[Film Review] Ginger Snaps (2000)

The mood of Ginger Snaps, a Canadian indie horror film directed by John Fawcett, is established almost immediately: two offbeat teenage sisters pose for photos depicting graphic suicide scenes, from a hanging to slit wrists to a rather gruesome impaling. The nightmarish images of their faux suicides play during the opening credits, accompanied by Mike Shields's eerie score. Many of the photos are staged in the girls' shared bedroom, which is a dingy basement that they've decked out as goth as possible in their suburban home.

Their bedroom's contrast with the cookie-cutter community they live in is just one of the ways Ginger Snaps shows the tension and damage that's caused by the push and pull of opposing forces. Ginger and Bridgette are stuck in Bailey Downs, killing time until they can escape. "Out by 16 or dead on the scene, but together forever" is their mantra, lending an even darker air to their grim photoshoot. The two girls identify with each other, but they don't identify with their parents, their classmates or the townsfolk, and would gladly write them all off, if they were not unempowered teenagers. 

As close as the girls are at the start of the movie, everything changes on the fateful night when Ginger is bitten by a werewolf after getting her first period (during a full moon, naturally). Ginger's body goes into overdrive, and her sexual awakening begins. Bridgette issues a warning to her older sister: "Just say you won't go average on me." And while Ginger doesn't go average, she does set out on a path very different from Bridgette's – her lust for sex and violence quickly takes over her life. 

Ginger has a feral quality from the start; she's more of a moody loose cannon, whereas Bridgette is cautious, logical and forward-thinking. The growing gap between the two sisters is where much of the film's tension comes from. They work at cross purposes as Bridgette tries to cure her sister's lycanthropy, but Ginger (like many teenagers) appears to be at the mercy of her raging hormones. She becomes selfish as Bridgette becomes selfless – Bridgette even pretends she's the one with the werewolf problem to protect her out-of-control older sister. 

Despite the downward spiral of Ginger's transformation, there is a glimmering moment when she comes into her own. In one of the most memorable moments of the film, she comes to school in a form-fitting outfit after her late-night lycanthrope encounter. At first, she's nervous, but her confidence grows by leaps and bounds as she struts down the hall. The moment is almost visceral; it can take any viewer back to that feeling of youthful sexual confidence. Although Ginger's unveiling is a bit tainted by the werewolf blood running through her body, it's still a powerful (and empowering) moment. 

Ginger Snaps also has a vein of dark humour running throughout it, which often comes from the scenes when the sisters rub up against the more "normal" (and aggressively chipper) folks in Bailey Downs. Alarmed by Ginger's rapidly accelerating puberty, the two girls visit the school nurse. The sisters describe a "geyser" of blood and "hair that wasn't there before." The nurse throws condoms at the sisters and assures them that this is quite normal, blissfully unaware that Ginger is growing fur at that very moment. 

The girls' relationship with their mother is also a source of amusement and illustrates the "parents just don't understand" mindset of many adolescents. Their mom adorns herself in bright colors and colorful jewelry; she's the very opposite of what her daughters want to be. In one scene that perfectly shows the wide gulf between mother and daughter, she interrupts Ginger in the bath and tells her, "You haven't got anything I haven't seen before." Ginger, who had just discovered a claw growing out of her foot, tells her mother, "That's what you think.” 

Ginger Snaps functions both as a story of the horror faced by teens as their bodies metamorphize against their will and how these isolating changes make adolescents feel like outsiders, even within their own bodies. In Ginger's own exasperated words, "Kill yourself to be different, and your own body screws you!" The idea of being other or outside the norm is one of the themes horror films return to again and again; it's a feeling everyone can relate to, and it's terrifying. 

The film also shows the hopelessness of being a woman (or girl) in a toxic setting. Ginger originally revels in her sexual blossoming, but she quickly sees that there's a big difference in what society accepts from teen girls and teen boys. She despondently tells Bridgette, "A girl can only be a slut, a bitch, a tease or the virgin next door." The horror of being a woman is the constant pulse running beneath the film – from Ginger's first period to her mother's toxic idea of femininity to her own experiences with sexism – and this may be the most painful and terrifying part of Ginger Snaps.

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