Horror movies have been exploiting hormonal teenagers from the very beginning. The number of sex-themed horror movie tropes is immense—and legendary. What gave Ginger Snaps its box office kick and subsequent legs is how it openly embraced the parallels of the onset of puberty with lycanthropy. You don’t want to talk to your parents, who are at best “lame.” You’re a social outcast morbidly focused on death because you’d rather be dead than be living in high school. So, you’re stuck fumbling for information from such questionable sources as old-wives’ tales, the Internet, and some student nurse. And desperately trying to keep it all together before people notice – the rising body count. This isn’t an “I was a teenage werewolf” movie; it’s an “I was an angst-riddled teenage werewolf” movie. And that twist saves it from being another fly-by-night werewolf film.
