Just Cramps - Looking Back at Ginger Snaps.
In 2005, I was scouring through my local video rental store’s horror section, as per usual. My best friend and I had been dedicating our summer to starting at the letter ‘A’ and working our way through it all. I don’t think we ever quite made it because I never got to see the Warlock series. However, on that particularly muggy summer day, we were picking up a copy of the 2000 Canadian horror film, Ginger Snaps. Unbeknownst to us, having never even heard of the movie, it would shape a huge portion of our formative high school years and encourage us to explore horror that we never had before.
Ginger Snaps is about two teenage girls, Ginger and Bridgette, who rebel against their cookie-cutter town of Bailey Downs. The adults seem to be clueless about how to understand the morbid teens’ expressions of creativity allowing this film to explore the experience of a misfit teenage girl. The film continues to dive deep into the struggles of menstruation and lycanthropy all in a dark, earth toned palette, werewolf film.
This movie spoke volumes to me, a sarcastic, fuck-the-world, angry teenage girl. It takes no time for the movie to rear its’ main characters heads and their distaste for the living as a neighborhood dog is slaughtered by what the town refers to as the ‘Beast of Bailey Downs’. You’re immediately fascinated with the two death obsessed teens and their world of creating various deaths in a slideshow for a school project. This film is truly unique in every delivery, down to the cast, score, and even the gore.
Now we get to talk about everyone’s favorite part of the movie; periods. Menstruation in horror hadn’t been explored in a major way since Carrie in 1976. Both Ginger and her sister Bridgette, are late to the party when it comes to getting their first periods. The girls detest the idea of it and even call it ‘the curse’. It doesn’t help that their perky mother has been dreaming of the day her grungy daughters would blossom into womanhood. The pressures of going through your period in a 2000’s society was portrayed as finally becoming a woman, which we all know is total bullshit. Ginger Snaps does an excellent job of portraying the nasty side effects that come with periods and it’s not just cramps.
Especially for Ginger who is savagely bitten by a werewolf and now must endure the struggles of womanhood with the urge to rip everything to pieces. Ginger starts gathering attention from boys and begins experimenting with marijuana, leaving her sister feeling ostracized and even more alone than she had felt with Ginger at her side. This causes a rift and despite Ginger’s new powers, Bridgette desperately tries to find a way to cure her sister of lycanthropy.
Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins truly understand the characters they are setting out to play as this werewolf flick flipped on its head helps the viewer navigate through what it’s like to be in their shoes. Karen Walton wrote the movie stating that she hated horror films because of the negative way they portrayed women so she wanted to go against the curve. Though horror fans like myself would argue that the genre boasts in feminism, the way the women are written in this film definitely make it a strong contender in the feminist horror subgenre.
If you haven’t seen this film, please do yourself a favor and find it. If you have Shudder, it was recently put on there as well as an episode of Joe Bob Brigg’s The Last Drive In!
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