Silver Screams: Ginger Snaps (2000)

I used to be friends with a pair of sisters: Sarah and Emily. They were 23 and 25, respectively, living in their parent's basement in the suburbs. They lived life in unison and I, 24 and also living in my parent's basement in the suburbs, was let in to their circle of friends, a cohort of half a dozen benign newly adult dorks who played Mario Kart, watched anime and lived in their parents' basements in the suburbs. It was a time of stasis for us, with all the mild comfort, mild frustration and mild sensations the suburbs had to offer, but there was an anxiety as well, a sense that none of this could last. Emily's fiancée was in the Army, overseas in Afghanistan, and it was understood that, upon his return, they would marry and find a place together. And what then of Sarah? Sarah and Emily lived life as a unit, a single organism with two people inside it. You never went to Sarah's house, you never went to Emily's house. You went to Sarah and Emily's house. But mutation was on the horizon and there is no mutation without pain.

Relationships are like bodies, aging, evolving, deteriorating, acquiring scars and wrinkles. A co-dependent relationship has a kind of anemia, one body's worth of blood attempting to metabolize for two. The pain of adolescence is the pain of wisdom teeth and aching flesh but it's also the pain of anxiety and shame, private moments of doubt and hopelessness as you look in the bathroom mirror and know for a fact that you are hideous and only getting worse. Our bodies never find stasis, even after puberty's completion, and the journey of discovering their fresh new biological betrayals only ends in the grave. Your back starts to ache and you ask yourself "Is this forever?" and sometimes the answer comes back to you, hissing through fangs, sharp and honest: yes. Your best friend stops laughing at your dumb impressions and you ask yourself "Is this forever?" but you already know the answer to that one too. The co-dependent relationship is built on a fallacy that things will be just fine, as long as we can stay right here, seated just like this, our bodies in this specific configuration, your head on my shoulder, my leg across yours, and don't move, if this moment can only last forever, if only neither of us grow or change, we never have to worry again. But time is coming for us all and it intends to draw blood.

Ginger Snaps (2000) is a movie about co-dependence, about puberty, about the tedious violence of suburban stasis and the people who refuse to be contained by it. But more than that, Ginger Snaps (2000) is about young women and gender as a sort of scarlet letter. It follows two goth sisters, Brigette, 15, (Emily Perkins) and Ginger, 16, (Katharine Isabelle) as they navigate their stultifying Ontario suburb, hating themselves but especially everyone else. The two despise all things overtly feminine, anything that reminds them of their Martha Stewart worshipping mother Pamela (Mimi Rogers). There may have never been a great time to be a teenage girl but the late 90's and early 00's, with their low-rise jeans, rail-thin bubble-gum-Lolita teen idols and teenage boys indulging a culture gleefully feeding them misogynist garbage like Limp Bizkit, has to be one of the worst. Brigette and Ginger reject the patriarchal framework of their world but they aren't feminists, reserving the most acid for any other teenage girl who dares show confidence or sexuality, referring to them as "basic pleasure units" and "cum buckets". Later Ginger, who is late to experience her first period, expresses revulsion at the idea of becoming one of those girls who "simps around the tampon dispenser moaning about cramps". And then, when Ginger's first period arrives and she's moaning about cramps, Brigette complains that she's "acting really girly right now". It's gender as a hostage situation. Full of bile in a stifling town that gives them no outlet, Ginger and Brigette only have each other, as laid out by their suicidal motto: "Out by 16 or dead on the scene". And it's good they do because shortly after menstruating for the first time Ginger is attacked by a werewolf. She survives, her wounds healing miraculously fast, but that's when the changes begin.

The initial concept, two teenage sisters navigating a sudden case of lycanthropy, had been kicking around director John Fawcett's head for a while. He hated most werewolf movies of the time and had good reason to. Walk into any Blockbuster in the 90's and most of the werewolves you'll find are the increasingly shitty sequels to The Howling (1981). Ginger Snaps screenwriter Karen Walton was an even less likely contributor to the sub-genre, not only not a werewolf fan but broadly disliking horror movies, particularly the portrayal of women in them. That's what made her a perfect collaborator in Fawcett's eyes and it's Walton's contributions to the script, the insight into the characters, the centering of the sister's relationship, that make Ginger Snaps (2000) what it is. Walton may not have been a fan of horror movies but she did share with Fawcett a love of David Cronenberg, and this love is quite evident in the film's structure, which deftly merges the dissolving co-dependent relationship at the center of Dead Ringers (1988) with the monstrous terminal illness drama of The Fly (1986). But where Cronenberg's work can be cold and clinical to a fault, Walton finds the beating heart of the story in Brigette, who works tirelessly to protect her older sister's secret while growing to resent her changes.

