When Ginger Snaps came out in 2000, it was unlike any other werewolf horror flick. Director John Fawcett and screenwriter Karen Walton turned the masculine subgenre on its head, focusing on an unexpected plot: a teenage girl’s period. In the film, Ginger, a 16-year-old outcast, is bitten by a lycanthrope right when she gets her period. She gains a newfound appetite for destruction and boys, while her best friend and sister Brigitte is left behind. It becomes up to Brigitte to search for a cure and stop her sister from being a danger to herself and others.
Puberty can be painful. Any young woman knows that getting your period brings plenty of physical and emotional agony. It triggers rage, changes your mental state, and it’s difficult to feel like yourself. But no film captures how challenging that transformation is like Ginger Snaps. The Canadian film became a game-changer for horror, becoming a cult-classic that opened opportunities for other feminist-focused horror flicks like Jennifer’s Body and Teeth to be made.
For the film’s twentieth anniversary, I spoke with screenwriter Karen Walton, who talked about the story’s origin, the film’s sequels, Brigitte’s queerness, and more.
Before you got involved in writing Ginger Snaps, [director] John Fawcett already had a concept for the film. How did you two collaborate on what the story would be?
We had sort of traded materials looking for something to do together. Because I was – of course, being a very, very, very new filmmaker – I was still like, “Oh, I want to make black and white art films that 32 people will see,” but I was very influenced by European cinema, and not so much by American cinema, and John was like, encyclopedic on American cinema, like Spielberg, and horror films, and all that stuff. That was really his bag, so we were trying to come up with something that we might do together, and yeah, he showed me a short film that was excellent, and I showed him my first script that I ever wrote – it was not very good.
Eventually, he just cuts me off. [He said] “I really want to do a werewolf movie but I want to do one ’cause there are some great ones out there but I want to do something special with a werewolf movie, maybe with teenage women. I was like, “Cool, I don’t know anything about that! I mean, I know about being a teenaged woman… But I don’t know what to do.”
At first I was a little hesitant, and John can be persuasive – he’s such a good filmmaker and storyteller himself, that we just kinda, yeah, sat down and started thinking, “How can we make this special?” We were working away on it, draft after draft. Ginger and Brigitte were pretty straight-forward, they were both, you know, as John would say, versions of me; I think in high school I was Brigitte, but Ginger was the girl I wished I was, to a point. So I just wrote about what it was like to be a teenage girl, which wasn’t awesome all of the time, as we all now know, and I really wanted to talk about what I really worried about, like getting your period, and stuff not working out the way it should body-wise, so I was just doing that – writing about being a teenage girl from my perspective. We weren’t running around looking for boyfriends and looking to be popular, which to me, it seems like at the time, horror films specialized in that, always some dude, and then they get in trouble, blah blah blah. That’s why I wasn’t watching so many, but I had grown up reading lots of horror, like Mary Shelley – I was over that. [Writing Ginger Snaps] really put me back in touch with the genre.
One thing I love about the script is that the dialogue feels so real compared to other horror films. I feel like the dialogue in many horror films that came out around the time of Ginger Snaps didn’t really delve deep into the characters.
Yeah, I was not a happy teenager – I moved at like 14 to another part of the country, so I didn’t have nostalgia for being 14 [laughs] I had nothing but like, remembering living in a teenage basement bedroom, scheming to get out. That was really true to my experience. I was in a strange culture that wasn’t like the one I grew up in, and I didn’t ask to be there, I didn’t want to be there. It was a suburb that looked exactly like the one in the movie, and I was just like, “How do I get out of here? How do I survive until I can escape?” That’s truly what I remember about being 15.
How did the idea of focusing on a sisterly bond come about?
