GINGER SNAPS: Horror, Genre and Kick-ass Feminism
“They don’t call it the curse for nothing” (Ginger Snaps tag line)
The film I have chosen to analyse in terms of the horror genre is John Fawcett’s 2000 film ‘Ginger Snaps’, a teen-werewolf film that deals explicitly with themes of gender, deviance, transformation, violence, body-horror and the monstrous feminine in the horror genre. The sequence I have chosen to analyse in this film is the penultimate scene before the finale, and I have chosen it because it is, in its mise-en-scene, lighting, direction etc, the most overtly ‘horror’ sequence of the film and the themes of the scene comply with my own reading of feminist themes in horror.
The sequence begins at 1 hour and 40 minutes into the film. In the first section of the sequence, our main protagonists Bridgett and Sam are hiding in the kitchen larder of Bridgett’s home, attempting to make a syringe of monkshood in order to inject and cure Bridgett’s elder sister Ginger, who has transformed into a werewolf. In the first section of the sequence Bridget and Sam enter the larder and sit down. They then begin preparing the monkshood concoction, crushing buds and using a lighter to heat the spoon. At the end of the sequence Sam suggests that Bridget, now infected by her sister, take the cure and they ‘blow’, leaving Ginger to her doom. Bridget refuses. Sam then issues the ultimate cinematic challenge to our female protagonist, saying “you can’t do this on your own,” A challenge which Bridget will rise to heroically, as this scene sees her become what Carol Clover terms ‘the Final Girl’ whom it is left to to destroy the monster (Clover, 1992:35). But for now, Bridget simply glares at Sam, the supposed hero, murderously. Sam then suggests he do the syringing of Ginger, and Bridget act as bait. To this Bridget agrees, uttering the fatal horror lines “be careful”, inadvertently dooming Sam to a violent death, as is the convention within all horror film. Sam, with the syringe, slowly pushes open the larder door.
The opening shot is a birds-eye-view medium long shot looking down into the larder from the ceiling. The camera pans across from the left to the right as our protagonists enter from a door on the right and move to the left and centre screen. This camera movement is specifically designed to ‘meet’ the protagonist’s movement in the opposite direction, creating a sense of impending collision. When the actors sit down, the camera tracks downwards, moving closer to the tops of their heads, and framing both protagonists in a tight medium shot. This action is deliberately used to heighten the sense of claustrophobia within the larder. The tightness of the ensuing shot-reverse-shot close ups of their activity as they ‘cook up’ the cure, also increases the sense of tight claustrophobia.
The framing of the opening shot is significant because in the left of the screen is a shadowed shelf covered in tined foods and cake dishes. The fact that the whole sequence is taking place in a larder reminds the audience that the events unfolding are taking place within a home, specifically Bridget and Ginger’s home. The theme of the normal and everyday mundane made strange and alien is a key theme in horror. The fact that this final confrontation between Bridget and her sister takes place within their home is highly symbolic. The camera is perceptibly unsteady in these shots, giving a strong sense that it is hand held. This gives the audience the sense that they are watching from a third person stance within the actual space of the film. The camera actually ‘look’ at what the actors are doing, looking from the spoon up to Bridget’s face, looking down at the bowl and then up to his face, etc. instead of cutting at these moments, the camera deliberately ‘watches’ the actions as a person would.
The only lighting in this shot is from Bridget’s torch, and slight overspill from the kitchen as the door is closed behind them. After that only the torch light remains, and because Bridget is holding the torch and moving rapidly, the light cast is sporadic and bright, casting at the same time ominous shadows, and brilliant white light upon both their faces and the walls. At several points the torchlight is shining directly up at their faces, giving them a very deliberate ‘spooky’ aesthetic. The use of light and dark is another key atmospheric instrument of horror.
The music in this shot is relatively subtle, beginning with rapid bass piano notes which mirror the rapid actions of the actors, but then changing to high, slow violins to increases suspense when the actor’s stop moving rapidly and remain still, listening. The music is not obtrusive and remains in the background of the sound in the shot, because the audience is encouraged to listen for any sounds of the werewolf from which our protagonists are hiding. Another cue to the audience to listen closely is the actor’s whispering. Background sound is left open to potential werewolf sounds. This is made use of when Bridget utters one of the most notorious lines in horror “What was that?” and total silence ensues as we all listen with her for werewolf sounds.
