. It doesn't help that his vocal cords were crushed in the accident, and so he can't talk except by use of a dry-erase board around his neck. His parents have saved him from being used for medical experiments or being turned into a crash-test dummy, and they let him live in their basement, but Andy's dad refuses to acknowledge him or treat him like a human being.

The first half of the book sort of turns into zany social satire. On the one hand, Andy spends a lot of time at Undead Anonymous, a zombie support group, where the members talk in funny slogans and try to figure out how to become empowered and make the most of their unlives. (And Browne has put up an Undead Anonymous web site, complete with zombie haikus.) And then there's Andy's struggle to regain all the human rights he's lost as a result of his death and reanimation. (He can't vote, hold down a job, take public transportation, or go out after a curfew.)

The whole thing's written in a breezy style, with the decaying tongue firmly in the cheek. Like in this passage:

On rare occasions, someone actually reanimates during their funeral.

Which is what happened with Jerry.

A friend of his videotaped the whole thing and sold it to America's Funniest Zombie Videos. Jerry taped the episode and brought a copy of the video to one of the meetings so everyone could watch.

It was a typical funeral. The father standing up at the podium, speaking with conviction through his choked emotion. The sound of people crying. The casket, surrounded by photographs, closed and draped in flowrs. Then one of the arrangements slides off the casket as the lid slowly opens and you hear people gasping and screaming as chairs are turned over and horrified faces blur past the camera and the father stumbles back from the podium and shouts, "Dear God!" Then Jerry sits up in the coffin, pulls the eyecaps and cotton out from beneath his eyelids, and glances around the room, his eyes blinking.

The camera moves in closer, a full frame shot of Jerry with his cheeks raw and his head wrapped in gauze as his father wails off camera. Jerry blinks and shakes his head, looks once more around the room and down at his casket, then turns and stares straight into the lens and says, "Dude, is that my video camera?"

If you can buy into the idea of an alternate world where America's Funniest Zombie Videos is a popular program, then you end up just running with the zany weirdness.

So Andy, the hapless zombie main character, winds up falling in love with one of the other zombies in his support group, a suicide named Rita, who's sort of gothy and exciting. (Hence the "romantic comedy" part of it.) We get to see a zombie courtship, which involves a lot of grunting and hapless fantasizing, and it's sort of sad and depressing in its caricature of a regular human courtship.

The novel really takes off about halfway through, when a few things change. Without giving too much away, Andy and his friends meet a zombie named Ray, who seems to have a more independent, empowered approach to life. Ray starts feeding Andy and the others his special venison, which he keeps in jars and which tastes way better than any other food to their dulled zombie tastebuds. Andy and the gang start feeling invigorated and full of something approaching life once again, just as they also start to suspect that maybe that venison isn't really venison.

In the second half, it becomes much more of a standard zombie rampage story, and is much better for it. Our characters stop pretending to be human or trying to live according to human double standards, and meanwhile, Browne's off-kilter social satire gets cranked up several levels higher as Andy starts going on Larry King Live to promote zombie rights. The undead's existence turns out to have a whole bunch of possibilities that Andy never knew about, but paradoxically the very thing that makes him acceptable to living humans is also their biggest taboo.

Bottom line: It's a very zany Chris Moore-esque romp, which doesn't try too hard to make sense, or take itself too seriously. It gets more demented and crazy in the second half, when both the characters and the author let go of any last shreds of sensibility. It's at its strongest when it plunges into gruesome farce, with a healthy helping of undead slapstick.

I had forgotten about this until just now, but apparently Diablo Cody is producing a movie adaptation of Breathers, which could be a fun addition to the canon of films like Shawn Of The Dead and Fido. Anyway, the novel came out earlier this month, so here's your chance to get a jump on Diablo's next project. [Amazon]

Writes Cody:

Upon arriving at the Universal lot, I'm directed to an airplane-hangar-size soundstage tricked out to look like a Sleestak temple. It actually takes my breath away; I've never been on a set of such massive scale. The first thing I notice is how the production design, extravagant though it may be, manages to retain the camp charm of the original show. Rocks look like fantasy rocks, in the best possible way. Storybook moss creeps across rugged stone paths. A suspended iron cage intended for poor Holly (played by Anna Friel) evokes those great Chuck Heston-style adventure movies of yesteryear. Best of all, there's a menacing lava pit surrounded by a bay of talking Sleestak-head oracles. ''When they're turned on, their eyes glow. It gets totally Vegas in here,'' director Brad Silberling says, pleased.

How you feel about that probably depends on whether you want your Sleestak temple to get "totally Vegas," I'm guessing.

And yes, the new version of Lost, starring Will Ferrell, will be more of a broad comedy than the original. Ferrell tells ReelzChannel:

I think it's a great blend of paying homage to the show mixed with what I think could be a different genre, this kind of adventure comedy where we really use the adventure to set up the comedy and we're able to comment on these situations that you would love to see characters comment on.

[EW and ReelzChannel]