[John] was like “Let’s do women.” I think in early versions, maybe even before the draft, we did treatments and stuff like that, so I think at one point they were twin sisters, but very very early on. Soon, we separated them. It was better that they were sisters. I don’t know if you know any twins, but it’s such a drag that people associate that biological phenomenon with being similar or having kooky powers and all that. We ended up wanting to avoid that, and just make two sisters, two people who lived together, ate together, went to high school together, and were going through the same things in the same place at the same time, but were essentially individuals. Getting bitten by a werewolf might be the thing that ultimately changed a relationship that was going to have to change sooner or later, because sooner or later, you’re going to finish growing up, or leave the house, and then what was going to happen?
They were sort of very codependent “best buddy” twin sisters, so it’s one of those situations where you’re sisters. You know everything about the other person. And that’s safe for a long time when you’re kids and you’re outsiders, but once you get into teen years and start trying to figure out, “How am I different? Why am I different? Who do I want to be,” that stuff gets challenged anyway. So that became the vehicle for exploring that idea of what happens when you lose your best friend growing up. So they were twins, but quickly became sisters close in age. Brigitte was the super smart, book-leaning woman, just a little bit younger, but I always imagined she managed to skip a couple of grades just to stay close to Ginger. Brigitte’s sort of like, she can’t survive this world, what would happen to her without Ginger?
This is the first time I had seen periods being the catalyst for the story in a horror film. Where did that focus emerge from?
That came about mostly because of their age, and the phenomenon itself. It’s a fact that, when I was a kid, they used to give out the little brochures from the tampon companies that would explain menstruation when you’re a pre-adolescent. The weird thing about them was that they all assumed that every single woman’s body worked the same, and that we were genetically the same, and that we were all basically… you could easily walk away with those brochures with the idea that, “Wow, you better be having your period by this date in your life, and it better be exactly like this, otherwise there’s something wrong with you.” So I did a little bit of research on what happened to young women who everything bodily is not going the way it’s supposed to, necessarily.
As they biologically come of age, and how stressful that can be. Because I found just regular coming of age biologically stressful. And it’s like, let’s make this even more difficult! But I think the technical decision started around the idea of how old these two should be, you know? I definitely wanted to direct, but I really felt strongly, but I wanted to see young women eating and young women bleeding. Not because they’d been slashed by a guy in the mask or anything like that. I wanted their problems to be what my problems were back then, which is like, “Wow, it’s really stressful when you finally got your period to figure out what the hell you were supposed to do with this whole thing.”
We didn’t have a great system. Just the anxiety of like, oh god, my friend had hers and I don’t, so now she is literally growing in more ways than one… The more I could ramp the feminine experience, the better, right down to your period, right down to whether you were shaving your legs yet or not, and why not, right down to the very fiber of your being, what people did to distinguish themselves, what kept them together in their little war against being teenage girls, and then what would pull them apart. So I did want to start the idea with a first period because it would trigger all those anxieties than happen, but they were a little older than most women were in their demographic, in their culture, for getting them, so yeah. Also the humor of a mom who’s anxiously awaiting girls to become women, because she thinks that’s something that will pull her closer than the giant rift between them, “Well we’re women now! I know this! I can talk to you!” which was another teenage experience that I remember quite vividly. Basically we’re just exploiting all my worst moments. It’s sad.
Before Ginger Snaps, werewolf movies always had male protagonists and focused on their transformation into these hairy, masculine beasts, but Ginger Snaps takes such a poignant approach to the exploration of the symbolism of transformation. How much were you and John thinking about flipping such a masculine subgenre of horror?
That was the driving agenda: how could we tell a different kind of werewolf story, a different kind of monster movie, you know? A monster movie that was grounded in emotional reality is really interesting to me, probably because I was such a big Mary Shelley fan as a kid. So I read Frankenstein, and the book was very different than all the movies and plays of it, which tend to romanticize the experience of someone who brought to life a collection of dead bodies, and the book was a little more graphic and intense and it was told from the point of view of a guy who’s watching what’s happening to both creatures.
