GINGER SNAPS: A bittersweet Halloween treat

For the next two or three years at least, everything you read about the 2000 werewolf film Ginger Snaps is going to include some variation of the phrase "this is the movie that Jennifer's Body desperately wanted to be". The two films do indeed have a lot in common. Like Jennifer's Body, Ginger Snaps has an unmistakably feminist sensibility, featuring two very close, snarky, endlessly quip-y suburban teen girls who are beginning to grow apart, and the loss of their childhood bond (and many of the other horrors common to adolescence) is expressed as a bloody, supernatural horrorshow.

But Ginger Snaps is a true cult classic (while Jennifer's Body is already fading from the memory of the few who saw it) because Ginger Snaps' screenwriter Karen Walton never lets her characters toss out cute lines at the expense of credibility. Walton's kids feel very real, and that makes the film's horror much more horrifying.

Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) and Bridgette (Emily Perkins) are a pair of slouchy goth sisters who are outcasts at their high school. They love to talk about suicide and murdering their bitchy classmates, as kids will. But then Ginger is attacked by a creature, a huge and hairy beast that's not a bear or a stray dog. She recovers from the attack all too quickly, and then poor Bridgette is forced to watch her sister transform into somebody (or something) unrecognizable.

Ginger Snaps is terrifying, hilarious and heartbreaking, all at once. It's not absolutely perfect (some of that 2000-era soundtrack, for instance, sounds a little too much like music from some syndicated TV drama circa 1993) but it's damn good. But if you really love the film, do yourself a favor and skip the sequel (Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed) and prequel (Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning). The sequel is a peculiar mess that will just make you depressed and angry, and the prequel is some straight-to-DVD oddity where Isabelle and Perkins put on corsets and pretend to be Ginger and Bridgette's 19th century ancestors - who are also named Ginger and Bridgette. (It is worth noting that Walton was not involved with either the prequel or sequel.)

The original Ginger Snaps is something really special, a weird horror-comedy-tragedy that tries a lot of things and actually succeeds at most of them. But Ginger Snaps is the sort of movie that absolutely does not cry out for a follow-up, and somehow it launched an unlikely franchise that's still not completely dead. There are even occasional rumors of a TV series, as hard as that is to imagine. There are fans out there who really don't want to let these characters go, they want more Bridgette and Ginger stories in any form, and I can sort of sympthize with that impulse. But these girls have suffered enough. It's time to put a silver bullet in their franchise before they're reduced to Ginger Snaps Goes Hawaiian or Ginger Snaps in Outer Space.




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