Ginger Snaps (2000) from director John Fawcett has a lot going for it. The story is fun, the characters are interesting, and I’m an absolute sucker for practical effects, which the director insisted on using rather than CGI which had really ramped up its presence in the film industry during the 80s and 90s.
The scene opens up with a young boy in a sandbox and finding the severed paw of the family dog. His mother runs into the street screaming while the neighborhood kids only pause for a second before returning to their game of hockey. We learn that there have been a string of similar pet murders. From there, the scene shifts to a pair of sisters, Ginger (16) and Brigette (15), our protagonists. They’re very close. Much of their free time is spent creating and photographing elaborate, gruesome death scenes which I’m sure many a lifetime horror fan can relate to in some way. I’m sure you can also imagine this doesn’t make them all that popular at school. They’re bullied mostly by a girl named Trina.
After a particularly nasty run-in with Trina, the girls plan a prank to replace her dog with a dead one to make her think hers was taken by whatever creature has been eviscerating the pets of the neighborhood. In the process, Ginger starts her first period and is attacked by the beast, where she ends up injured with large claw gashes across her shoulder and chest. She’s dragged home by Brigette who quickly realizes that the wounds are closing up on their own.
What follows is a series of increasingly unpleasant events as Ginger slowly transforms over the course of several days. She becomes aggressive and short-tempered and she begins displaying highly sexual behavior that she previously had no apparent interest in. A classmate ends up turning after she has sex with him. Oh, and she grows a tail.
While this is happening, Brigette is talking with Sam, a guy implied to be in his early 20s, about the werewolf issue. With how she talks, he assumes she’s the one that was bitten and hops right on helping her figure out a cure. Leaving alone how creepy it is that a guy in his 20s would be cool with hanging out with a 15 year-old, they find what they think should be a viable cure and get to tracking down the primary ingredient, monkshood.
Upon returning home, Brigette is confronted by Trina who confronts her about her dog. Ginger shows up and drags her inside the house and a scuffle ends with Trina falling and hitting her head hard on the way down. She’s dead and the girls put her body in the chest freezer just as their parents return. They don’t have time to clean up the blood and mess from Trina’s fall and instead take the opportunity to present it as one of their photography projects. Ginger quickly takes off again after a failed attempt to lock her in the bathroom, leaving Brigette to track her down. But first, she needs to figure out the cure.
Sam and Brigette put together a syringe that she ends up testing on Jason, the boy Ginger turned. It’s almost instantly successful, so she takes off to find her sister who has made her way to a Halloween party held at the school. She’s intercepted by their mother who has found Trina and instead of looking to turn her daughters in, she plans to blow up their house and run away with her girls. I think it’s safe to say most girls would love to have a mom so in their corner that they could kill someone and their mom would just go with it. She takes Brigette to the school to find her sister.
Brigette finds her after she’s mangled one of the teachers and tries to keep her contained, promising to come back for her so they can leave with their mom. Instead, Ginger ends up killing the janitor that’s been nice to Brigette in the past. By this time, she’s just aiming for whatever will hurt her sister the most after the attempt to lock her in the bathroom. In response, Brigette slashes her palm and purposely infects herself in order to regain that broken trust.
She’s knocked out by Sam and driven back to the house so they can put together another dose of the cure. This goes about as well as you would assume and Sam ends up dead while Brigette has started to change herself. There’s one last fight with Ginger and the movie ends with Brigette stabbing her in the side, closing on her laying with her head on Ginger’s fully transformed body.
There are several themes tied into the movie, but one of the biggest follows those around familial loyalty and the unbreakable bond of sisterhood. Ginger and Brigette are almost uncomfortably close. They spend most of their time together and even have a joint suicide pact. The movie then shows what can happen when one sibling’s path takes her away from her sister’s. Ginger runs headfirst into adulthood with sex and a newfound confidence both girls lacked previously.
The inciting incident of the movie, you would think, would be the werewolf attack, but I would argue that it’s what happens mere moments before. Young women starting their first menses only to transform into something monstrous is a common trope in horror. The body goes through changes a girl doesn’t necessarily know how to process. In Ginger Snaps, this trope is extended through the implication that a late start to puberty is indicative of a late start to maturity. Neither of the girls seems all that enthusiastic to start their period despite how much later than their peers they appear to be starting.
No matter whether you’re watching it for the feminist themes or just looking for a fun movie about werewolves terrorizing a small Canadian town, I can’t recommend Ginger Snaps enough. There’s a sequel and a prequel that came out one after the other and I need to find time to watch them both, but you can find the original on Shudder.
