MAY 15: Ginger Snaps

            In Bailey Downs, a deadbeat Canadian suburb, something is killing the dogs. Sisters Ginger and Brigitte could care less. With the morbidity and misanthropy of young Winona Ryders, they spend their free time photographing each other in elaborate mock suicides. They are angsty and extra as hell and I love them. They loath their maturing bodies and the way the Greek chorus of skeevy boys objectify them, especially Ginger, who’s older and bustier. As the school weirdos, it’s them against the world – as Brigitte puts it, “united against life as we know it.”

            Then, one October night, Ginger gets her first period and a werewolf bite. And you can guess what happens next.

            As Halloween night and the full moon approaches, Ginger begins to transform. She grows fine, wolfish hairs over her scars, a spindly tail that wags, and pronounced canines. She gets a confidence boost, and before long she’s dressing sexy, smoking pot, and pursuing boys for unsatisfying sex. Her mom thinks it’s just puberty – Brigitte, the younger of the sisters, will have her turn soon enough. But Brigitte knows better. With the help of Sam, the friendly neighborhood drug dealer who, amazingly, sells weed in a yellow van outside the high school and grows his stuff in a pot-leaf-emblazoned back room at the local greenhouse, and who caught a glimpse of the original werewolf, Brigitte hatches a plan to cure Ginger of her lycanthropy. But Ginger isn’t so sure she wants to be cured.

I heart her

            Based on the marketing, I was expecting something extremely 2000s, lots of snappy music-video-style cuts and dated one-liners, and a horror-comedy tone similar to its successor, Jennifer’s Body. Instead, Ginger Snaps goes to darker places. Ginger and Brigitte are bitter, sarcastic, and foul-mouthed; every inch the ‘00s goth teens. Their wit and over-the-top angst, plus their all-or-nothing bond with one another, is captivating, the kind of characters it sucks to say goodbye to when the movie’s over. For all the moments of comic relief, like the girls’ delightfully oblivious mom, this is no comedy. It’s not that the tone is grimdark – this isn’t the Evil Dead remake from week one – but rather Ginger’s horror and confusion at her metamorphosis, and Brigitte’s terror as her sister slips away, is always front and center. Even their ditzy mom has surprising depth, as she blames herself for her daughters’ increasingly strange behavior. The violence goes there, from the opening scenes of ripped-apart doggies to Ginger’s increasingly brutal tendencies. And the ending, well let’s just say it’s not a happy or a cathartic one.  

            I’d heard a lot of buzz about Ginger Snaps as an early horror movie to center teenage girl protagonists and the relationships between them, while featuring a sympathetic female monster. Since then, there have been a lot of those movies. Jennifer’s Body, Raw, even my other Friday movies The Lure and Tragedy Girls, all follow Ginger Snaps’ template and have invited comparisons to the earlier film, Raw especially. So I wondered, having seen all these other films that took on similar subject matter, would Ginger Snaps still matter, or would it be a snooze. I was blown away. Other than The Lure, which is so specifically a movie made for me that comparison is hardly fair, Ginger Snaps is far and away the best film of this cycle. It has such a strong sense of who its girls are – to the people around them, to each other, to themselves – and that never gets lost in its own cleverness. Its characters are fully realized, and a movie like this lives and dies on its characters.

Ginger and Brigitte are messy and vibrant, kind of terrible but kind of amazing, quotable, absurd, so very themselves. The arc of their sisterhood, as it falls apart but can never disintegrate, is the backbone to all the film’s violence and drama and measured excess. It’s an original, and still the best.

Ginger's wolfy make-over

Vibecheck: A mood-board for The Craft but grotty and, uh, better (don’t @ me!)

Scare Factor: Ginger Snaps keeps its werewolf in the shadows at the beginning – all the scarier – before unveiling its big special effects transformation at the end. And I wouldn’t say it’s realistic necessarily, but it is unnerving. Meanwhile, there are tense chase scenes, helpings of body horror, and plenty of gore. Dog-lovers, proceed with caution.

Pairs Well With: I rattled off a whole list up there of Ginger Snaps’ followers, but may I add Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a contemporary show that is this if it breathed helium and got all peppy, but still kept some of the low-rent aesthetic and the occasional breath of sleaze. It’s an interesting comparison of two snapshots of the late-‘90s / early-‘00s and what the teen girl meant to horror.

But how gay is it?: You know, sometimes a movie comes around, and it’s just gay. Is it the body horror? The teen drama? The witchy goth vibes of Ginger and Brigitte’s whole deal? Ginger’s disdain for boys? Menstruation? Look, if Carrie is gay than this is gay too. Don’t blame me. I didn’t make the rules.

Girlfriend’s Corner: I almost watched this because Sara promised it would be peak early-2000s cheese. Glad I didn’t take her up on it! I don’t want to see teenage girls die, or kill others! That is bad.