Werewolf Winter: Ginger Snaps (2000)

So Winter has officially ended and Spring is here, but the werewolf movies continue. After all, I still have to get through the 2000s! Which brings us to the first and most famous werewolf movie of the 2000-era: Ginger Snaps.
 

All in all, Ginger Snaps is B-movie cheese at its best, but with the added bonus of late-90s/early-2000s gothic awesomeness. At first glance, the film appears to have a similar symbolic message to The Company of Wolves, as both of these movie connect the idea of the "wild wolf" to female sexuality. However, while The Company of Wolves focuses on one lone girl and her relationships with men, Ginger Snaps is mostly a story about the relationship between sisters.

The story opens by introducing Brigitte and Ginger Fitzgerald, two sisters who have a fondness for the gothic and the macabre. Ginger especially is focused on suicide and death, and gets her sister to help her photograph fake suicides for a school art project. She repeats more than once that "suicide is so us" and that the girls should die together if life doesn't get better soon. Brigitte seems more hesitant, but clearly loves and feels close to her sister and so agrees. This leads to one of the coolest opening credit sequences I've seen in awhile.

(Fun fact: Katherine Isabelle, who is known for playing Ginger,
 also played a significant vampire character in this year's
Season 4 of Being Human.  And so it comes full circle...)   

Through painfully awkward dinner-table discussion with their parents, the movie soon reveals that neither Ginger nor Brigitte, who are 16 and 15 respectively, have gotten their period, which gives their mother concern. Ginger seems thrilled to not have "the curse," however, and rejects a suggestion that a pain she recently started feeling in her back is a sign of cramps.

The movie clearly ties menstruation and the werewolf curse together very closely. Besides the fact that Ginger calls menstruation "the curse," she also finally starts her period right before getting bitten by a "mysterious creature" while she and Brigitte are out walking at night.

Again, werewolf movie symbolism is subtle...

 After being bit and scratched, Ginger begins to change. She becomes interested in boys, acting overtly sexual and near-ravenous in a way that she hadn't before. She also starts to have "strange body changes," such as growing a tail.

Just a normal part of growing into womanhood, right?

Brigitte comes to the conclusion that her sister is turning into a werewolf (pointedly mentioning, "Something's wrong. I mean, more than you just being female") and starts to count down the days until the next full moon... on a period planning calendar. Yes, this movie cracks me up.

However, I think it would be too literal to read the werewolf curse as only being about a girl becoming a woman and having to tackle sexuality and change. What is most significant about this film is actually how the change affects the relationship between Ginger and Brigitte. While pre-period (and werewolf curse) they were inseparable best friends who say they would literally die rather than be apart, Ginger's change causes her to pull away from her younger sister. When Brigitte angrily and sarcastically yells "Don't let me hold you back" at a changing Ginger, her elder sister yells back "Don't worry, I won't" as she leaves to go meet a boy (who she then passes on the werewolf virus to like an STD, which is a fun detail). It's a common narrative in real life - a teenage sister leaving the "child" world she may have shared with a younger sibling and seemingly becoming "a monster" as she becomes her own person.

And it's not just on Brigitte's side - Ginger becomes jealous as Brigitte befriends a local drug dealer, Sam. Sam plays the role in this werewolf movie usually occupied by an elder gypsy or mystic; he helps Brigitte find a possible "cure" for the werewolf infection by cooking up (like heroine) an herb related to wolfsbane. Ginger becomes furious  ("I didn't like how he looked at you!"), attacking Sam and thus transforming into her final werewolf form.

The finale of the film is actually the least interesting part, but fulfills the narrative well: Brigitte tries to make a final plea to Ginger for things to go back to normal, but when she finally realizes that Ginger is beyond that, she rebels herself and strives for her own path, screaming notably:  "I'm not going to die in this room with you!" It's the end of the plot arc for the sisters; they have become their own "monsters," separate from each other and permanently apart. I won't fully spoil the ending, but the film ends beautifully with one sister mourning for the loss of the other and their relationship.

For the record, Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed is a decent sequel, though not quite as complex and without a similarly symbolic an arc in my opinion. It's still a decent, well filmed, well written, and entertaining movie; however, I felt like the sequel was missing some of the layers of the original. If the first movie was about the relationship between sisters, the second film could be about the broader relationship between women as Brigitte is thrust into an all-women environment of a rehab clinic as she struggles with her own "change" into a werewolf. But that's a bit of a stretch. It's worth a watch if you liked the first film, but I stand by my feeling that the original film was notably better.

In the end, both Ginger Snaps films are excellent movies. At times they feel a bit "of the era" and don't date as well as the original The Howling, or An American Werewolf in London, or even The Wolf Man. But they are definitely a fun ride and the best werewolf movies I've seen in awhile.

Ginger Snaps:         4 out of 5 bites
Ginger Snaps II:     3.5 out of 5 bites