[Editorial] Exploring Womanhood Through Ginger Snaps Back 2: Unleashed

If I had to watch one horror movie on repeat for the rest of my life, it would be Ginger Snaps (2000). As a teenage girl, Ginger Snaps came into my life at the perfect time. Not only did it satisfy my love of horror, but it delved into the experience of a teenage girl in a way that typical teen movies or TV dramas just weren’t capable of doing. It showed the dark and dirty side to growing up, getting your period, losing your virginity, and dealing with the conflicting swirl of emotions inside your head. 

Ginger Snaps gets a lot of love in the horror community, but the movie is just the first in a trilogy that explores the lives of the Fitzgerald sisters throughout the years, including a prequel set in the 1800s. While Ginger Snaps may be the perfect movie for exploring your teenage years, the sequel, Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed (2004), looks at a further range of womanhood experiences, without limiting them to puberty. It takes the themes of the first movie, and expands on them, allowing Brigitte to grow up and discover a whole new selection of problems she has to face. 

Set soon after the events of Ginger Snaps, Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed follows Brigitte in the wake of her sister’s death. Brigitte infected herself with Ginger’s blood as proof of their love near the end of the first movie, but this means she’s left trying to stave off the infection by constantly injecting monkshood. While the monkshood seems to slow down the wolf transformation, it’s proving less effective every time Brigitte uses it, meaning she’s running out of time to find a solution to her problem. 

This discovery must have been quite a blow to Brigitte, who thought that monkshood would save her sister in the first film. After injecting Jason, a boy infected by Ginger, it seemed to cure him in an instant. And even though Brigitte was armed with monkshood in the final showdown with her sister, she ended up stabbing her to death instead. However, it now turns out that the monkshood wouldn’t have worked after all, and Ginger was always doomed to turn into a wolf - a fate that now awaits Brigitte as well. 

This could be a nod to the inevitability of going through puberty, growing up, and being thrown into adulthood. Though they both took different paths, both sisters end up hurtling towards the same fate, because there’s nothing they can do to stop it. The werewolf side of this fate is explored in Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (2004), where the sisters’ ancestors also find themselves infected by werewolves, but it also shows that no matter when you grow up, being a teenager is a bit rubbish. 

While Ginger adapted to her situation and tried to make the best of the changes happening on both the inside and the outside, Brigitte tries to fight the process a lot more. However, she knows it’s inevitable, and in the end, there’s nothing she can do to prevent herself from changing. 

Ginger appears to Brigitte in this film as a ghostly hallucination, taunting her sister about what’s to come and how there’s no escape. Ginger is keen for Brigitte to accept her fate, and even though she’s merely a product of Brigitte’s trauma and loneliness, she’s the expert on it all having already gone through the whole wolf puberty process. 

Another topic that Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed explores particularly well is the topic of men, objectification, and sexual pressures. The main threat that Brigitte faces, apart from turning into a wolf herself, is the male werewolf who is stalking her. Brigitte is constantly on the run because she can only escape the male wolf for so long before he tracks her down. Brigitte confirms that the wolf doesn’t want to harm her, but instead wants to mate with her, knowing that she is on the verge of turning herself. 

In the first movie, Brigitte is overlooked by the boys at her school because of her plainness, the way she dresses, and the fact that everyone seems to prefer Ginger over her anyway. However, the minute she reaches sexual wolf maturity, she literally cannot get rid of the male wolf stalking her. He feels entitled to Brigitte and her body, without seeking her consent in the situation. 

However, it’s not just the wolves who act like this, as Brigitte soon finds out when she’s admitted to a rehab clinic for young women. Inside, she meets Tyler, a worker in the clinic who likes to dish out your drug of choice in return for sexual favours. Tyler ensures that the women either agree to participate in the arrangement or actively seek him out to ask him to visit their room, possibly to try and push any guilt away from himself so he can claim their arrangement isn’t assault. However, it’s clear Tyler likes the power he gets to hold over the women by hearing them beg him for the drugs. He makes Brigitte smile and ask him nicely before he agrees to inject her with monkshood, as though it was all her idea in the first place. Brigitte quickly twigs that Tyler wants her to act like a ‘good little girl’ and he doesn’t like her fighting back or making him feel like the villain, because then he has to face up to what he’s doing to these women.

Much like the wolf, Tyler feels entitled to the women’s bodies. And he’s not really interested in them consenting to it, but rather he twists the situation so that he can cover his own back in the future. The wolf and Tyler are only interested in their own needs, and this reflects the constant sexualisation that women have to deal with daily. This is especially true once women go through puberty or hit the legal age of sexual consent, and people are apparently allowed to sexualise them as much as they like because it’s legal.

Alongside the darker side of sex, Brigitte is also having to deal with her growing sexual appetite. Much like Ginger before her, her desire for sex and dinner are getting slightly mixed up as her wolf needs combine with the changes caused by puberty. She’s aware that she dislikes Tyler and hates the way he coerces other women into having sex with him, and yet, when she finds herself alone with him she ends up either sniffing him or kissing him before she regains control of herself. Sex went from being something she never thought about, to something that takes over her mind at a moment’s notice, and it’s difficult for her to find a balance that doesn’t leave her feeling confused and ashamed.

