Canada | 2000 | Directed by John Fawcett
Logline: The close bond of two sisters, obsessed with the macabre, is tested to its limits when one of them is bitten by a werewolf.
Sometimes being a girl can be such a bitch … a howling, snarling, hair-bristling bitch. It helps when you have a sister who’ll do anything to make those teething problems a little less painful for you. Ginger Snaps is up in the small pantheon of great werewolf flicks, one of my faves. Why lycanthropy isn’t as popular as vampirism in the horror community is a mystery as looming as a supermoon. I’m thinking the fetid-breathed undead have that whole immortality angle. But I digress …
The Fitzgerald sisters (Ginger, nearly 16 and Brigitte, 15) are a little unusual as neither have begun menstruating yet. Their mother (Mimi Rogers) isn’t too concerned; it will come in good time, whilst ather just looks and acts confused, utterly ineffectual. The sisters are ridiculed at school, which only aggravates their general misanthropy (hello, lycanthropy!). They are inseparable and spend much of their free time staging and photographing their own highly elaborate death and suicide scenes for a school class project.
No one seems to understand them, and that bitch Trina Sinclair (Danielle Hampton) with her damn dog, she’s gonna get hers one day! Just you wait! But fate plays a monster card when the two girls are attacked near the woods by a huge beast, and Ginger is savagely mauled. They escape only to discover back at home that Ginger’s wounds are healing at an alarming rate.
Karen Walton’s tidy screenplay plays with the notion of lycanthropy being a physical metaphor for adolescence and, more precisely, female puberty. It’s not so much the full moon to watch out for, but that 28 day cycle, the “curse”, as Ginger affectionately calls it when she and her sister notice she’s got blood on her thigh, and it ain’t from the mangled dog in the park they just found. PMT is going to play havoc with Ginger’s sensibilities. “I thought I had a craving for sex, but it’s to tear everything to fucking pieces!”
Director John Fawcett has elicited two superb performances from the two leads; Emily Perkins as “Bee” (Brigitte) and Katharine Isabelle as Ginger. Curious to note Perkins was four years older than Isabelle, and is wearing a full wig. Rogers is wryly funny as the vague, but earnest mum, Pamela, while Kris Lemche as green thumb weed dude Sam is solid. Handy that he knows a little about the properties of monskhood (aka wolfsbane), and with his illicit drug knowledge, can prepare the crushed petals into a administrable potion.
Karen Walton’s screenplay holds up really well, nearly twenty years down the track, with terrific dialogue, mostly the exchanges between the sisters (eg with the early stages of lycanthropy surging and looking for a suitable box of tampons Brigitte asks Ginger “Are you sure they’re just cramps?”, Ginger, doubled-over in pain sarcastically replies, “Just so you know, the words ‘just’ and ‘cramps’ do not go together.”). Also, it must be said, the word “fuck” is used as great punctuation throughout the movie.
While the special effects are uneven, some decent, others less so, the mise-en-scene and editing keeps everything firmly in check, and Isabelle is so charismatic and commanding in the central role, one forgets the movie’s production limitations. Ginger Snaps is a kind of twisted date flick; it pokes smart, witty fun at our adolescent woes; bullies and sexual frustration, while keeping the horror edge sharp and glistening in the fat moonlight. It’s hip without being self-conscious, and that’s a delicate balance to hold.
But why is it so many werewolf flicks are part comedy? Another mystery to me.