Costume in this sequence is most significant concerning Bridget, whose dowdy, almost puritanical clothing belies her true morbidity of character, and also her status as heroin within the film. Bridget’s old-fashioned clothes could be said to reflect her old fashioned conservative views of femininity, and her hatred of her own gender as being both emotionally weak and sexually victimised. Her abhorrence of all things pubescent has been clear form the start of the film, and now, as she prepares to do final battle with her sister, the embodiment of the “monstrous feminine”, her puritanical clothes take on an extra symbolic significance as she triumphs over sexual deviance. Interestingly though, as they ‘cook up’ the cure with all its obvious drug/addiction connotations, Bridget’s clothes give her a very ‘junky’ aesthetic, with her sleeves pulled up over her hands, almost like a tramp.
The second section of the sequence starts with Sam pushing open the larder door and looking out into the kitchen. Bridget watches him with baited breath, when suddenly he is grabbed by something and dragged out of the larder by the unseen werewolf whose snarling we can hear but whom we cannot see. Bridget can only cower and watch as Sam is slammed against the larder door repeatedly as he is violently attacked so violently in fact that the door splinters and the tins on the shelves are shaken off. The larder door opens and closes as Sam is attacked, giving both Bridget and we the audience horrific glimpses of the werewolf attacking Sam, but importantly, we hear more than we see of the attack, and the sounds lead us to imagine the horror we cannot see. Sam screams a final time, and silence remains, apart from the sound of Bridget’s panicked breathing. As a pool of blood seeps under the door, it creaks open, and Bridget peers out into the empty kitchen, before the door is slammed shut again by the werewolf, again we can hear its snarls as opposed to seeing the monster. Bridget turns the torch up to her face and switches it off. In the pitch darkness, we can hear the snarling of the werewolf, and then the definite sound of it moving away, then just Bridget’s panicked breathing.
This sequence is initially lit by the kitchen lights through the opening larder door, and also by Bridget’s torch. We then have the situation where we are in two different spaces during a rapid sequence of shots. Within the larder Bridget’s torch casts rapid flashes of light and dark, whilst at the same time she is lit by flashes of kitchen light. In the kitchen, as Sam is being attacked, he is lit but obscured by the bulk of the werewolf and by the cameras positioning which maintains the larder door in half of the screen. As a result the dominant light source is Bridget’s powerful torch, which shines out of the gap in the door, flashing light through it in the same way we are given flashes of the attack. The use of the torch in the final shot of this sequence is a very deliberate cliché, conforming to traditional ‘spooky’ images.
There is no music in this sequence, until the attack has ended. Then, with the shot of the pool of blood seeping under the door, the high violins fade up, perhaps to give a sense of seeping, certainly to create suspense. Then when the door swings open, the low piano notes sound to emphasise the threat Bridget is now under. When the door slams shut again, there is a short cacophony of sound to emphasise the suddenness of the action. The low rumble of the piano notes remains until Bridget turns off the torch and we hear the werewolf moving. The music stops to allow the quiet sounds of the werewolf moving away to be heard, so the audience can be sure it has gone.
The use of sound is extremely important in this sequence, which begins with an eerily loud squeak from the door as it is opened, another typical cliché from horror. The silence as Sam looks out of the door means that the audience have no cue that something is about to happen, and this serves to heighten the tension. When Sam is grabbed we hear the snarling of the werewolf but we cannot see it, only from this sound do we know its there. Sam’s screaming is also particularly effective in making the attack appear gruesomely realistic. Sam’s final scream is specifically made to sound as though it is moving away from the door. This cues the audience to think that he has been taken away by the werewolf, and also to leave us in doubt as to whether he is alive or dead. The door then swings back open with another ominous creek and relative quiet lulls the audience into believing that the coast is clear. Again when the door slams shut, the only way the audience know that it is the werewolf is by the snarling, growling coming from beyond the door. The relative absence of any other sound but Bridget’s panicked breathing, allows the audience to clearly distinguish the sounds of the werewolf outside the door, and the padding of its paws as it moves out of the kitchen. We are then left with only the sound of Bridget’s breathing, in total darkness.
