Ginger Snaps

While the concept of a rejuvenation in the werewolf-movie genre might sound a bit far fetched – and the concept of said rejuvenation taking place without recourse to Scream-style self-referentiality even more remote – Ginger Snaps achieves the near-impossible and accomplishes both. In fact, it is easily the most original horror-flick to come our way this side of Audition, with supremely pitch-black comedic dialogue, moving performances and considerable intelligence throughout.

Brigitte (Perkins) and Ginger (Isabelle) Fitzgerald are two of your bog-standard neo-Goth chicks, whiling away their teenage lives in suburbia by staging increasingly grisly versions of their own deaths and forging suicide pacts. While this is fairly atypical adolescent behaviour, the girls (aged 15 and 16) are odd in one physiological respect: neither of them has yet, as their terrifically twee mom (Rogers) euphemistically puts it, ‘become a woman’.

Unfortunately, Ginger’s timing in the matter turns out to be rather off, as her first menstrual episode only serves to attract a mysterious wild animal which has been preying until now on the area’s domesticated animals. Suddenly, Ginger finds herself going through the obligatory changes – hair where there was none, sudden interest in boys where there was none, and uncontrollable bloodlust. Her darksome little sister Brigitte, meanwhile, is distraught at the person her sis has become, and sets about researching a cure before the next lunar cycle kicks in, before Ginger infects any more of the local populace with her own lycanthropic tendencies, or before she leaves their half-chewed corpses lying carelessly around.

Immediately, Ginger Snaps is both retro and very contemporary in approach: never forgetting the well-established cinematic connection between adolescence and lycanthropy, while playing on modern anxieties such as sexually transmitted disease(s). Elsewhere, the bleak suburban setting may seem borderline comical, but Ginger Snaps is far too gritty and dour in aspect to be even faintly tongue-in-cheek, while the central relationship between the two sisters is so intense and so convincingly portrayed that their drama overshadows the inherently unconvincing nature of the material.

Rather remarkably, the film relies purely on its Heathers-for-the-nu-metal-set dialogue for laughs, instead of resorting to winking at the audience in any way. So, we get a fearsome, genuinely fucking frightening horror flick which pisses all over recent forebears such as The Craft.

Buffy, this is most definitely not.