Ginger Snaps

You never really “invent” a story. Rather, your mind just enters the realm of the imagination and returns with something that is at some level real. Your task then is correctly manifesting it in this world. So it is with Ginger Snaps.

When Karen Walton saw the taped auditions of Emily Perkins and Katherine Isabelle, she said that they were exactly as she had pictured the characters. Despite being four years older, Perkins was cast as the younger sister Brigitte, while Isabelle was cast as the older sister Ginger.

Enough has been said about the metaphor of the werewolf, which serves to illustrate the process of growing up. It turns Ginger into a ferocious beast, that aggressively seeks out guys for sex and kills them. She tolerates Brigitte, as long as Brigitte fools the beast into believing she is planning on following into her footsteps. But Brigitte, as the heroine of the story, doesn’t.

And that’s where the analysis generally stops, because people, especially feminists, like to be polite. The problem is you’re just not doing justice to the movie when you stop at “puberty turns girls against each other”.

The problem rather, is that childhood is a period of gender segregation. Before sexual maturation, girls have “cooties”. And for the boys and especially girls who are socially awkward, that’s a relief. It is in a sense a golden age for them, before adulthood. Brigitte is in a sense blessed, because her and Ginger are not sexually maturing. They’re three years late with menstruating, don’t like normies and have no interest in boys.

Most women are bisexual. And the awkward girls like Brigitte would very much just prefer to be in the company of girls, for guys not to exist altogether. A good female friend offers them just about all they genuinely desire. For a woman to desire the company of a man, she must first feel desirable. Brigitte doesn’t feel desirable, her whole body language illustrates this, so she doesn’t desire a man’s company anyway.

Brigitte doesn’t want to grow up. And she doesn’t want Ginger to grow up. The first half of the movie, before Ginger is transformed into a werewolf is idyllic. It is like watching paradise. The girls made a pact to kill themselves before turning 16. The girls are in hell, but they are in hell with someone they love. Paradise is nothing more than to be in hell together with someone you love.

The problem in this movie, ultimately, is that Brigitte is an archetypal femcel, whereas Ginger just has a “phase”, probably reinforced by Brigitte. The way Walton went about this without having to explicitly stamp “you’re the ugly one” in a woman’s head is by just making the older woman play the younger girl.

There’s no bond that makes a woman happier than a bond with another woman. I’ve never seen it. I’ve never seen a woman as happy with a man as two women are together. Women display their emotions quite transparently and you never see a woman in a relationship as happy as you see her with her friend.

The other theme that has to be noted, is the connection between sex and violence. Sex and violence are linked at a very deep level in the human brain. You see this illustrated in the peculiar phenomenon of hunting. The boys constantly make aggressive remarks about Ginger, but Ginger enjoys it. But rather than just being a prey, she is ultimately more predatory than them. Ginger kills all the guys she has sex with, transforming into a monstrous werewolf whenever they have sex.

I feel like an old LSWM for saying this, but movies like this aren’t really made anymore. If you wanted to make a movie like this today, Brigitte would be injecting testosterone and binding her chest. Then in part two she would have a fake penis made out of forearm skin installed between her legs. And in the third film she would finally kill herself after all.