How I Learned To Love Having a Tail

Ginger Snaps, Or How I Learned To Love Having a Tail

God, I want a tail. A fibrous, bony tail I can saw into with a kitchen knife, bleeding into the toilet as a terrifying metaphor for menstruation, as I rail against the vagaries of evolution….maybe I’m jumping ahead a bit, here.

Girls, remember that personal hygiene film you saw in grade school? The one the boys had to leave the room for and go play dodge ball for an hour, while we took our fledgeling steps on the path to womanhood? This ain’t that film.

Ginger Snaps is a cautionary tale about puberty and the pressures of growing up a morbid teenager in suburban Canada, steeped in the deepest black comedy. I love it! The movie begins with a class photography project two sisters, Ginger and Bridget, are working on. Scenes of progressively more vivid and disturbed deaths staged and photographed by the sisters flash on the screen. My favorite? The pitchfork through the neck. These girls have some serious special effects at their disposal.

Angry outcasts, these sisters wallow in their rage, uninterested in boys or clothes, or other peoples’ company. Their parents, all too normal – frighteningly normal – try their best to ignore just how weird and off-putting their daughters are. Until puberty strikes Ginger, the older sister, she’s content to watch over Bridget, sharing in their special sisterness. Scenes wherein their mother (Mimi Rogers) attempts to celebrate their maiden pubertal voyage with cake are painfully hilarious.

In an amazing coincidence, the very night Ginger discovers her first period, she’s attacked by a savage, many-fanged beast which chomps on her repeatedly, thrashing about while Bridget slaps at him with her camera. Ineffective as this is, the flashes repel it long enough for the girls to take off running together. They scramble across a dark road, and the great tufted monster is creamed by a van with great timing. Thus begins the nightmare.

While Ginger’s having a blast with her newfound predatorial instincts, wearing supersexy outfits, piercing body parts and chewing on the local chauvinist, she’s sickening herself by eating the neighbor’s dog and growing that bony tail we talked about. She’d always had a temper, but now, she’ll literally rip out your entrails and play “Mr. Bojangles” with them.

Metaphors stack upon metaphors – sex, drugs, puberty, rebellion, alternative lifestyles - and the movie progresses, until Bridget makes a difficult decision. You see, this movie isn’t really about Ginger. Ginger’s the catalyst. Bridget’s the real focus, wrestling with that hero’s journey, shrugging toward apotheosis while wearing that shapeless black sweatshirt. (A shout out to Joseph Campbell and his bitchin' hero's journey mythology. Yo.) Returning home. Except Bridget doesn’t return home. Bridget takes off for the Outer Bank, syringe in one hand, dead guy’s spleen in the other, hair all mussed. I love Bridget!

So to recap: one sexy chick, one cool chick, a van full of stoners, wolfsbane, one delusional yet perky suburban mother, gallons of bloody entrails, and poor dead Norman. Oh, and a werewolf or two. How can you miss? You can’t. Go see this movie!