She even dreams about masturbating, but when she finds her arm transformed into a wolf arm, she’s jolted back to real life. Hairy palm jokes aside, she’s unable to embrace her sexuality and feel comfortable in herself. Going through this massive hormonal change in front of everyone is embarrassing, and because the only sexual experiences Brigitte has had so far are negative, it’s hard for her to think about her own sexuality as a positive thing. She decides to push it away at every chance rather than come to terms with it and find out what she wants in life. Women are so often shamed for showing either not enough or too much of an interest in sex, and so it can be hard to find the middle ground that means we won’t be judged by those around us. Brigitte’s body wants to explore her sexual desires, but her head doesn’t know what to do with these thoughts. 

Another problem Brigitte has to deal with is her constantly changing body and her need to fit in with those around her so they don’t notice that she’s different. In the opening scenes of the movie, Brigitte shaves the excess hair off her body with a pink razor. She’s also seen cutting the tips off her ears, and even filing the points on her teeth down. In the first movie, the last thing Brigitte cares about is looks. She and Ginger dress like each other, and look nothing like any of the other teenage girls are their school. Part of their style is standing out from everyone else, and only matching each other.

But now, Brigitte’s whole body is changing in a way she can’t control, and she wants to fit in and not draw any extra attention to herself. It doesn’t matter how you dress, when you or those around you are hitting puberty, it’s easy to long to look like everyone else so you don’t stand out or get left behind. From stuffing your bra or carrying sanitary products even when you don’t have your period, there are lots of little things teenagers do to try and fit in with their peers. The changes Brigitte has to make to her body are a little more extreme, but the desire to fit in remains the same. And this isn’t something that goes away once you enter adulthood, with the often conflicting range of body standards that are pushed onto people by the media, celebrities, and social media. 

The final point Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed deals with incredibly well is the lack of control Brigitte has over her life as a young woman. In the first movie, she’s desperate to escape the confines of Bailey Downs, her overly-protective mother, and dismissive teachers at her school who refuse to support her or Ginger. While she leaves town under less than ideal circumstances, she soon finds that it’s hard for her to explore a life she wants without someone trying to control her. 

After she overdoses on monkshood, she’s admitted against her will to a women’s rehab facility. Even when it’s discovered the drugs she’s using are legal, she’s still held by the centre’s leader, Alice, as she believes Brigitte needs to be looked after and healed.

Alice thinks she can understand the experiences of all the young women she’s caring for because she was once a drug addict herself, but she doesn’t take the time to try and understand Brigitte and her personal issues. In fact, she’s not interested in anything Brigitte has to say and is set on keeping her locked up to offer her version of help, without asking Brigitte what she needs.

It seems this is true of the other women in the facility as well, as most of them mock the group therapy sessions rather than participating in them, suggesting they’re also not getting the help they need. And when the women in the facility really need help, it seems to go unnoticed by the staff. Aside from Tyler assaulting several women, and providing them with the drugs they’re meant to be quitting, characters like Ghost are also on the receiving end of abuse from other patients constantly without any intervention.

The staff at the facility are more interested in placing this control over the women than they are actually providing any care for them. While Brigitte managed to escape her small town and her parents, she soon realises that the confines placed on women can extend well into later life as well. Brigitte technically isn’t doing anything wrong, her parents could be contacted to come and collect her, and yet she’s locked up with no chance of escape. She isn’t behaving the way Alice and the other staff expect her to, and so they want to force her to act in a certain way. Sure, Brigitte claiming she’s going to turn into a werewolf if they don’t let her go isn’t the most believable story, but Alice doesn’t seem open to listening to anything Brigitte has to say unless she’s trauma dumping like one of the other patients in the group therapy session.

From Alice and Tyler, to the visions of Ginger, the ever present threat of the male wolf, and even to Brigitte’s new friend, Ghost, Brigitte ends up being controlled by everyone around her. She soon realises that the only people that offer her help are those who want to use her for sex or for power. It’s a tough lesson for Brigitte to learn, that even out in the world by herself and free from her parents she still faces judgement and control, which is only intensified purely because she is a young woman on her own. 

Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed not only expands on the werewolf lore than we get in Ginger Snaps, but it also delves into a whole other range of issues that women have to face in their daily lives. While Brigitte has spent the whole movie trying to stave off her werewolf transformation and fit into the world around her, it turns out that embracing those changes of growing up and turning into someone else might be the best thing for her. After being captured by Ghost, Brigitte fully turns and is said to be growing stronger every day. By finally embracing the person (or wolf) she was turning into, Brigitte will no doubt be able to stand up for herself, take on those who have harmed her, and hopefully get a little more control over her life, even if it wasn’t the life she had envisioned for herself.

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