Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
All the Austinites who saw GINGER SNAPS at South By Southwest this year seem to have walked away smitten. I understand the feeling. That's how I was with JEEPERS CREEPERS. Maybe it's that we're all fans of horror films, and we'll embrace anything that makes the tired feel fresh again. Anyway, here's Abe Froman, the Sausage King of Chicago, with a less-enthusiastic view on the film. See you after with a special treat:
Just wanted to let you know (well, I'm sure you already know but just in case) that Ginger Snaps had it's Toronto premiere last night. The director, screenwriter and some of the stars were on hand (but not the two girls, who were off somewhere "doing press"). Anyway, before the movie started, the director told the crowd "for the love of god, if you like the movie, tell your friends to see it this weekend." I didn't like it nearly as much as you did, so I have no idea if you want to use my slightly negative review, but if you do, you can call me Abe Froman.
It's disheartening to watch a movie like Ginger Snaps and slowly come to the realization that it's just not that good. It's disheartening because it's Canadian, and when was the last time a Canadian film got a release this wide? It's disheartening because it had the potential for so much more, yet winds up wallowing in its own detached ironic humour.
Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins stars as Ginger and Brigitte, sisters and best friends. They have a antisocial world-view and spend most their days making fun of their fellow classmates and plotting elaborate ways to off themselves. One day, they decide to take revenge on one particularly cruel student by kidnapping her dog and making it look like it's dead. The plan goes awry, though, when Ginger is attacked by what appears to be a large animal. Bleeding profusely, Brigitte takes Ginger home only to discover that her immense wounds are already healing. Massive changes in behaviour follow, which Ginger assumes is part of her ascension to womanhood (she coincedentally had her first period arount the same time, you see), but Brigitte knows better.
Ginger Snaps (now do you get it?) is a routine, slightly above-average horror flick, but that's not saying a whole lot. When what passes for horror these days is Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, it really doesn't take much effort topping those self-referential "scary" movies. But what Ginger Snaps does have going for it is a terrific sense of mood. Set amongst the cookie-cutter homes of Suburbia, the film captures the dull lifestyle of living in the 'burbs perfectly, right down to the myriad of minivans that skulk about the streets like an Spanish armada.
The film takes a really long time to get going, though, with the first hour containing little other than various sequences detailing Ginger and Brigitte's disgust with everything around them. While the screenwriter has to be applauded for not creating more Neve Campbell/Jennifer Love Hewitt clones, these two girls are essentially of the Heavenly Creatures/Heathers ilk. Frustrated with the Barbie-esque lifestyle they're expected to adopt, the duo confide in each other their fears and desires and mock everyone else. But when everyone around them is as cartoonishly over-the-top as they are, it has to be expected that they'll view people with complete disdain. Prime example of this: Mimi Rogers. Rogers plays their mother, Pamela, a woman that is completely oblivious to the fact that her daughter now craves human flesh, and just chalks it up to "horomonal changes." This character is played for laughs (initially), but as the denoument approaches, the screenwriter jettisons her sardonic approach to the character and Pamela becomes just another frightened cast member (and in addition to that, towards the end she wanders off into a party and is never seen again).
In the end, this is what causes Ginger Snaps to tumble. It spends the entire film walking a fine balance between straight horror and cynically black humour - a balance which never really works - and finally eschews the comedy aspect of the film for pure thrills. But by that time, the audience is filled with apathy for the characters, so it's really difficult to actually care what happens to these people.
But Ginger Snaps, made on a budget of less than $6 million (Canadian! That's, what, $23.50 American?), is a worthy successor to the detached horror films made by David Cronenberg early in his career. Just don't go in expecting another Blair Witch Project or In the Mouth of Madness.
Well, I'm not much of a fan of IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS (give me PRINCE OF DARKNESS any day instead), so I don't know quite how to take that. I was getting ready to put up Abe's review when ANTON SIRIUS came bounding into the Labs, unannounced, and slammed a document down on my worktable. He started to explain something about how he was embarrassed to turn his six-month-old interview in while Harry was here, but figured he had nothing to lose with Mr. '90s List himself. I think he said something after that, but I wouldn't know, as that's about when I opened fire. Winged him, too, on his way out the door. Now that I've read the groovy little interview with the director of GINGER SNAPS that he left behind, I almost feel bad. Almost.
Now, where does the time go.
Between Cloudmaking and my extra-heavy party schedule recently, I’ve had very little free time. So today I finally got a chance to sit down and have some quiet type fun, bounce around, chat on the phone… you know, Sunday-type stuff, only on a weekday.
Well, as I was surfing la ‘Net I zipped over Harry’s review section, and saw that he’d seen Ginger Snaps. “Oh, brill!”, I thought to myself, “I wonder if Harry liked it.” I open up the link and what do I find?
