Ginger Snaps

Aw-woooooooo! Aw-woooooooo!


Ginger Snaps is just a fun little nifty treasure of a film. I first heard of this film when I looked up "Katharine Isabelle", the protagonist later antagonist Ginger, on Wikipedia following her performance from a laughable rom-com film entitled Another Cinderella Story. I had developed a little crush on her and was pleasantly surprised we were going to watch Ginger Snaps in class so that I wouldn't need to download the film on torrent (though given how much I enjoyed it, and to see her again, I'm downloading the trilogy now).

I write this review with apprehension and with the utmost care because of the fact that I have to write both of my crush on Katharine Isabelle and the topic of the ultimate female abjection--menstruation--on the same page. Somehow, it just doesn't seem right to me. (Come to think about it, menstruation never was and is a sexy topic for guys. It's just plain disgusting. A fact I'd rather not know and could probably have lived through life without knowing.)

This coming-of-age werewolf story (I Was a Teenage Werewolf, anyone?) brilliantly juxtaposes the metamorphosis of puberty with the gradual transformation of Ginger to a werewolf. An interesting pair, female abjection meeting supernatural injection, the tension of growing up with these two forces provides for a situation wherein each one enhances the other. It is precisely in this mixing of these two changes that I feel most uncomfortable in that I found, though this I know not if from merely personal repressed perversion or is one that is shared by other male viewers, that the most attractive moment of Ginger's growth as a pubescent character was when she first manifested fangs and darkly more emphasized eyes from lycanthropy and had the confidence brought about by the hormonal charges of puberty. For some reason, the moment her character showing the changes for the first time when she walked through the school hall was just the epitome of her attraction. This leads me to reflect on whether the attraction arises from the normal change brought about by her changing pubescent body or the supernaturally (other) lycanthropic changes she starts to show, and whether the changes were intentionally made to be more pleasing/titillating, because if it were intended then the pleasantness of the sight of her changing under both conditions were written off as coming from within her character but if it was not in the filmmaker's intention and indeed the attraction is merely from the viewers making, then this leads to the consideration of the male perception of what is attractive for the female body (in this case, the female body is not enough, a certain danger, an external force that is beyond and other than the woman's being is necessary in making her more attractive)and its implications (picking up from case in point, that woman in herself is still deemed lacking, a fact that should not be by now). A question I am still at a loss with answers.