"Ginger Snaps"

Canada. Werewolves. It's the smartest and funniest scary movie in a long time -- and a true feminist horror film.

By Charles Taylor

Oct. 26, 2001 | "Let's forget the Hollywood rules," says a character in the Canadian werewolf movie "Ginger Snaps," and the picture takes his advice. "Ginger Snaps," which was directed by John Fawcett from a clever, canny script by Karen Walton, is one of the smartest and funniest horror movies since the '80s high points of "Near Dark," "Parents" and "The Stepfather." It's not quite in a class with those should-have-been classics, but it's damn close. It's got a real emotional punch.

In a perfect world, "Ginger Snaps" would be just the sort of thing that teenagers looking for a fright fix could see at their local multiplex. Bluntly funny about the teenage black humor and death wishes that grow out of boredom, it's also just the sort of movie that gives authority figures the heebie-jeebies.

"Ginger Snaps" had the bad fortune to be in pre-production at the time of the Columbine shooting (and another school shooting in Alberta, Canada). When word got out that Canada's federal film-funding agency, Telefilm Canada, had backed the project, the Toronto Star exploited the public fear and shock over the shootings and announced that the Canadian government was funding what it derisively described as a teen slasher movie. A predictable barrage of debate followed, finally silenced by the film's release to critical acclaim, and its winning one of Canada's Genie Awards. "Ginger Snaps" was also a critical hit in the U.K., though it's only just reaching America, and in a limited theatrical release. The good news, though, is that the movie is also just coming out on DVD, so if it's not playing in your area, you'll still be able to see it.

The teenagers in "Ginger Snaps" aren't the perky and buff victims-in-waiting of most teen horror movies. Sixteen-year-old Ginger (Katharine Isabelle), with her red hair and almond-eyed, screw-you stare, and her 15-year-old sister Brigitte (Emily Perkins), sloughing around in baggy mohair sweaters and peeking out from her long black bangs like the love child of Patti Smith and Dwight Frye, are a pair of goth outcasts, despised by nearly all the other kids in their suburban Ontario high school. Cocooned in the bedroom they share (a cross between an industrial garage and a family crypt), Ginger and Brigitte wallow in their general disdain for everything around them: the classmates who torment them and whose deaths they cheerfully imagine; their chipper, flower-arranging mom (Mimi Rogers); their dull, sterile town.

Just about the only thing that rouses them is death: Their pact to kill themselves, together, while they're still young, and their school art project, a series of photos taken by Brigitte of Ginger in various and gruesomely staged deaths. (Those pictures are one of the multiple puns of the title.)

In other words, these two are the kind of kids whose "unhealthy" obsession causes parents and teachers to fret, and the kind who are immediately recognizable to anyone who didn't spend their high-school years as part of the in crowd. Ginger and Brigitte have formed such a close bond that they've effectively shut out everything else. They haven't even started menstruating yet, as if they'd found a way to transport themselves to their own gloomy Neverland.

The movie's central metaphor -- and its sick joke -- comes when Ginger does finally get her period, and is immediately attacked by a werewolf. She survives, but examining herself back at home she notices the scars have already started to heal. And there's more: Little silvery hairs sprout from those scars. The link between lycanthropy and menstruation was first made in a "Buffy" episode a few years back when Willow is explaining to her werewolf boyfriend Oz that he's not the only one affected by the cycles of the moon.

"I get a little cranky every 28 days," she tells him. 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. One of the movie's best jokes comes when Ginger is in the bathroom shaving the werewolf hair off her legs and she notices a claw growing out of her ankle. When her mother walks in without knocking Ginger pulls the shower curtains shut. Says her mom: "You don't have anything I haven't seen before."

Ginger's transformation into a werewolf also works as a metaphor for the growing pains that drive teenage friends apart. Ginger and Brigitte have nothing but contempt for the boys who lust after Brigitte's ripe, Amazonian build. But to Brigitte's dismay, the bite of the wolf puts her sister's hormones into overdrive and soon she's vamping down the school hallways in short skirts and clingy tops, flirting with every boy who looks her way.

Next page: The little werewolf hunter who could