Part of why Ginger Snaps (2000) works as well as it does is because Walton is able to take the Scream (1996)-inflected post-modern approach to the sub-genre (the characters have seen werewolf movies, know the tropes, and try to work out how such a thing could actually exist) while excising the snark and cynicism you associate with the era. But what truly elevates Ginger Snaps (2000) is the remarkable performance by Emily Perkins, who completely embodies Brigette without a glimpse of vanity or affect. Brigette is the plainer of the sisters and always looks like someone is holding dogshit under her nose, in constant disgust of the world around her and the people who inhabit it. Perkins has an uncanny intuition for how little she can emote while still doing Brigette's complicated and shifting inner life justice. As her sister's keeper it's Brigette's role to downplay the mayhem left in her wake, smoothing over attacks on students, impulsive rough sex with dirtbags, dead dogs and, later, dead bodies. One of the key aspects of Cronenberg's work that Walton and Fawcett borrowed is his fondness for protagonists who start out on the edge, the fringes of society, before diving outside of it completely. Brigette and Ginger are teenage girls for whom suicidal ideation is a hobby, they're already a nudge away from falling in the deep end, and Perkins portrays Brigette's manic attempts to protect Ginger in thwarted eye contact and clenched jaws, under-reacting to the imminent collapse of her life and the most important relationship in it when around others, but allowing herself full-blown panic when it's just her and Ginger. It's a stunning performance, as powerful as any the genre has to offer, and Perkins doesn't sacrifice any of Brigette's prickly misanthropy to make her more relatable to a mainstream audience.

Ginger isn't a traditional werewolf. Savvy viewers may hear the pitch of "puberty meets lycanthropy" and assume it's a story of a girl who turns into a werewolf in sync with her menstrual cycle instead of the moon's cycle, but the transformation here is long, gradual, drawn out body horror, not a quick series of dissolves turning Lon Chaney Jr. hairy in the full moon. But part of the genius of Ginger Snaps (2000) is the ambiguity about where Ginger's "correct" puberty ends and where her "incorrect" puberty begins. Growing unwanted body hair? Hormones causing mood swings and incontrollable sexual urges? A bubbling rage that makes you want to tear things apart? Films that connect teenage tempestuousness to monstrous mutations are as old as films about teenagers themselves, with Blackboard Jungle (1955) and Hot Rod Girl (1956) almost immediately begetting the Herman Cohen double-feature of I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957). But those are highly generic films, plots stitched together from parts of highly marketable drive-in genres, Frankenstein's monsters unto themselves. And crucially, I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) is about a boy. Ginger, as a teenage girl, is under the scrutiny of the world, in constant judgment from all the horny leering boys, shit-talking girls, patriarchal male authority figures, and smothering chipper women she encounters. It's on display, on stage, that she must navigate her changing body, changing appetites. A common angst, even when your puberty doesn't involve growing a tail.

It's an easy cliche to find the trans narratives lurking underneath the flesh of body horror films, but that doesn't make it incorrect. Dysphoria can disconnect you from your body, which in turn allows you to consider it objectively, as something separate from yourself, simultaneously an object of fascination and revulsion. I don't for a moment believe that Karen Walton, a cis-woman, was trying to express something about transness while writing Ginger Snaps (2000) from 1996 to 1999, an era when those issues would be on few people's radar. But she was interested in speaking her truth and there's a lot of truth about gender to be found here, truth that has a different tenor when viewed with modern understandings of transness. The film almost suggests that Brigette and Ginger have gotten to such a late age without getting their first period out of pure stubbornness, part of their blanket rejection of everything girly. In that light, there is no "correct" puberty to be found, it is all incorrect, all horrific and unwanted, the "brownish, blackish sludge which signals the end of the [menstrual] flow" the school nurse gleefully describes arguably more repulsive than the fangs and row of canine breasts Ginger will later sprout. And later, when Ginger spreads the werewolf virus to her new boy toy Jason (Jesse Moss), during a round of unprotected backseat sex (in which Jason protests Ginger's aggressive, rough foreplay with "hey, who's the guy here?") he finds himself bleeding out of his penis in a cruel gender-swapped kind of menstruation of his own. Even Ginger's unwanted tail is phallic and not under her control, a common teen issue and one the girls address with the very trans solution of tucking and taping, with her later attempt to remove it heavy with castration symbolism. Walton is interested in the ways adolescent sex is gendered, the guy a hero, the girl a slut, but the ways she addresses these double standards, combining them with recurring images of body dysmorphia & gender dysphoria, make Ginger Snaps (2000) one of the most powerful trans narratives of its era, in any genre.

Ginger, high on her new power (both physical and sexual), takes her case of lycanthropy in stride, bouncing between denial and acceptance whenever it suits her. She's impulsive, violent, thoughtless, driven by her urges, selfish and cruel. Which is to say, she's sixteen years old. Meanwhile Brigette understands the situation almost immediately and, in her attempts to protect and possibly cure her big sister, begins to understand their relationship may have never been as equitable as it appeared. Everything must be on Ginger's terms, everything to her liking. Even before the change we see a clear dynamic that's evolved from a younger sister who has idolized and fallen under her older sister's sway. They don't always see eye to eye but when they argue, it's Ginger who gets her way. When Brigette seeks help from Sam (Kris Lemche) a young landscaper, botany enthusiast and part-time weed dealer, Ginger immediately gets judgmental and shitty, telling her sister that the only reason any guy would talk to her is to get into her pants. Ginger Snaps (2000) is the story of Brigette slowly realizing that the most important relationship in her life, and the one she even planned her own death around, was something of a sham with nothing else ready to replace it. You may think that her fledgling relationship with Sam will end up replacing her relationship with her sister, but you'd be wrong. This is not the kind of movie where two teenagers with exactly one thing in common forge an eternal love in the crucible of life-or-death stakes: when Ginger kills Sam at the end, it's an emotional blow not because of what it means for Sam and Brigette, but because of what it means for Ginger and Brigette. And Pamela is no suitable replacement either, a loving mother, but only in the least productive ways.