“Anton Sirius had mentioned it, was supposed to do an interview with the director…”
SUPPOSED to? Of course I did! What do you mean supposed to? I did it and typed it up and, um, oh. I didn’t type it up. Oops.
(Sigh) Your Earth technologies are so exhausting, you know that? Back home the thing would have been done for me on the spot by my personal pre-fab Bot Friday. But no, here I have to record it on MAGNETIC CASSETTE of all things, play it back, type it up… such a waste of precious time. But for you darlings, I do it all gladly.
If not promptly.
Thus I give you, six months late, my interview with Ginger Snaps’ director John Fawcett, conducted at the Toronto International Film Festival.
AS: How long did it take you and Karen (Walton) to write the script?
John Fawcett: We started on the script early ’95. I guess the idea had been rolling around in my head for a few years before that. She was someone that I’d met, and we were looking for something to do together, and so I pitched her this horror concept that I had, involving these two girls and a werewolf, and she was a little hesitant at first. I don’t think it had ever occurred to her to write a horror film. But I basically assured her that I wasn’t interested in making just a standard horror film. So we started on it, I think it was even January ’95, and wrote treatments and outlines on it for about ten months or so before we actually started to write a draft. It probably took us a solid three years of writing to get to some place we thought was pretty good. Our first draft we did manage to get some Telefilm support for development- we wrote a draft and then took that to Telefilm.
(Anton notes: Telefilm is a Canadian government funding agency for indie films, I believe.)
Telefilm has been really supportive of the project from the beginning. So it’s been five years.
AS: Excellent! One of the things that really impressed me about the writing was that you managed to avoid all the obvious Scream/Buffy traps- you’re doing a horror movie involving teenagers, but there’s no hip, ironic dialogue. The characters seemed very real. Did you find you had some trouble slipping into that mode, and having to pull back out?
JF: No, not so much, because I think one of the things we wanted to do from the beginning was to try and create real teenagers. To a degree. Considering that the two girls started in my head as cartoon characters, little stick-y Edward Gorey girls. They were just really stylized versions of what Brigitte and Ginger became. I knew early on that what we wanted to do was give those characters a bit of grit and a bit of edge, and in doing so hopefully make them feel real. In first drafts of the script I think there probably was some… Karen’s a really witty writer, so she can write that stuff. And there is to some extent some of that cool dialogue in there.
AS: Yeah, but there’s no references to other movies or witty banter between them…
JF: The whole way along it was always the mandate to try and avoid clichés. And I was the horror ‘expert’, so I was there to help with ideas and help in an editorial fashion. But also I was there either to steer us clear of certain conventions that we wanted to avoid, or to let Karen know that these were conventions that we wanted to stick with and we wanted to twist a bit. I was always just to try and make the most unique thing that we possibly could.
AS: So having said that you were the horror ‘expert’, what were you going for tone-wise, in terms of the classic horror films?
JF: I think it was, to me, I really wanted to make a truly classic horror film. The thing that made me the most afraid for the project was the fact that it could get labeled a ‘teen horror comedy’ and get lumped in there with the Faculty and Scream and all those sort of things, which was exactly what we didn’t want to make. We wanted to make the exact opposite of those. I dunno- does that answer your question?
AS: It’s close enough. You could throw in the specific movies you’d consider classic. I guess beginning with American Werewolf in London, which is I guess the only recent ‘classic’ werewolf film?
JF: I tended to find… American Werewolf in London had a nice tone to it, it had a nice blend of comedy and horror.
AS: I’m asking because this actually came up last night at the American Nightmare screening at midnight. Were you planning on seeing it?
JF: I don’t know- should I?
AS: I think you’d probably like it. It’s a documentary just about 1968 to ’78, the last ‘classic’ period of horror, with interviews with Romero and Carpenter and Tobe Hooper and Savini and Cronenberg…
JF: Well, they were great horror movies made then. I didn’t necessarily find inspiration so much from the werewolf movies that I’d seen and liked. It was more from other things because I think that we immediately were making that was so different from a ‘werewolf’ movie. Certainly there are certain similarities, but I think early on we kind of laughed about the fact that we thought this movie was going to be Heavenly Creatures meets The Fly.
AS: That’s actually a good description. Call Variety with that one.
JF: The nice thing about the film in terms of pitching it was that it was actually a fairly pitchable project. All I had to do was go, “Oh, it’s Heavenly Creatures meets The Fly” and everyone would go, “Oh… that’s really weird!” But I think we found inspiration from other sources. I’ve always loved David Cronenberg and all his old movies, well, pretty much down the line. Dead Ringers was truly one of the best horror movies I’ve ever seen.
AS: Yeah, that’s my favorite too.
JF: That’s a creepy, creepy movie. I don’t think it was so much the werewolf movies. I think it was the fact that there weren’t many good werewolf movies that inspired me to make a werewolf movie. Because I went, “There’s a genre that really hasn’t been done well that many times.”