I was really interested in that sort of thing, and John being so well-versed in horror and so up-to-date on genre introduced me to many many more movies I wouldn’t have seen, because we were working on this one together. It was very important to both of us, both of us wanted to do a monster movie that wasn’t like all the other monster movies, and on top of that John’s interest in exploring the teenage girl in horror, and my interest in reclaiming the teenage girl in horror to someone more relatable, or certainly someone more like an experience I recognize instead of the perfect outfits and the, you know, a lot of screaming in horror films… I was looking for that.
I wanted to tell a teenage girl scary movie from the point of view of someone who didn’t have all the friends in the world and wasn’t going to all the best parties. More like Carrie, or Heavenly Creatures came out then, and we used to talk about the script as Heavenly Creatures meets David Cronenberg’s The Fly. So you wanted to do a slow transformation, like The Fly, and I really loved HC, and that’s a dense story, and it’s really horrific. If you just read [about the Parker-Hulme murder case that Heavenly Creatures is based on] on the news or saw it on CNN, that would be told very differently than if you’re in the room with the girls who come to decide this is a good idea. “What we need to do is kill your mom!”
And I’m like, she’s that powerful! Because we’re with them all the way; not that we support them doing it, but we understand how they get there, and they’re really young women with understandable problems, and they’re not like other girls, and that’s the reason they’re together. That’s the reason they’re attracted to one another, they dazzle one another. One is looking to be recognized and to be adored, and the other is looking to adore someone. With Brigitte and Ginger, it’s like, these people grew up in the same household together, that’s how they work, they don’t see themselves as separate until circumstances force them apart. But it’s not a very healthy relationship, not because they’re not going to junior proms and stuff, but because they’re completely co-dependent in terms of making sense of the world around them, and that’s not necessarily healthy.
Nobody wakes up 15 and has it all figured out, and you don’t wake up 20 and figure it out, or 30… The older you get, the more you know that your best and closest friends in most cases will come and go as you mature, or fail to mature. I really wanted to look at that, all the things that happened to girls that age, but from the point of view of girls who are really proud at the beginning of the movie that they don’t belong and they don’t want to be in a club that would have them. They’re just in a unit of two, and they actually see advancing out of this world together.
I’ve watched Ginger Snaps many times over the years but it wasn’t until watching it recently that I realized that Brigitte goes through a transformation of her own, becoming more independent and discovering her identity without it being tied to Ginger. How did you approach exploring that?
To me, because I’m writing it, I know that they’re different people. I know there’s more difference than they’re prepared to admit at the beginning of the story. Ken and I took a long time just differentiating them as individuals. That’s the other mistake we make when we talk about youth and womanhood, is we assume everything is alike, and things work generally the same way for everybody. And I’m like, no, that’s not the case. We do conform, you know, we have our little group of our friends, and we have our things in common and stuff, but after that, we’re all very different, and Brigitte and Ginger were very different, and yes, it took a little bit of, not so much time, to separate them as people in my head, but it certainly does show how different they really would become.
Each one of them has a journey again. I didn’t want to do that traditional popular horror style where it’s just one girl, or it’s all the girls and one girl survives, or something. It’s not all the same, and wouldn’t some of us make different decisions? Yes we would, we’re not all the same, we’re not going to make the same mistakes, we’re not going to look at a problem the same way, and that was really important for me for Brigitte especially, because the point of the story is that if Brigitte tried to stay with Ginger and defend her when she becomes absolutely not Ginger anymore, not only would that be a lie, but she herself needs to end this relationship to survive. In order for Brigitte to ever have the kind of happiness she really deserves, she’s going to have to break up this codependency.
A scene that has always stuck with me is when Ginger attacks Jason. It’s interesting how it’s a reclamation of power from Ginger’s side, but you didn’t kill him off. Instead, he becomes a symbol of toxic masculinity while going through his own transformation into a lycanthrope.