This scene portrays Bridget’s penultimate confrontation with her sister Ginger, who has now completely transformed into a werewolf. Throughout the film, themes of transformation and monstrosity, what Patricia MacCormack and Jackie Stacey both term the “feminist teratology” (Stacey, 2003: 245, and MacCormack, 2004:27), have been building, from the moment Ginger was attacked, to this moment when she has lost her humanity entirely and become what Barbara Creed terms “the monstrous feminine”. Ginger now represents what Julia Kristeva considers to be, in her essay on abstraction in horror, “the abject” (Kristeva, 1982). According to Creed, “[t]he horror film attempts to bring about a confrontation with the abject (the corpse, bodily wastes, the monstrous-feminine) in order to finally eject the abject and redraw the boundaries between the human and nonhuman” (Creed, 2001:14).
Ginger Snaps is an example of what Mark Jankovich refers to as “body horror” sub-genre of horror. Jancovich also associates this preoccupation with the body in horror as relating to a “supposedly postmodern collapse of distinctions and boundaries…the monstrous threat is not simply external but erupts from within the human body” (Jancovich, 2002:6). In Ginger Snaps this body preoccupation relates specifically to the female body and notions of puberty and menstruation. Ginger’s transformation into a monster is a metaphor for her transformation into a woman, conforming to traditional negative and taboo perceptions of menstruating women as somehow unclean and threatening.
Ginger’s attack on Sam in this sequence is an example of the taboo female attacking. Ginger’s sexual transformation has resulted in increasingly aggressive and violent behavior towards men, culminating in this scene with her attack on Sam. Ginger’s taboo behavior also relates to another common theme in slasher horror, that of teenaged rebellion. As Neilsen points out “[d]uring her lycanthropic transformations, Ginger persistently refuses to obey the gendered “laws” of her small Canadian town”. Bridget realises that “Ginger’s sexuality is inextricably linked to violence and monstrosity, and that she must attempt to “rescue” her sister from her own animalistic and aggressive urges” (Nielsen, 2004: 58). This notion of “deviant desires is also explored by Stacey when she links notions of “deviant cells”, of disease and genetic deformity specifically to horror films concerned with the abject and sexual transformations (Stacey, 2003).
It is Bridget’s final task of destroying her abject sister, which also presents, in this scene, another theme of horror, the reversal of heroic roles between male and female. This scene shows the moment that Sam, the supposed hero male of the film, is actually destroyed, and Bridget, the supposed victim female, becomes the heroine. This role reversal is one of the key elements separating ‘body’/‘slasher’ horror from other forms of the genre. Bridget’s position within this film complies with Carol Clover’s statement of the “Final Girl” of the slasher horror film. In her words, “[t]he image of the distressed female most likely to linger in memory is the image of the one who did not die: the survivor, or Final Girl. She is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril; who is chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again…she alone also finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued (ending A) or to kill him herself (ending B)” (Clover, 1992:35). The scene ends with Bridget poised between these two fates.
Bibliography:
(All citation and referencing in accordance to the Harvard system)
Clover, Carol J. (1992) Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. New Jersey: Princeton University Press
Creed, Barbara (2001) The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge
Kristeva, Julia (1982) The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Quoted in Barbara Creed (2001) The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge
Mark Jancovich (2002) ‘Introduction’. In Horror: The Film Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 1- 8
Nielsen, Bianca (2004) ‘”Something’s Wrong, Like More Than You Being Female”: Transgressive Sexuality and Discourses of Reproduction in Ginger Snaps’. In Thirdspace 3/2, pp. 55-69
Patricia MacCormack (2004) ‘Perversion: Transgressive Sexuality and Becoming-Monster’. In Thirdspace 3/2, pp. 27-40
Stacey, Jackie (2003) ‘She is Not Herself: The Deviant Relations of Alien Resurrection’. In Screen, 44:3, pp. 234-250
Filmography:
Ginger Snaps (2000) Canada, Dir. John Fawcett.