AS: So it was always your intention to get away from the wolfsbane blooming at night, transformation under the full moon, that kind of stuff.
JF: Always. Always. I was more interested in biological horror, in a kind of slow metamorphosis movie, than I was in full moons and silver bullets and that kind of thing. To me when I think about things that really sort of frighten me… I think everyone likes a good monster movie, but I think that ultimately what works for me is the fact that you could go to your doctor tomorrow and find out that you have cancer. And that it’s been in you for years. Right? Or you could discover that you have a brain tumor. It’s that not knowing what’s going on inside your body. Or the fact that you could become infected by a virus. All these invisible things that could get into your body. Those horror stories are going on every day. That to me was truly creepy and scary, that idea of a slowly mutating transformation.
AS: Let’s switch tracks for a minute. How did you happen to find the two actresses, Emily Perkins and… ah, her name just slipped out of my head, played Ginger?
JF: Katherine Isabelle.
AS: Right! Their chemistry together on screen is just fantastic.
JF: It’s kind of a weird story. We cast in a lot of places- we cast in Toronto, Vancouver, LA, New York, a little in Montreal. And they put themselves on tape in Vancouver. So I got this tape that had a bunch of girls on it from Vancouver. I watched it, saw Emily, and went nuts for her immediately. She wasn’t doing exactly what I saw as Brigitte, but I saw that she was a good actor, and I could also see that she was exactly the kind of person that I wanted to see play that part. Katherine was on the same tape, and my producer really liked Katherine initially, and I liked her, but I wanted to keep looking. But Steve (Hoban) kept saying, “No, she’s my favorite, I really like her” and I kept saying, “Well, Emily’s my favorite” and ultimately it led to, after seeing hundreds of people, us bringing those two girls from Vancouver. And what I found out was the fact these two girls knew each other, and had known each other. Their families knew each other. They went to the same school. Born in the same hospital, had the same agent, and not only that they read for each other in that video audition! Emily read off-camera for Katie, and Katie read off-camera for Emily. And I didn’t know that because they were just sort of voices off-camera when they were reading. So they came out with this already very comfortable feeling with each other. So that was kind of the boost that on screen relationship needed. Bringing two total strangers together and saying, “Create this chemistry. Make us believe that you’re sisters”, it can happen certainly with good actors-
AS: - but if they’ve got that history-
JF: -it was a huge, huge bonus, right. Because it was really just the three of us making this movie. The two girls, me, and then a bunch of people around us. It just made the whole thing really comfortable. We spent probably ten days rehearsing. I’d just shoot scenes basically with my little video camera, cover all the different angles for them, as much as we could we’d do it on the set. I just wanted them to clearly see what was in my head in terms of the way I thought these characters should play out, the kinds of girls they were.
AS: Now, the budget for this was teeny tiny, compared to the result you got. Three million US?
JF: A shade over three million US. For a Canadian film kind of a high budget, really, because Canadian movies are usually landing in the range of… well, I made my first feature for like 1.2 million. But I think that now the average budgets are ranging between 1.5 and 3 million Canadian. And we were at about 4.7, 4.8 million Canadian. So for a Canadian movie we were very fortunate to raise barely enough to do it.
AS: And yet that doesn’t show on screen at all. The effects are all top-notch. I mean it doesn’t look like a Steven Spielberg-level production, but it compares easily with Hollywood.
JF: That’s good. You want it to look good, you want it to compete in the marketplace. It’s this weird thing of growing up Canadian around the Canadian movies that were getting made, and to an extent are still getting made, this slightly arthouse vibe in Canada. And then being influenced by the Americans who are right next door, and you can’t help but go see their movies. So I think my sensibilities are a bit of both, always trying to find a nice sense of balance between the art and the commerce.
AS: Again, sort of walking the line Cronenberg walks.
JF: I suppose, yeah.
AS: If you’re approaching it from the critical perspective you can go “Well, the metaphor is this, and the underlying themes blah blah blah blah”, but then at the same time it’s just a hell of a scary film and you jump in your seat.
JF: Yeah. And to me that’s important. I think my favorite films personally are the films that work totally on an entertainment level. Just on that strict, buy a bag of popcorn and enjoy the flick kind of level. You don’t have to be super-smart to go, “Wow, that’s cool.” But at the same time there’s something else there, something else that you can enjoy at a higher level, characters and relationships that exceed normal expectations and that it ultimately has something to say.
AS: So do you see yourself as a horror director, or did you just happen to make a horror film this time out?
JF: Horror is certainly one of my favorite genres. And maybe it’s not horror per se I’m ultimately interested in, but the things I tend to think up are a little on the twisted side, and little bit on the dark side. I don’t think anyone would think I was the right person to do their family drama or kid’s film.
AS: Well, you say that, but look what Sam Raimi’s been doing the last three years.
