Ginger Snaps
A beautiful, coming of age movie about two sisters. Also, one of them's a werewolf.
Horror based in female puberty is a known phenomenon. From Carrie to The Exorcist to The Craft, there have been movies about the horrors inherent in female puberty since there have been horror movies. However, until Karen Walton’s Ginger Snaps, they were written by men.
Like horror about female puberty, men being scared of female puberty is pretty common. This often means that horror written by men just isn’t all that scary to women, or people who were raised as such. Experiences like, say, waking up in a pool of your own blood, or feeling like everyone’s watching you when you’re walking alone or with friends, or the thought that you could be harmed at any time are all things that pretty much all women and feminine people experience on the day-to-day or month-to-month. There have been some movies, like Alien, which made the xenomorph work the way it did so that men would feel that kind of fear, that did it right, but most didn’t.
And then along came Karen Walton and Ginger Snaps.
The basic premise of Ginger Snaps is that the older of two sisters (Ginger and Brigitte Fitzgerald) is bitten by a werewolf immediately after starting her first period at sixteen years old. Increasingly horrifying scenarios ensue. It’s also all a metaphor for female puberty and how young women are treated as they go through it.
The thing that is made horrifyingly and undeniably clear about Ginger Fitzgerald throughout the movie is that she’s scared. This horrible thing that she doesn’t understand and shouldn’t be possible is happening to her, and there doesn’t seem to be anything to do about it. Turning into a werewolf comes with a whole bunch of side effects, like growing a tail and claws, pain, and awful mood swings, to name a few. While the first item in that list may not be quite par for the course for female puberty, the last two are. This means that throughout the movie, almost no one, not even Ginger herself, will believe that Ginger is turning into a werewolf. The school nurse dismisses all of the sisters’ concerns (there’s so much blood and pain, she’s growing hair where she shouldn’t be, etc.) as normal, with that Condescending School Nurse Tone (tm) that we all know so well. In this same vein, girls going through puberty are often regarded as, if not monsters, pretty close. There are countless jokes made in pop culture about hormonal teenage girls and their yelliing, mood swings, PMS, drama, etc, as though those very same girls aren’t culturally conditioned by exactly that media to act like they’re not undergoing a painful transformation. Ginger Snaps takes this phenomenon and turns it on its head by giving the viewer two inciting events for Ginger’s transformation. The first, her period, then, immediately after, the werewolf bite. We are then left the rest of the movie to question her behavior based on those two factors. Is Ginger’s rage a result of fear about what’s happening to her, or does becoming a werewolf naturally make you angry? Would she have ended up treating Brigitte like this if not for the transformation, or would her period arriving have done that anyway? Young women aren’t given the benefit of the doubt required to have these questions asked in real life. It is assumed that they’re emotional because they’re hormonal, which is true, but what’s also true is that they’re emotional because they’re scared and hurt by what’s happening to and around them.
Ginger Snaps what written by a woman who understood what it was to be a teenage girl, but was directed by a man who did not. This means that, while the script really has something special in it, it is often at odds with the directorial style. This gives the movie a sort of odd, off-kilter sense, especially with how the Fitzgerald sisters are portrayed. To put it simply: the director thinks Ginger is the main protagonist. The writer knows it’s Brigitte.
While Ginger is in the movie’s title, and all the marketing, Brigitte is the one that does everything. She’s the Anna to Ginger’s Elsa, if you will. Brigitte figures out that Ginger is a werewolf, gets a guy to find a cure, and is the character you follow for most of the movie. She’s scared, just like Ginger, but for different reasons. She’s scared of her sister leaving her. She’s scared of dying in Bailey Downs. She’s scared of never having anyone but Ginger. And, like with Ginger, these fears are all bad and real enough for a teenage girl to have, but are amplified by the fact that Ginger is turning into a werewolf.
Ginger Snaps is a perfect example of how culturally and socially important horror is. It takes real-world problems and amplifies them to extremes that show just how scary they are. Good horror is meant to be both a reflection of and an escape from society, and Ginger Snaps does that masterfully. It shows how young women are treated in North American culture, while using the ‘werewolf transformation as a social metaphor’ trope to brilliant effect. It’s tragic, gory, and absolutely genius. Bravo to all involved.