It's here I have to sing the praises of Mimi Rogers, who takes what is a ridiculous comic relief character on the page and makes her hilariously, heart-breakingly real. Watching an early montage of Ginger and Brigette taking photos of their staged suicides around the house, a thought may occur to you: where are their parents? The answer explains a lot. The girls' father Henry (the hilariously named John Bourgeois) is emotionally checked out, a ghost in his own home, cowering from the estrogen surrounding him. Meanwhile Pamela is indulgent but not responsive, loving but never listening. She stands as a counterpoint of femininity to her daughters, bright, chipper and demonstrating her love for her family by constantly producing extravagant desserts. But as the film goes on Rogers reveals another, more desperate side to Pamela, someone deeply unhappy and trapped, in a loveless marriage, driven somewhat mad by the expectations on her as a woman. Ginger and Brigette fled femininity, Pamela embraced it, but none of them came out the other side happy or fulfilled. When she discovers the dead body of the girls' classmate buried in the backyard she is immediately prepared to burn down the house, kill her husband, and flee the law to protect her daughters. The fact that Canada's most perfect homemaker is ready to blow up her life at the first opportunity says as much about what it means to be a woman as anything else in the movie, and it takes a truly great turn from Rogers to make this swing, from a character we spend far less time with than the sisters, play coherently.

Ginger Snaps (2000) is remarkable in a hundred ways, but it's not without it's limitations, almost all of which rear their head in the third act. The film works for as long as Ginger changes but still feels recognizably Ginger, but as she continues to mutate the bizarre creature design distances the audience from her as a character.  Ginger's final werewolf form, designed by Paul Jones under very specific instructions from John Fawcett, is not the massive hairy canine you associate with films like The Howling (1981) and An American Werewolf in London (1981), but a bizarre, slimy, fleshy thing that looks more like the phallic Xenomorph knockoff Inseminoid (1981). Even before Ginger loses her humanity altogether, the appliances on her face and mouth make emoting and speaking a challenge, rendering scenes that should feel like emotional revelations disappointingly muted. A series of stumbles, from a protracted climax that takes place at one too many locations to a poorly lit final set that renders the final confrontation confusing, mean that the film's pay-off is too little, too late. For a film as deeply emotional and gripping as Ginger Snaps (2000) so often is, it's tragic that when Brigette and Ginger finally come face to face, trying to reach some sort of understanding, both drinking from a pool of blood spreading under a dying, hyper-ventilating Sam, it's more alienating than overpowering. It should be Emily Perkins and Katharine Isabelle acting that scene together, but instead Perkins has to act with either a stunt man or an extremely ugly and confusing puppet. Perkins does truly incredible work in these scenes and with more support her tearful rebuke of Ginger, crying out "I'm not dying in this room with you!" right before accidentally stabbing her to death in a struggle, would break my heart in two instead of just in theory. Ginger Snaps (2000) is still one of the greatest horror films of it's era, but it's the final 20 minutes that keep it from a masterpiece.

But John Fawcett had bigger problems than a weak ending when it came to getting Ginger Snaps (2000) distributed. By all accounts it had a great showing at the Toronto International Film Festival, reviewing well and creating the kind of buzz that attracts major distributors. But a promising meeting with Fox Searchlight fell apart when they revealed their plans to cut out whatever language, sex, and violence was necessary to get it a PG-13 in the States. In the end it got a small, scattered indie release in it's domestic territory of Canada and even less than that from Artisan Entertainment in America, essentially ending up a direct-to-video film. But in the year 2000 there were still other ways for audiences to discover interesting movies. After a screening at a rep theater in New York City lead to a rave review by Elvis Mitchell in the New York Times, HBO bought the rights and aired it constantly, growing Ginger Snaps (2000)'s status as a cult film and eventually leading to it being a big hit on DVD. It would be followed by two sequels, Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed (2004) and Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (2004) and Fawcett and Walton would go on to far grander success with their hit sci-fi series Orphan Black, but the true legacy of Ginger Snaps (2000) can best be seen in so many of the female-driven horror films that would follow it, in everything from Jennifer's Body (2009) to Tragedy Girls (2017). Audiences understood the appeal instantly, distribution companies were slow to catch on, but the genre eventually reached the point where thoughtful female driven horror was the rule, rather than the exception. It'd be an overstatement to imply that Ginger Snaps (2000) was the virus that infected popular tastes in horror but the story of this great film and it's struggle to be seen is, at the very least, a sign of the growing pains that come with mutation.

Next on Silver Screams...Blood: The Last Vampire (2000)