Ginger Snaps (2000)
Directed by John Fawcett
The story of two outcast sisters, Ginger and Brigitte, in the mindless suburban town of Bailey Downs. On the night of Ginger's first period, she is savagely attacked by a wild creature. Ginger's wounds miraculously heal but something is not quite right. Now Brigitte must save her sister and save herself.
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14 films that influenced Ginger Snaps
What critics say influenced Ginger Snaps
Also echoing Dracula, the chaste Bridget pairs with drug dealer Sam (Kris Lemche), Ginger Snaps's Van Helsing.
We've seen teenage werewolves before, from Michael Landon in I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) to Michael J. Fox in Teen Wolf (1985) to Seth Green in TV's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
In “Ginger Snaps,” lycanthropy works as the same metaphor for adolescence that telekinesis did in “Carrie” and “The Fury,” though the correlations are even more direct: hair growing in strange places, uncontrollable urges, the simultaneous desire to be accepted and to revel in being an outsider.
Brian De Palma's Carrie is another antecedent in the literal sense; thematically, though, Ginger Snaps is even closer to the body-horror cycle kicked off by (Canadian) filmmaker David Cronenberg in the late 1970s (especially his downright venereal Shivers and Rabid) and mainstreamed by Ridley Scott's Alien , itself fairly aghast at the particulars of reproductive processes.
Girls can be "sluts, virgins, teases and bitches," Ginger reasons, but no one will ever suspect that girls could do something like make a classmate mysteriously disappear (obviously, they haven't seen Carrie).
Working from a lively, unsparing script by Karen Walton, Canadian director John Fawcett touches on the same unsettling feelings evoked by Carrie, which was also fueled by the intense mortification that goes along with the first signs of womanhood.
John Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps devilishly reworks the menstrual horror film genre that seemingly began and ended with Brian De Palma’s Carrie.
No horror film since Carrie has made such use of the terrors of menstruation and puberty.
Ginger Snaps owes a great debt to horror traditions-not so much to George Waggner's original werewolf picture, The Wolf Man, as to director Jacques Tourneur's and producer Val Lewton's Cat People and especially the more-explicit Paul Schrader remake of that film.
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In a nod to that phony-suicide classic, Harold and Maude, the girls are seen devising grisly modi operandi for their own demises-photographs of which form the basis for a classroom presentation that earns their teacher's scorn.
Brian De Palma's Carrie is another antecedent in the literal sense; thematically, though, Ginger Snaps is even closer to the body-horror cycle kicked off by (Canadian) filmmaker David Cronenberg in the late 1970s (especially his downright venereal Shivers and Rabid) and mainstreamed by Ridley Scott's Alien , itself fairly aghast at the particulars of reproductive processes.
Brian De Palma's Carrie is another antecedent in the literal sense; thematically, though, Ginger Snaps is even closer to the body-horror cycle kicked off by (Canadian) filmmaker David Cronenberg in the late 1970s (especially his downright venereal Shivers and Rabid) and mainstreamed by Ridley Scott's Alien , itself fairly aghast at the particulars of reproductive processes.
We've seen teenage werewolves before, from Michael Landon in I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) to Michael J. Fox in Teen Wolf (1985) to Seth Green in TV's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
It's a cinch to connect the hairy howling of adolescence with the legend of lycanthropes -- hence ''I Was a Teenage Werewolf'' and Michael J. Fox in ''Teen Wolf.''
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A gory coming-of-age tale that employs lycanthropy as a vicious metaphor for puberty, Canadian export Ginger Snaps manages to be the funniest werewolf movie since An American Werewolf in London and the darkest high-school movie since Heathers.
About a month ago I watched John Landis' An American Werewolf in London for the first time in years and gradually came to understand how and why I'd identified with it as an adolescent: after being inflicted with the werewolf's curse, David, the hero, goes through a second puberty.
Ginger Snaps owes a great debt to horror traditions-not so much to George Waggner's original werewolf picture, The Wolf Man, as to director Jacques Tourneur's and producer Val Lewton's Cat People and especially the more-explicit Paul Schrader remake of that film.