Homebound Werewolves
Ginger Snaps is a feminist hit, equal parts horrific and ironic. John Fawcett brought screenwriter Karen Walton on “to write the film she’d like to see.” What emerges is horror wielding some of its best tools — a certain level of genre-awareness, monster elements poking holes in our society, some parody that sinks us into the developing terror of the film.
My dog’s a pandemic dog. After applying to adopt about twenty dogs starting in November, I finally got the call one late January morning while I was teaching my students in their Zoom squares. I’d been approved for a six-month-old blue heeler. We’d do the meet-and-greet Saturday and, if all went well, I could take him home that day. He was named Cash at the time, after Johnny Cash. He came right up to me, docked tail wiggling. We worked a bit with the shelter’s trainer. Two hours later, he was on a leash and following me around our home.
Blue heelers are smart, working dogs — also called Australian Cattle Dogs, meant to herd. One day I walked him past an old barber downtown. The barber lost his geriatric, arthritic yellow lab during the pandemic and was so excited to meet my dog. He loves blue heelers. They’re so smart. His friend in California has a bunch of them, and they work on his ranch. Also, the barber used to keep a pet wolf himself.
A wolf? Did I hear him right? I only thought to say something once we were a block away.
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The opening credits of John Fawcett’s 2000 Canadian cult hit Ginger Snaps evoke fear immediately. Ginger gets impaled on a picket fence. Brigitte gobbles up pills. Ginger and Brigitte have a tea party with poison. They die again and again. Did the Fitzgerald sisters kill themselves so easily? Is this where the film is going? We learn that these deaths are staged, part of an art project the two sisters have been completing, imagining their death in various, gruesome ways, and taking photographs. Their teacher shares the slides on the projector and sends them to the guidance office, this content so disturbing.
Ginger Snaps is a feminist hit, equal parts horrific and ironic. John Fawcett brought screenwriter Karen Walton on “to write the film she’d like to see.” What emerges is horror wielding some of its best tools — a certain level of genre-awareness, monster elements poking holes in our society, some parody that sinks us into the developing terror of the film.
Ginger and Brigitte are intensely bonded. In turn of the millennium goth fashion — long coats, skirts, and layered necklaces — they glower at their classmates. They share a spooky bedroom in the basement of the house and work on “their death project,” as their mother later refers to it. While the photos are convincing, shocking, the sisters have in fact made a suicide pact, out by sixteen. They hunch and scowl through field hockey in gym class, dishing to each other on the girls they hate. Trina, the class mean girl, decks Brigitte into one of Bailey Downs’s eviscerated dogs, which somehow ended up on their playing field, and Ginger swears revenge. A beast has been stalking their safe and caring suburbs, leaving pet dogs for dead.
Their relationship is thrown into chaos when Ginger gets her period. Brigitte calls it “the curse,” and the two go out to claim revenge on Trina when Ginger, bleeding, is attacked by a beast and dragged into the woods. They flee to safety, and a boy they know, Sam, hits the beast with his truck. They get Ginger home. Her wounds start healing and growing hair. Ginger undergoes a double transformation — her first period tightly woven with her lycanthropic becoming. She shaves constantly. They buy pads, and Brigitte opts for a pack that comes with a free calendar so she can chart the date of the next full moon.
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To quote Lauren Groff, my dog goes wolf. Last semester cooped up in the house together, he got feisty during Zoom class. Wanting attention, wanting to know what to do, he developed this habit of barking whenever the phone rings or I speak on Zoom. He needs all my attention. It was just us for all those months together. Didn’t I know that?
Many things scare my dog: trucks, motorcycles, books falling off the shelf. And always I’m trying to find the line between sheltering and exposure, desensitizing and letting him know everything is okay.
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A rift opens between the sisters. Brigitte worries for her sister, but Ginger leans into it. She starts hooking up with a boy from school. She transmits the werewolf bug to him through bites or sex and comes home covered in blood after killing the neighbor’s dog, a moment that presages Jennifer’s Body (Jennifer stooped over a chicken in front of the open fridge, vomiting black sludge). And just like Jennifer’s Body, there’s something empowering to this transformation, an awakening of bodily force that Ginger relishes as her teeth sharpen and tail grows.
The movie is packed with one-liners that deepen our sense of the film’s critique. In the early days following the werewolf bite, Brigitte says, “Something’s wrong, like more than you being female.” When they buy pads, Ginger snaps at Brigitte, “Just so you know, the words ‘just cramps’ don’t go together.” They go to the school nurse to ask for advice, and she delivers details on uterine lining so precise, both sisters seem ready to barf. Discussion around their burgeoning femininity is so exaggerated — by their mother and the nurse, who are excited about Ginger becoming a woman, and by the boys at school, who sexualize them — and this werewolf story becomes one of a different kind of teenage power. Ginger gets to do something else.
The film sinks us into the story of the Fitzgerald sisters with its humor and awareness of werewolf mythology. But underneath it, something dark churns too. As Ginger evolves, Brigitte starts seeing Sam, connected to him by what they both know they saw that night in the woods. Brigitte reverse-engineers the “my friend” tactic; she tells Sam that she was bitten in the woods, that she’s changing, that everything she sees is a silver bullet to her head. Sam can tell it’s really about Ginger, but Brigitte’s tactic is alarming. Ginger embraces her changes. Brigitte fears the consequences. What will this mean for the sisters as things get worse?
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The last days of summer, my dog and I took languid walks through the North Carolina heat. In a few days, I’d be going back on campus for class. The routines he’d known would suddenly change. How would he handle this new separation?
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The film banks left into grim territory. Ginger’s transformation accelerates with the approaching full moon. Brigitte and Sam try to develop a cure, the first of which, in a wonderful moment of 2000s culture, is a pure metal belly button ring that Brigitte pierces through Ginger’s navel. But Ginger’s impulses lurch out of control. She harnesses her werewolf strength to beat up anyone who looks at Brigitte funny. In the aftermath of an attack, she and Brigitte on cleanup, Ginger says, “Look, no one ever thinks chicks do shit like this.” She’s digging a hole for a victim. Brigitte watches. “A girl can only be a slut, a bitch, tease, or the virgin next door. We’ll just coast on how the world works.”
This gives them an angle for a cover-up, but too, there’s something irresistible to Ginger’s new power. “It feels so good, Brigitte. It’s like touching yourself, you know every move, right on the fucking dot. And after, you see fucking fireworks, supernovas. I’m a goddamn force of nature. I feel like I could do just about anything.”
I was captivated through the end of the film. The sisters have ended up on opposing sides, and I was rooting for both of them. Would Ginger get cured? And if so, what would that mean for her future and her understanding of power? Would the sisters reunite through this change, in the way they saw each other? Will they renegotiate their boundaries to accommodate the ways they’ve grown apart?
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My werewolf has adjusted fine to the return to school. I’m out of the house more, but now our time home is more intentional. He has a clearer job, a better understanding of what he should do when.
Sometimes still there’s the glimmer of our intense bond. Class is moved to Zoom, he doesn’t like it. The phone rings, a glint in his eyes.
