“I get this ache…” Ginger Snaps and the Pain of Being a Girl by Keri O'Shea

Welcome to the bleak suburbia of Bailey Downs, where the line between life and death seems unusually thin…

The first shocking clash between suburban domesticity and something unspeakably grisly happens soon after the opening credits roll on Ginger Snaps, when a mother tending to her young son discovers the remains of their pet dog in the child’s sandpit. Bailey Downs is being stalked by a rumored ‘Beast of Bailey Downs’, though no one is quite sure what it is – yet. This is the strange place where two teenage sisters, Ginger and Brigitte, are growing up, though coming of age – and all that this means – is something they’d really rather do without.

Instead, these death-obsessed girls divide their time between fantasies of suicide, photographing death scene tableaux and wishing for the demise of their popular, conventional classmates. So far, they’ve been frozen in an unusually long childhood, but Ginger and Brigitte are aware of the young adulthood which is sure to come. They know what womanhood, in particular, means – and they don’t want it. It could tear them apart. Already coping with the tribal, territorial and judgmental world of high school, where girls compete and boys spectate, the sisters’ pact, “out by 16 or dead on the scene, but together forever”, sounds far more appealing. They see rites of passage like dating as “average”, and it feels like a fate worse than death. One more thing: they are perfectly well aware that menstruation is the key, the thing that could lead to them being average, conventional, and potentially even alienated from one another. Their mother openly looks forward to her daughters ‘becoming young women’. The girls themselves dread it.

Fittingly, when 16-year-old Ginger finally gets “the curse” – a double meaning which Ginger Snaps explores at length – the girls are out at night, preparing to prank a girl in their class. It’s the last genuine (though fittingly gory) prank they’ll ever plan together. The shocking onset of Ginger’s first period takes on horrific proportions as her menstrual blood attracts the roaming ‘Beast’, a werewolf which mauls Ginger, infecting her with lycanthropy, before both girls manage to escape.

Ginger Snaps’ horror-comic focus on the menarche is both its raison d'être and its greatest achievement, making an explicit connection between a woman’s monthly cycle and the lunar cycle believed to govern lycanthropic transformation. The parallels here are clear, and even whilst Ginger’s period does drive the anticipated wedge between the two girls, the film’s unflinching treatment of menstruation – still incredibly rare in the oddly squeamish Nineties and Noughties – has fun connecting myth to material reality. Pain, physical changes and the reactions of others all figure prominently here. As Ginger’s body begins to alter, some of her symptoms also resemble other coming-of-age excesses such as hangovers and altered states, like an unholy amalgamation of milestones. The film offers a deft and often layered approach to both its supernatural and its realist subject matter. It’s strange that, until the year 2000, female werewolves were so rare in horror cinema, given those menstrual cycle parallels, but finally, in Ginger Snaps, we get a female werewolf whose transformation allows her to play havoc with the rules.

Whilst Ginger, to her surprise, initially begins to revel in her new life stage, we see that, at Bailey Downs High, the boys have very decided ideas about girls, their bodies and what’s owed to them. Though keen to push back against conventional gender norms, Ginger is fully aware of the tropes, reeling off the feminine stereotypes of “slut, bitch, tease, virgin next door” – different categories used to diminish girls. She makes it her business to disrupt those expectations, becoming briefly sexually voracious early in her transformation. When she seduces Jason, one of the worst boys from an already entitled bunch, he briefly tries to exert control over their sexual encounter, telling her to “lie back and relax”. Ginger inverts this, telling him to lie back and relax (and we are also soon able to infer that lycanthropy infection can work like an STI). Jason, battered and bruised, still attempts to spin the encounter as just another conquest, but he’s soon to be corrected on this, too.

Thing is, as Ginger soon realizes, her desire isn’t for sex after all. She just thought it was; she’s grown up on the periphery of a culture where sex is routinely referred to in savage, primal language. However, her newfound condition goes far beyond that. Not only does Ginger Snaps push back against ideas of feminine passivity, but it gives us a young woman who now actively seeks out violence. Ginger is the one who assaults and harms others, struggling to contain her newfound rage and her sexualized pleasure in that rage as she navigates school and home life. The word ‘freak’, used as a pejorative, peppers the script; it’s used by the popular kids to lay into outsiders, and both Ginger and Brigitte are frequently on the receiving end. After she gets the curse, Ginger leans into the label, actively disrupting and destroying any conventional setting or relationship she can, even when this alarms and appalls Brigitte – who is trying to help her sister, even though she’s soon horrified by her new, sadistic streak.

Brigitte’s plight when she thinks she has lost Ginger for good eventually overcomes the film’s more comic, sarcastic content. Everything she feared has come to pass: Ginger, rapacious, cruel and at liberty, no longer wants Brigitte’s love the way she always did. Brigitte is terrified of being alone, and attempts to free her sister of at least one of the ‘curses’ which have come her way. Seeking the cure for Ginger’s lycanthropy – which she does with the help of petty drug dealer Sam – is as much about resetting the old balance as it is about getting rid of the werewolf. Through all of this, the sisters’ relationship ebbs and flows, first clingy and then distant, but Brigitte has to accept a degree of autonomy from her beloved, but overbearing, older sibling. Despite her best efforts, despite her oh-so near attempts to save her sister, we never see Ginger turn back because, as the film moves into its tragic conclusion, there is no ‘back’. The film finally parts ways with its audience right at the point when any semblance of a happy ending is denied. It does a great many things across its runtime, but what Ginger Snaps gives us, as the end credits roll, is the certainty that things are never going to be okay again. Brigitte is right where she feared she’d be: alone, isolated and traumatized, left to deal with her own curse in her own way.

The turn of the new millennium was, as we now understand it, a world on the cusp of permanent, seismic change. As such, Ginger Snaps does even more than show us a tale of two sisters, navigating their way through a horror-soaked adolescence. Theirs is an analog world now lost, one where secrecy is possible in ways we can scarcely imagine today. The Beast of Bailey Downs is a local secret which goes no further; the town is never faced with a host of podcast creators wanting to investigate the phenomenon. Only a Polaroid camera is ever used to show proof of the strange creature stalking the suburbs: there’s no social media, no cellphones, no livestreaming and no video. When Brigitte and Sam try to come up with a cure, there’s no online community with the answers; they have to consult some pretty hefty history books. The world of Bailey Downs is for all intents and purposes a closed community, where broader attitudes and values may filter down and congeal, but they go no further. There’s never much of a sense of a bigger world out there, save for in Ginger and Brigitte’s flimsy fantasies of escape. Put briefly, things would never quite be like this again, making Ginger Snaps a strange and wonderful time capsule, as much as it’s a pithy werewolf fantasy.

In this time capsule, Ginger Snaps blends its supernatural elements with a bold story and an acerbic script to take an often funny, frequently grisly, but long overdue deep-dive into what it felt like to be an adolescent girl in the early Noughties. It pivots the male gaze and gives that power to two unconventional sisters, never flinching as it reveals growing up to be a messy, tricksy, traumatic journey.

Is the divide between the two girls closed at the end of the film? Is all forgiven? That, too, comes in for an ambiguous treatment, the final bold plot point in a whole sequence of them. No wonder the film was such a formative experience for many younger viewers, and no wonder it enjoys cult status now. It’s also clear to see that Ginger Snaps transformed the cinematic landscape, paving the way for a slew of feminine coming-of-age genre films, such as Teeth (2007), Excision (2012), Raw (2016) and more recently, the ferocious menstrual horror of Tiger Stripes (2023).