It had to be done. We had to look at the phenomenon that we created – an unusual werewolf who doesn’t change and change back, who just changes once – just like your body and your identity growing up. For our lycanthropy, we wanted a one-way street. It’s going to end one way or another for you whether you get bit or you’re a person trying not to get bit. To do toxic masculinity at least for me was not a term I knew about back then when I was writing it, it was just a kind of guy I knew very well from that age, and they didn’t go away, so I could write about it. They’re still very relevant!
But guys like Jason, yeah, I wanted to flip the rules. In that particular scene, I think she flips him on his back in the backseat of the car, and that entire scene is a role reversal for what I was used to seeing in teenage movies at that point. It was always the dudes. He was always – consent or not – going to exert his physical power on someone, usually a woman, and I really wanted to see that turned upside down. What would happen to a guy like Jason if he met Ginger who knew she was changing but isn’t entirely aware of how much she’s changing? I just wanted to see a new version of that moment instead of the guy trying to take advantage, and the woman, because she’s not just a woman anymore, she’s turning into something quite different, flips that on him and he’s the one who suffers the damages.
Another scene that stands out to me is the ending. In a way, it feels like a traditional horror movie ending, with fatalities and the “monster” being defeated, but it’s also so deeply emotional and it’s difficult to see Brigitte coming to terms with losing Ginger.
It was really hard to write the ending. We thought a lot about that one, probably one of the last scenes we absolutely were sure of, mostly because it was really hard to decide how we wanted people to feel watching the movie as it ended. It’s truly a tragedy for these characters we care about, but that was the trick, so we care about them now. It wasn’t like, “Yay, the bad guy’s got an axe on his head and the woman with the really tight shirt went…” it wasn’t that type of movie. Who really wins here? This is horrible! This is horror! Two individuals I really care about can’t finish the movie in a positive way. It wouldn’t be true, you know? Let’s keep these characters who they really are.
When you bring it up, I automatically choke up a bit, because I still flash back to the days at my desk where I’m trying to write the final moments between Ginger and Brigitte… there was a lot of Kleenex, I’m just telling you. I knew I got it right when I was like, “Oh, this is horrible, this isn’t how I wanted this to end, but this is how it has to end, Brigitte has to survive this.” And Ginger, even if she’s still in there, isn’t going to be Ginger anymore. Like, get out! Save yourself! One of my complaints is always like, “Why do they run into the basement when they know the thing is always in the basement?”
The first Scream had come out, and made fun of all the horror movies, and I just loved it, so it was a really interesting time to be thinking about all of that, that final thing, always about how I want you to feel when you leave, when the lights come on in the cinema, when the credits start rolling in your living room, and you’re like… Well, I felt really sorry for them both. I really, really felt bad, because Ginger didn’t exactly ask for it, and it is a wild phenomenon that just hit her like a truck. Imagine being Brigitte in that. I can’t even talk about it because I honestly find it so emotional. Between you and me, I still cannot watch the last scene. I hear the music when it’s playing in theaters every once in a while, I’m standing outside listening to music, and I know that scene is coming, and I just can’t deal. I go outside and I wait until it’s over.
I can imagine. Even for me, just watching it after growing so attached to the characters, it’s very difficult to process that ending.
It’s so emotional! We tried it a few ways, like “Can they get away together?” and I’m like, “That’s not really. That’s not true.” Then you’re saying she’s dangerous but she’s not that dangerous just so we can feel better at the end of the movie? Ginger is a dangerous beast! She’s a beast. She’s not the sister who cracked all the funny jokes, like, an hour ago. That’s not what she’s become. It’s about Brigitte’s survival, and how this would happen if she didn’t do the right thing. Save yourself! That’s the moral of all my teenage romance stories. Save yourself!
She had no good options! And Ginger was like, “You can’t turn me in, I know who you’ve become.” Because Brigitte had to change as well. She had to adapt, evolve, start thinking for herself, start talking to people that she would’ve never talked to before to try to save Ginger, and that’s how she ends up being able to defend herself. It’s her or the monster.
