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16. Ginger Snaps (John Fawcett, 2000)
Ok, I know I have a LOT of explaining to do but for the sake of sounding repetitive, i'll explain some other time! All I will say, however, is sorry to those who have been waiting patiently for my next update. I'm extremely flattered that people even cared about my updates! So yeah, I am terribly sorry.
Joss Whedon's Buffy The Vampire Slayer often alluded to the fact that high school was hell on earth - literary what with the school being on the hellmouth. But what was even more evident was how Whedon suggested that high school was even more hellish for females in particular. Y'see, Whedon had grown disappointed and frustrated with horror films, especially the depiction of female characters.
When speaking about the origin of the Buffy concept, you'll often find Whedon saying he wanted to take the cliched 'hot blonde victim' and turn her into a kick ass action figure, turning the formula on it's head a little. With Buffy he also found the horror element in the nightmare of teenage girls (and sometimes boys) trying to figure out who they were. John Fawcett took a similar approach with Ginger Snaps, a sharp, quirky reinterpretation of the werewolf myth.
The synopsis is basically about a pair of 14-15 year old sisters, social outcasts who are attracted to the morbid and the disturbing things in life by which they pride themselves on. Then one night, the slightly older sister survives an attack from a certain big hairy beast thing whilst simultaneously commencing her ascent to adolescencse..
What's most interesting about Fawcett's Ginger Snaps is that unlike similarily themed werewolf films (Teen Wolf) it is told from a distinctively female perspective. Yes, Fawcett directed and co wrote it but I understand that Karon Walton came up with the concept and wrote a majority of the script. It's a horror film that's based on very human (ish) relationships and young girls growing up. Whedon did the same thing with Buffy, but that was television. I hadn't really seen a horror film go to the depths to show young girls in such a light.
After the attack, the films charts the next 28 days in Ginger's life. When Ginger first starts to see changes in her body, they are disturbingly similar to what every 15 -16 year-old girl would go through during adolences. But asthe film progresses, it becomes apparent that she is transforming into a big hairy nasty lycanthrope.
This is where the film gets more and more interesting. Fawcett and Walton go out of their way to use the mythical notion of werewolf transformation as a deliberating over the boundaries of "ordinary" and strange experiences of adolescences. Obviously, the parallels are striking.
The scenes that mostly affected me, however, were the increasingly deterioating relationship between Ginger and her younger sister Bridgette. Bridget's interpretation of her sister's sexual blossoming carries with it a sense of abandonment and lonliness. The earlier transformation scenes in which Ginger complains about period pains along with being checked out by the jocky high school sleaze Jason demonstrate that her sexual maturity is already breaking the bond they so once prided themselves on.
I don't know if any of you lot have read Barbara Creed's The Monstrous Feminine, but when I did film studies, we were able to link Creed's theories with Ginger Snaps, and that's how I realised how truly psychoanalytical and layered this film was. Creed's theories work by being linked to Julia Kristeva's concept of the abject. If Bridgette and Ginger and miserable and depressed human figures then they fit perfectly into Kristeva's abject theory. The abject is also considered to be a motherly figure who refuses to let go of her hold of her daughters and their bodily functions. In this case, Ginger's mother can be considered abject due to her being a paradigm of that. But then, I figured that everybody experiences abjection from time to time so I will spare you guys the lecture
I know I keep referring to Buffy a lot but I feel the parallels are impossible to ignore. Buffy also dealt with the issue with a teenager, at the onset of puberty, discovers she's 'not human'. In that sense, she is no different to Ginger and (in latter, lesser sequels) Bridgette. Sidney in Scream is also amongst the line of powerful contemporary horror protagonists who's sexuality is linked to extreme measures of violence. The irony of Scream being that it's the sexually liberated female who becomes Carol Clover's 'Final Girl'.
The million doller question in Ginger Snaps is whether or not it is a feminist picture. What do YOU guys think? Me personally, I think it is a feminist picture. I think that there are enough Freudian references and fairly explicit references to the vagina detenta to suggest that it is a feminist film, even if it was directed by a bloke. I mean, much of Ginger's aggression is targeted at males, especially ones she claims are sexually attracted to her sister. If you look at the way she kills the males, a lot of the time it's done through off-camera impalement, suggesting it's below the mid-section..
There are thousands of other reasons why I love this film and rate it so highly, but in all honesty, it would take up to an entire page. All I can say is I feel this film is fantastic in it's depiction of adolescence. Despite the mythical analogies, the film does a far better job at depicting teenage angst than that flippin' TV show where all the FIFTEEN year old characters used suspiciously long words...Dawson Creek, right? It might be the OC, I can never tell these days. Either way, they both suck.
