Bounding Into Halloween, Night 25: It’s A Saturday Night She-Wolf Shoutout Featuring ‘Ginger Snaps’ And ‘The Howling’
It’s the final Saturday of October, and the howls of anticipatory grief have already started, but this doesn’t mean that the nightmare is over. There are still six days left in the Samhain season to celebrate, and tonight’s double feature goes out to all the lovely lupas out there who walk among the freshly-bloomed wolfsbane when the autumn moon is bright.
Ginger Snaps (2000)
The first cavalcade of carnivorous lunar activities comes from the land of lumberjacks, log cabins, and Labatt Blue beer. This is the tale of the Fitzgerald sisters, Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) and Brigitte (Emily Perkins).
They’re inseparable teen outcasts from a fictional suburb in Ontario who are so obsessed with death that the two make a pact to self-terminate if they don’t escape the mundane trappings of their picket-fenced purgatory.
These melodramatic plans change when Ginger catches her first splash from the crimson wave of womanhood while they’re out on a dog-napping mission, and after she’s bitten by some mysterious animal that has been making short work of pets in the area.
It doesn’t take long before Ginger starts to undergo physical and emotional changes that have absolutely nothing to do with any cycles of human maturation whatsoever.
Fur begins to grow from her wound, she sprouts a tail, and her status in the Bad Girls Club at school goes from non-member to president faster than you can say “babies legs.” With Halloween approaching, Brigitte desperately searches for a way to save her sister, and the only person willing to help is the local drug dealer (Kris Lemche).
The puberty metaphor is hardly concealed in this cult classic, but the rest makes up for it. Both leads play their roles to perfection, and it’s safe to assume that anyone who went to high school during the film’s period in history more than likely had their own versions of the Fitzgeralds shuffling down the hallway.
The dialogue still holds up pretty well for a feature from that era, and the practical effects are what propel it into the conversation of “Greatest Werewolf Movies.” Ginger Snaps is barking at the Moon over on TUBI, and the trailer is below:
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The Howling (1981)
Up next is the 80s Horror classic by director Joe Dante (Piranha, Gremlins, Innerspace), and it stars the undisputed Queen of Screams, Dee Wallace (The Hills Have Eyes, Cujo, Critters), as a journalist named Karen White.
She goes to a secluded mountain resort after surviving a botched sting operation by the police to take down a serial killer, who ends up turning into a werewolf, before the cops shoot him dead. Her psychiatrist strongly suggests that Karen and her husband (Christopher Stone) visit the resort – “The Colony” – to help facilitate her recovery.
What was sold as a realm of serenity and relaxation turns into red flags as Karen is kept awake at night by the sounds of howling, and she’s completely weirded out by eccentric people at the resort with them.
She hits her limit when Mr. Karen starts spending a little too much time with feral nymphomaniac, Marsha (Elisabeth Brooks), who really likes her meat “rare.”
The effects by Rob Bottin (The Thing, Total Recall, Se7en) steal the show, and it contains one of the best transformation scenes in all of werewolf cinema. It’s also worth mentioning that fellow make-up legend Rick Baker was involved with the project in its early stages.
He left to go work on An American Werewolf in London, and between the two, left his mark on the all-time greatest transformation scenes ever seared into celluloid.
The Howling is available for free on TUBI, and here’s the trailer:
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