Happy All-Hallow’s Month! In anticipation of Halloween — which, let’s face it, we’ve been anticipating since last Halloween — Daily Grindhouse will again be offering daily celebrations of horror movies here on our site. This October’s theme is horror sequels — the good, the bad, the really bad, and the unfairly unappreciated. We’re calling it SCREAMQUELS!
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GINGER SNAPS 2: UNLEASHED is a brilliant sequel deserving of cult worship; where most sequels aim to more or less repeat events of a first entry, it explores a new world of werewolf bloodlust. One of the things I noticed most during my rewatch is just how little Emily Perkins smiles as Brigitte. She doesn’t smile once, not even half of a smirk, not for anyone or anything. It’s wonderful. She’s a role model for girls and women everywhere, and not just the ones who love horror.
Brigitte, our stoic role model in UNLEASHED, is the younger sister of Ginger (Katharine Isabelle), whom she murdered in the first film in an attempt to stop her sister from completing her transformation into a werewolf. But in the sequel, it’s Brigitte’s turn to face the transformation, and she does everything she can to stop it. She injects wolfsbane, an herb that slows down the change, but not entirely. It’s a poison; she’ll overdose if she takes too much, but if she takes too little, her body will start to transform again. And then the urges start up…
The urges are a desire for murder and sex, combined into one monstrous desire in a werewolf, which reminded me of the song “Sex and Violence” from the old punk band The Exploited:
Sex and violence
Sex and violence
Sex and violence
Sex! Ha Ha!!
For humans, “sex and violence” might mean a fun romp of roughish sex, but for a werewolf, it’s something else entirely. It’s murder. It’s gore. It’s fucked up shit, and Brigitte doesn’t want any part of it. In fact she recoils at the thought, although she is slowly consumed with bloodlust and stalked by a werewolf who wants to have wolf sex with her, with or without her consent. She doesn’t want to do it; if she sleeps with him, she will be transformed forever. She doesn’t want to be a werewolf.
But her urges are getting stronger…
In GINGER SNAPS, bloodthirsty lust was a metaphor for puberty; in GINGER SNAPS 2 it’s a metaphor for drug abuse. Brigitte craves wolfsbane as well as sex and violence. She needs it, she has to have it, and she will do anything to get it. But she ends up in a rehab facility trapped by an ex-user, Alice (Janet Kidder), who doesn’t know that she’s a werewolf—she thinks Brigitte is a druggie who is cutting herself because she is delusional—and tormented by Tyler (Eric Johnson), a corrupt aide who trades favors for sex.
Emily Perkins’ performance as Brigitte is remarkable and one of the reasons why the sequel is so enjoyable. She is a force of snarly goodness, intensity, and grit. Her performance is a lesson: You don’t have to fake-happy your way through a film or life. You don’t have to smile inanely to be considered “nice” or to be charismatic.
There are lots of great male actors who didn’t smile, who made a career out of brooding intensity, even. Actors like Steve McQueen.
Steve McQueen NEVER SMILED.
Steve McQueen had an air of mystery about him because he didn’t smile. He didn’t beg the audience to like him. Something about him felt seemingly…beyond capture. His eyes suggested that he had “seen some shit.” A large part of McQueen’s mystique was that we never knew what he was thinking, not really. We knew that he was sad, and struggling, and unbreakable, and a hero, but we didn’t plug into him. Although the audience connected with him onscreen, there’s a respectful distance, a gulf. You don’t identify with Steve McQueen entirely. You admire him. He’s so….well, shit. He’s Steve McQueen!
Brigitte in GINGER SNAPS 2 reminds me of Steve McQueen—Emily Perkins brought the same sort of intensity to her character as any McQueen portrayed. She perseveres like Steve McQueen in PAPILLION, like Ash in EVIL DEAD. Perkins simmers as Brigitte in GINGER SNAPS 2; she scowls and slashes her arm with a scalpel for research then injects herself with a needle like a strung-out junkie, pale and wretched-looking, alone in her motel room, where she spends most of her time reading. Later, in rehab, she refuses to conform or befriend anyone, except for Ghost (Tatiana Maslany), who forces her way into Brigitte’s life.
Ghost is an odd girl at the facility, and the only one who figures out Brigitte’s secret. Ghost is obsessed with werewolf comic books and she spies to get information on Brigitte. She wants to be best friends, but Brigitte is a loner, preferring to keep most of her time to herself like she and Ginger did when they were the outliers of their small town. We don’t see women loners in films much (unless something is “wrong” with them); they are invariably men, although that is starting to change, particularly in sci-fi. In 2004, though, there weren’t many characters like Brigitte, except maybe for Daria.
I want to describe Brigitte and Daria as “individuals” but the word “individuals” reminds me too much of “rugged individualism.” And then it sounds like we’re talking about farmers, or oatmeal, or as if someone is trying to con you into joining a scary Ayn Rand book club. The words “individualist” or “non-conformist” or “eccentric” or “loner” are rarely used to describe young women. Young women are not allowed to be outliers as men are. Young women are supposed to be obsessed with fitting in with the crowd. If they are an outlier, they are quickly dismissed as a fake, since only men are authentic. Even adult women establish and perpetuate these rules about young women. That too is starting to change, though not fast enough.
But what if you were a girl in 2004, or 2009, or 1995, or 2021 and you didn’t care about fitting in with a bunch of dreary suburban teens? What if you were interested in other things and a different type of crowd? And what if fitting in meant that you had to conform by acting like a boring asshole to fit in with other boring assholes?
