Ginger Snaps (2000)

Ginger Snaps is cheesy and unsubtle and a bit overlong and often silly and excellent. 

It shouldn’t surprise you to read that - I am on record as loving and being a passionate advocate for female centric horror, so this tale of two sisters - with lycanthropy as a metaphor for puberty - was perfect for me. 

It was also a fun adventure in who’s-that-guy searching, so get ready to go on a ride that won't be interesting to anyone who doesn't consume the pop culture that I do. Katharine Isabelle is wonderful as the titular Ginger, and went on to be one of many facets in my realisation of my bisexuality with her turn in American Mary years later, but there’s also some real laughs going through the cast list. The two main male stars, whose voices both sounded super familiar, both went on to be in my favourite Final Destination movie together (the third one, with the roller coaster and my celebrity crush Mary Elizabeth Winstead) - the drug dealer as the goth guy, who was also Cute Guy God in Joan of Arcadia, and the cool guy who Ginger starts seeing was immediately recognisable as the hillbilly-hating asthmatic from Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. I’d recognize that distinctive overacting anywhere! Even the director - John Fawcett is the guy who went on to direct internet darling Orphan Black! So none of that is interesting to anyone else, but I fell down an internet hole and rewatched a bunch of Final Destination death clips for about an hour.

Anyway: Ginger Snaps. It’s an ode to sisterhood and the pains of adolescence, packaged up neatly with gothic sensibilities and the tropes of a werewolf movie. It is barely out of the 90s, so naturally there are some issues with cheesiness and the werewolf SFX are atrocious, but it’s a sign of a good movie when the emotional stakes push you to not care about that at all. I loved the moments of self awareness - when I would be pulled out of the story for a moment by a character doing something ridiculous, like not telling anyone else their plan, it would be commented on and it would make sense from the eyes of the character. These are all teenagers! They even actually look like teenagers! They’re young and stupid and clouded by hormones and some of them by an insatiable thirst for murder! This movie talks frankly about periods and hormones and women being gross and women being crazed possessed murder machines. I would actually not hesitate to call this important feminism-in-horror viewing. 

I should list out my other minor problems with the movie, but don’t be dissuaded. I mentioned earlier that it feels a bit overlong, and it’s not because of the duration but rather because of the editing. There are lots of extraneous bits that were kept where we would have been better served by a little levity in darker parts, in-keeping with the rest of the movie’s balance of tone. The extended beginning feels like too little establishing for how long it takes, throwing off the pace of the rest of the movie. Also, if you have an issue with animal death in movies, I will officially warn you that not only does the dog die, all the goddamn dogs die. After a while, you have to just think “okay, we get it, they’re killing the dogs”. There's also a stretch without a noticeable raise in stakes for so long that when it comes it’s incredibly sudden and doesn’t really flow. Some parts of the movie tend to feel a little cartoonish, like when Jason (hillbilly-hating asthmatic) is cornering a child - it feels like it comes from another movie, one I would have enjoyed far less. I personally wasn't keen on the several extended sequences of girl hate, but I guess it’s an authentic teenage slice of life. Teenagers are pretty awful to each other.

When a movie makes you care about characters and uses very familiar conventions to tackle issues often avoided by their genre - let's talk about puberty and sisterhood in horror - the little things get outweighed. I had a tremendous time with Ginger Snaps, and I'll definitely be returning to it. If only for the early 00s aesthetic nostalgia.

Rating: 9/10 - None of my minor grievances detract from the fact that this cheesy, unsubtle movie is also well thought out, well executed and well rounded. It has important things to say and says them in a way that still merits hearing all these years later.