top of page

GINGER SNAPS

A TEENAGER GETS HER PERIOD. CHAOS ENSUES.



★★★★☆ (Worth the Watch)

Director: John Fawcett

2000


Adolescence can be hell, especially when you’re from the same emo family as Daria and Jane Lane. The two sisters in Canada’s Ginger Snaps (Brigitte and Ginger), are obsessed with the sick, sad world we live in. They take fake crime scene photos for school projects, and they fetishize how they’re going to die as if they’re speaking of their future weddings. Though thick as thieves, there are fundamental differences in the two. Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) is the glamorous one, the outgoing one, the girl who’s not afraid to tell people to fuck off. Brigitte (Emily Perkins), on the other hand, is almost comically mousy. She hides her face behind her hair and scuffles around like Igor. As they dream of their demises, we know that all this bluster is about to end when they’re faced with the real thing, and the real thing arrives in the form of a dog-eating werewolf, stalking the neighborhood at night.


You’ve seen this story before, but you may not have seen it in a middle-class suburb. Before one of the sisters is attacked by the beast, she gets her period, and this ain’t no afterschool special. For these teens, the end of their childhood means the end of the world; it’s a revelation that tears their once close relationship apart (I’m guessing no one gave them a copy of Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret). The newly minted woman is angry and flailing while the other is forced to sit on the sidelines and wait her turn. When the werewolf arrives and bites the bleeding girl, the situation goes from bad to worse. The young lady must shag the first boy she sees, and she must kill, kill, kill, but there’s hope in the form of her devoted sister who reaches out to the local drug dealer (Kris Lemche) for help in finding a cure. Meanwhile, there’s a race against the clock, and a nosy mother (Mimi Rogers) who could have been part of the twist at the end, but only serves as comic relief.


Watching Ginger Snaps, you will thank your lucky stars you’re no longer this age—surviving your teenage years is a badge of honor. The teens in this film react instead of think, or rage and get hysterical. She might be a monster or…she might have PMS. Get it? Get it? Hormones clog the air at the high school, and while Ginger Snaps is ridiculously heavy-handed in comparing the scourges of pimpled youth with the transformation of a werewolf, it’s a well-made film that transcends its contemporaries thanks to sick practical effects and terrific performances. As for the emotional part of Ginger Snaps, I had a difficult time investing in our hairy sister because she didn’t really give me a lot of heart or soul before she turned. There wasn’t much to care about to begin with. All my affections were saved for the brave younger one fighting to keep the only friend she has ever known. How ironic that these two girls were just looking forward to their own funerals.





GENRES: Body Horror, Feminist-Friendly, Funny, Monster/Creature, Teens in Peril


NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s [and publisher’s] exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this website's (nicolinatorres.com) blog posts or publications to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.




Recent Posts

See All
NICOLE

NICOLE

bottom of page