It’s really interesting that we get to see what happens to Brigitte afterwards in the sequel [Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed] but I was surprised to see that you and John had zero involvement in the sequel and prequel. How do you feel about how the story was continued?
It’s really cool, because when we were making Ginger Snaps, we were thinking about the ideas of prequels and sequels. They’re branches of the same tree, and I feel great, because when we were starting to think about, “Hey, should we make more of these?” whatever that meant, I had nothing in mind, we all sort of agreed it would be really cool that if we ever got the chance… That’s really lucky, to make one independent film that your team owns. It’s yours! No one told us what to do, the producer raised the money themselves. It’s a real, independent Canadian film, so when you’re lucky enough to just make that, you start to go, “Well, wow, what if we get to make another one like this? What would it look like?”
And for all of us at the time, we really felt, if it had a life after this, it would be important to make room for other young talent. We’re like, “We’re getting this movie made because people are believing in us and giving us a shot, so what if we did the same thing with whatever might come after this?” So for me, that’s still the spirit of it. I’m always excited to see what people do with it, whether it’s art, doing cosplay for Ginger and Brigitte, or whatever… Whatever inspires people from Ginger, I’m just thrilled, because that’s the idea: it’s a conversation, right? You want to inspire people if they relate or get it or if they identify it. And the sequels and prequels are great! New writers and people who worked on the first film in different capacities became the directors, which was really cool, like a whole bunch of other people got a shot at expanding on this weird little sisterhood together, which I thought was really groovy!
It makes sense to open doors for new talent to get involved, but did you consider becoming involved in any capacity, even if it’s just as a consultant or producer?
In my case, I was already starting my TV writing career, and while Ginger Snaps was shooting, I would go and be a junior staff writer at a TV show [The City] all day, and at night I would get in my car and drive to the set of Ginger, which was in the suburbs outside of Toronto, so I was working on a TV show as a writer, I had a TV movie [Heart: The Marilyn Bell Story], my very first one, shooting in Montreal at the same time as Ginger was shooting.
Everything happened at once for me which was really lucky but that’s the way it goes sometimes, and by the time Ginger came out and it was big and doing so well, I had already said yes to lots of other things, so I really had to have a hard think about for the next few years, whether I wanted to continue to be one specific thing, or take advantage as a young artist at the time of trying a whole bunch of things. About the time they were doing the sequels and prequels, I was doing Queer as Folk, and all kinds of crazy cool gigs, so that’s the direction I chose to go.
At the time, I did think I really killed myself to say everything that I thought was really important to say in [Ginger Snaps]. Ginger and Brigitte – it’s like they’re real people to me. It took a good four years to really make the script great, and raise all the money to make that movie, because we did it ourselves. So after that experience, I’m like, “Wait, is this going to be another ten years where I only do this one situation?” I really wasn’t sure what I wanted out of a career in screenwriting, I was very new. So, at the time, I was like “I would like to get a chance to talk to other filmmakers like, in Hollywood, about making their horror films and get a shot at writing for big TV shows like Queer as Folk, or bending another set of rules, and challenging another set of stereotypes.”
At the time, Queer as Folk was the only openly 100% all gay cast doing gay stories on cable TV in the world, and I was like, “Wow, how do you say no to that? I’d like to do that too. I’d like other people to benefit from Ginger and meanwhile, I’d like to continue to learn and get to work with other good artists about more provocative stories that aren’t getting told and are getting overlooked in mainstream culture.”
That was really my jam. But I’m only here for a limited time on Earth, and I’d like to keep doing these kinds of stories with different artists and different topics, be they queer story telling, or more different takes on different types of horror, or be they just you know, a really good show on Sunday nights who you never heard of. I wanted to make room. Someone else could do that [Ginger] and I could do some other cool stuff.
That’s incredible to go from Ginger Snaps to Queer As Folk. I feel like they are such different projects but they both made powerful impacts on pop culture.