Wouldn’t rejecting gender rules and certain social mores…be the right thing? The kind thing? What is the right thing to do then? And who is really the nice person? The one who smiles to manipulate and fit in, or the one who doesn’t? The answer, of course, is the underdog, it’s always the underdog. The one who stands against the many. In GINGER SNAPS 2, the underdog is a werewolf who never smiles.
It’s hard to explain why that’s so important. But it is, particularly in 2004 when the film was released. Back then, even more so than now, women were expected to smile. There weren’t any commercials on TV ridiculing men who say “Smile!” That kind of critique didn’t exist. Back then, men could tell you to smile with impunity. You had to take it. You had to grin and bear it. Women were expected to simper, to cater, and to please (DANCE FOR ME), if you wanted people to “like you.”
So, seeing a young woman not smile in a movie may seem like a small thing, but it’s huge. It’s a rebellion. A quiet one, yes, but a rebellion nevertheless. Not smiling is the simplest way to show that you have your own mind and that you don’t believe in gender rules. It’s peaceful yet absolutely resolute. Some cultures view smiling as an act of aggression. Asking a person to smile or noting that they don’t smile like some kind of face hall monitor is an act of aggression as well. Because peaceful people don’t try to control other peoples’ faces, do they?
In GINGER SNAPS 2, Tyler demands Brigitte smile for him, which means that he will die by the end of the film. Perhaps not by her hands, but he will be dead. Of course, I knew that was going to happen, but I was surprised when I didn’t want it to. A testament to how well his character is written, Tyler’s a total douchebag, yet I didn’t want him to be mauled to death by a werewolf in the snow. I wanted him to face the consequences of being a perv, but not die a horrible death. But you can’t tell a woman to smile in a horror film without paying for it.
He pays, but Brigitte isn’t the one who hurts him. She sends him outside, where the werewolf is waiting for him. Brigitte isn’t a murderer—killing her sister in the first film was a strange act of love—instead, she is a hero in both films, although she suffers in GINGER SNAPS 2, without release. She defends Ghost from Tyler, although Tyler is innocent, and saves Ghost from being bullied by the other girls in rehab. And most importantly, she does it all without smiling.
She doesn’t smile in the beginning when an annoying librarian flirts (poorly) with her, or when she cuts herself to measure how fast her body heals, which will tell her where she is on the Werewolf Transition Scale. She doesn’t smile when Tyler corners her in the bathroom stall. She actually sniffs him like an animal, which I think excited Tyler, although he masked it (This girl is DOPE, she sniffed me like a dawg!). She doesn’t smile when her dead sister visits her to warn her about werewolfy desire. She doesn’t smile and try to manipulate her way out of rehab; she just busts out of it with Ghost in tow.
And she doesn’t smile at the end of the film, when she finds out that Ghost is a sociopath who tried to murder her own grandmother by burning her to death. Ghost is the one who goes on a killing spree, not Brigitte! Ghost murders Alice, the head of the rehab center, and kills Tyler by subterfuge. Ghost is a liar and the scariest person in the film—way creepier than any werewolf. The last we see of Brigitte, she is trapped in Ghost’s basement, banging against the walls to be let out, which Ghost ignores, treating her like a dog in a pen, her dog, her special werewolf pet that she plans to unleash on her enemies. Yes, Ghost is disturbed and delusional.
The irony of GINGER SNAPS 2 is that, while Brigitte never smiles, Ghost smiles all the time, which is why no one views her as a threat; no one guesses how truly monstrous she is—not even Brigitte—until it’s too late. The perpetually fake-happy Ghost is the film’s true villain. I like that the film ended on a cliffhanger of sorts, without a happy or sappy ending, though we never get to see what happens next. The third film, GINGER SNAPS BACK: THE BEGINNING, jumped back in time. I imagine after the screen goes black on GINGER SNAPS 2, Brigitte escapes and attacks Ghost instead of her imaginary “enemies,” and when the triple homicide in the house couldn’t be explained properly to the authorities, Brigitte ends up in jail, blamed for everything, scapegoated.
But she breaks out of jail like Needy in JENNIFER’S BODY, doomed to be a werewolf on the run, forever…
GINGER SNAPS is a cult classic, but I don’t see GINGER SNAPS 2 getting the same amount of respect. The crowd who love it is growing larger, though, I suspect thanks to its remarkable ability to tell a story about werewolves through the heavy but important lenses of puberty and drug use. At its heart, it’s a story about a woman who—neither threatening nor irrational—simply doesn’t smile. A woman who refuses to follow gender rules, a rebellion, and a peaceful request to be left alone. Emily Perkins makes it look good too. And men don’t own that. Not even Steve McQueen.
Tags: Brendan Fletcher, Brett Sullivan, Emily Perkins, Eric Johnson, Ginger Snaps, Ginger Snaps 2, Ginger Snaps Unleashed, Janet Kidder, Katharine Isabelle, Megan Martin, Screamquels, Sequels, Steve McQueen, Tatiana Maslany, Werewolves
Fantastic write-up of a film that is itself an underdog, bucking against the irrepressible tide of big studio releases.
And I am male, but when I was young I was subjected to a constant stream of “You should smile mores” by my mother. My teeth were a bit messed up, I had braces, but I should smile more. Thanks, mom.
But for women this is a seemingly life-long commandment: Thous shouldst smile! It makest thou look prettier! What a load of crap, yet another way for men to control women’s bodies and, at the same time, make themselves feel important by issuing such nonsensical tripe.
Thank you for yet another classic DG article. Top-notch writing like this is the reason I make this site a regular stop on my internet travels.