Ok, I know I have a LOT of explaining to do but for the sake of sounding repetitive, i'll explain some other time! All I will say, however, is sorry to those who have been waiting patiently for my next update. I'm extremely flattered that people even cared about my updates! So yeah, I am terribly sorry.
Joss Whedon's Buffy The Vampire Slayer often alluded to the fact that high school was hell on earth - literary what with the school being on the hellmouth. But what was even more evident was how Whedon suggested that high school was even more hellish for females in particular. Y'see, Whedon had grown disappointed and frustrated with horror films, especially the depiction of female characters.
When speaking about the origin of the Buffy concept, you'll often find Whedon saying he wanted to take the cliched 'hot blonde victim' and turn her into a kick ass action figure, turning the formula on it's head a little. With Buffy he also found the horror element in the nightmare of teenage girls (and sometimes boys) trying to figure out who they were. John Fawcett took a similar approach with Ginger Snaps, a sharp, quirky reinterpretation of the werewolf myth.
The synopsis is basically about a pair of 14-15 year old sisters, social outcasts who are attracted to the morbid and the disturbing things in life by which they pride themselves on. Then one night, the slightly older sister survives an attack from a certain big hairy beast thing whilst simultaneously commencing her ascent to adolescencse..
What's most interesting about Fawcett's Ginger Snaps is that unlike similarily themed werewolf films (Teen Wolf) it is told from a distinctively female perspective. Yes, Fawcett directed and co wrote it but I understand that Karon Walton came up with the concept and wrote a majority of the script. It's a horror film that's based on very human (ish) relationships and young girls growing up. Whedon did the same thing with Buffy, but that was television. I hadn't really seen a horror film go to the depths to show young girls in such a light.
After the attack, the films charts the next 28 days in Ginger's life. When Ginger first starts to see changes in her body, they are disturbingly similar to what every 15 -16 year-old girl would go through during adolences. But asthe film progresses, it becomes apparent that she is transforming into a big hairy nasty lycanthrope.
This is where the film gets more and more interesting. Fawcett and Walton go out of their way to use the mythical notion of werewolf transformation as a deliberating over the boundaries of "ordinary" and strange experiences of adolescences. Obviously, the parallels are striking.
The scenes that mostly affected me, however, were the increasingly deterioating relationship between Ginger and her younger sister Bridgette. Bridget's interpretation of her sister's sexual blossoming carries with it a sense of abandonment and lonliness. The earlier transformation scenes in which Ginger complains about period pains along with being checked out by the jocky high school sleaze Jason demonstrate that her sexual maturity is already breaking the bond they so once prided themselves on.
I don't know if any of you lot have read Barbara Creed's The Monstrous Feminine, but when I did film studies, we were able to link Creed's theories with Ginger Snaps, and that's how I realised how truly psychoanalytical and layered this film was. Creed's theories work by being linked to Julia Kristeva's concept of the abject. If Bridgette and Ginger and miserable and depressed human figures then they fit perfectly into Kristeva's abject theory. The abject is also considered to be a motherly figure who refuses to let go of her hold of her daughters and their bodily functions. In this case, Ginger's mother can be considered abject due to her being a paradigm of that. But then, I figured that everybody experiences abjection from time to time so I will spare you guys the lecture
I know I keep referring to Buffy a lot but I feel the parallels are impossible to ignore. Buffy also dealt with the issue with a teenager, at the onset of puberty, discovers she's 'not human'. In that sense, she is no different to Ginger and (in latter, lesser sequels) Bridgette. Sidney in Scream is also amongst the line of powerful contemporary horror protagonists who's sexuality is linked to extreme measures of violence. The irony of Scream being that it's the sexually liberated female who becomes Carol Clover's 'Final Girl'.
The million doller question in Ginger Snaps is whether or not it is a feminist picture. What do YOU guys think? Me personally, I think it is a feminist picture. I think that there are enough Freudian references and fairly explicit references to the vagina detenta to suggest that it is a feminist film, even if it was directed by a bloke. I mean, much of Ginger's aggression is targeted at males, especially ones she claims are sexually attracted to her sister. If you look at the way she kills the males, a lot of the time it's done through off-camera impalement, suggesting it's below the mid-section..
There are thousands of other reasons why I love this film and rate it so highly, but in all honesty, it would take up to an entire page. All I can say is I feel this film is fantastic in it's depiction of adolescence. Despite the mythical analogies, the film does a far better job at depicting teenage angst than that flippin' TV show where all the FIFTEEN year old characters used suspiciously long words...Dawson Creek, right? It might be the OC, I can never tell these days. Either way, they both suck.