I hope so. We had a little hand on it – on the shoulders of giants, as they say. Two incredible experiences, first and foremost, to write stories the way I knew, at least for me. I was having a hard time finding stories written from those perspectives, and that they survived 20 years later is amazing. When people call me up like “I watched this movie as a teenager,” I’m like, “Cool! Right the fuck on! That’s why I did it!” I’ve written a lot of scripts, some went, some didn’t, that’s what writing is like, but I’m sitting down not to change the world, but to show people ideas and characters they might not otherwise get to see.
Many queer fans consider Brigitte to be a queer heroine. Do you think of her as a character who is queer?
You know what’s funny, that question I’ve been asked before, but really in the last few years have people started asking me that. Isn’t that funny? Again, stories have changed, and the way you’re reading that character has evolved. I always like to say about Brigitte, however you imagine her life after this movie is absolutely true. However you imagine. I don’t want to over describe what people could, in their hearts, put on her. But I definitely don’t think she was the straightest individual. She’s probably a little queer… Probably. I mean, she’s so far from thinking about who she would date at that point in her life, or like, wanting to be with or being in love, it’s just not happened for her yet. I suppose I wouldn’t say it isn’t possible that she’s queer.
I think a lot about how in the case of Jennifer’s Body, which seems to be inspired by Ginger Snaps, the film had a very different experience because it was a Hollywood production. The marketing of the film tried to focus on it being “sexy” rather than it being a film tackling toxic masculinity and being about a young woman finding agency. Looking back, do you think that Ginger Snaps strongly benefitted from being a low-budget film because of those issues?
Yeah, for sure. For these reasons, you can be sitting at home and you don’t know anyone at that age who likes this weird little movie, and then you go out into a different part of the world and find other people who dig the same stuff you do, and you find people who’ve seen it too… that’s the same as it was for me growing up. I used to really dig old French movies, but was anybody watching those when I was growing up? No.
Big films… I’m sure you do it too, where you see the trailer, or you see the slogan on the poster, and you see the ad or whatever, and you’re just like, “No, I don’t want to go see a movie about that.” But I can say, yeah, little films, the irony is, what kills us at the box office – like, nobody sees them they’re super obscure – is that we don’t have marketing, which is like half the budget of the movie or whatever. So yes, nobody gets to tell the audience before they sit down and watch the film what the film is. You get to experience the film the way we intended it. If I say, “Hey, come to my werewolf movie, chicks bleed, it’s about periods,” like… Who’s gonna go? It’s like, “No thanks, I’ve got one of those every single month, I’ve got my own, I’m familiar, been there done that.”
I don’t know how you’d market Ginger. I’m sure someone’s tried. You had to be really into horror and into things that the mainstream wasn’t sanctioning for you. “This is the #1 whatever this weekend.” That’s one kind of moviegoing, and another kind of moviegoing is like, cinephiles who just watch crazy weird stuff that nobody else knows about because they can, and it’s cool, and they love it, and they love to do something different. That’s what independent films offer: a story you think you know, and then rips you right out by telling it from a new perspective, or from a different culture, or attitude, or era.
But for a tiny little movie, it did really well. It debuted at TIFF, and it did really well at that debut – they added screenings and stuff. So people who just loved movies for the sake of loving movies… a lot of them saw it there from different parts of the world, they came to the festival, they saw this weird movie, they went “This weird movie!” then how it got everywhere, I don’t know, but it did.
What has it been like to see Ginger Snaps become a cult classic?
That’s really cool. but you know, you don’t sit down to make a movie thinking, “I’m going to make a cult classic.” John and I just really wanted to make a movie we would go and see. We wanted to do something that was really special and different, that our friends would enjoy. That’s the best kind of art, where you’re just trying to make something you believe in because, and if you can’t do it that way you won’t do it. So that’s where we came from back then. We weren’t trying to make some huge grand feminist theory thing. I was just telling it like it was for me.
