“You don’t think our deaths should be a little more than cheap entertainment?”: On Brigitte’s fate in ‘Ginger Snaps: Unleashed
Ginger Snaps: Unleashed (2004) is the second film in the Ginger Snaps trilogy, and I’ve got a problem with the ending. Shocker, I know; but it’s not for the reasons you might expect.
Disclaimer: Please keep in mind that I wrote this almost five years ago when i identified as female(ish), and so it's not necessarily my current thoughts/opinions for Brigitte, these films, gender, horror etc. but it's also not necessarily not my thoughts either. I hope you enjoy it!
This film is arguably the bleakest of the trilogy. Brigitte is no longer living in Ginger’s shadow. Executive producer (and director of Ginger Snaps), John Fawcett says in the commentary of Unleashed: “I think it’s important in this movie that we see the evolution of this character, because I think that in the first film we saw a girl that was really in her sister’s shadow, used her sister as her barrier to the world, was kind of shy, didn’t like people, and was forced to become strong by the end of that movie. Now we see a girl who has become strong, who is a tougher version of that Brigitte character.”¹ But she is still bullied by Ginger’s apparition. She seems to be using these visions of her sister — real or imagined — as a means of coping. Ginger always appears when things are starting to look their worst. For Brigitte, it’s a means of pushing herself to live, like she said she vowed to do at the ending of the first film, but I think it’s heartbreaking that her memory of Ginger is harder and meaner than Ginger actually was. Living rough in motels and only going out late at night, she’s keeping the lycanthrope virus at bay by regularly injecting herself with the cure — monkshood — that she and Sam came up with in the first film. When she accidentally overdoses, she ends up in a clinic against her will.
The clinic, ironically named Happier Times Care Centre, hangs liminally between a psychiatric hospital and rehab centre. It was actually filmed in a real abandoned “mental asylum” in Canada, and I love this choice, because North America (and many parts of Europe) have a long history of committing women to asylums even when they were not insane. Instead, they were often women who were outspoken, unmarried, gay, or just thought to be a nuisance. Between the 18th to the 20th centuries, “women were placed in mental institutions for behaving in ways the male society did not agree with”², and it “was an easy way to render them vulnerable and submissive.”³ Like Fawcett mentions, Brigitte has been gaining a new sense of self, a new kind of autonomy not only since Ginger’s death, but since Ginger was attacked by the wolf in the woods. By the beginning of Unleashed, Brigitte is functioning entirely on her own. It becomes clear that she — like Beth-Ann and Koral and Winnie, and so many other women throughout history — is not necessarily in hospice because she needs to be, but rather because she is thought to be too much, too difficult for society to handle.
To be fair, Brigitte does exhibit some behaviours that appear to warrant a stay at the clinic, but they are misinterpreted as violence and drug addiction instead of what they really are which is, uh, a desperate attempt to avoid becoming a werewolf. But you can’t really explain that to your therapist, I guess. On top of these sins, though, Brigitte is also solitary (that is, without a male presence to govern her — a father, a brother, a boyfriend); she lives alone, travels alone — she’s apparently made it all the way from Ontario to Alberta by herself. She may have shed her weird, gothy, voluminous skirts in favour of pants, but she still doesn’t look the way society expects her to look, and she doesn’t carry herself the way society expects women to carry themselves. On top of all of that, she is vocal about her needs (getting the monkshood, getting out of the clinic) and, perhaps as a nod to the injustices faced by the LGBTQ+ community who were (and unfortunately are still, today) thought to need psychiatric help, Brigitte is marked as a “Lesbian?” by Dr. Brookner when she voices some unusual (and to Dr. Brookner, sexual) inclinations. On the whole, Happier Times is not so much helping these women as it is keeping troubled (read: unruly, objective, overly visible) girls away from the delicate sensibilities of the general public. At one point, Alice says “Girls on drugs don’t go over too well in private funding circles.” She’s right, and look, I’m not even going to get into the dismal mental healthcare system in Canada, because that’s a pretty kettle of fish you could write a whole book about.
While sane women might not be locked away in “insane asylums” anymore (probably), there has always been a close link between women and insanity, especially in horror films, and there’s a reason this trope isn’t going away. Horror has always been political, and in the 21st century, we are still making horror films that acknowledge the fact that no one listens to women. They are thought to be over-dramatic, irritating, and insane, and that continues to be the underlying message throughout the majority of horror films: If you are a teenage girl, adults will not listen to you. And if you are an adult woman, no one will listen to you at all; not your friends, not your boyfriend, not your spouse. Horror reminds women that they are alone. It also reminds women that they are more than capable of handling things themselves.
But I know the Ginger Snaps movies never do quite what we expect them to, because in the first film, Sam believes Brigitte when she tells him that she’s turning into something “totally else”, and it is this that makes him different from so many other men in horror. Screenwriter Karen Walton says that they are “good partners,” and she’s right. Brigitte takes that risk, steps over into the paranormal, and Sam just… believes her. Every time it happens I’m astounded, because this is such an anti-horror trope. Hell, I’d argue that it’s an anti-film trope. If there was supposed to be a kiss in the pantry, they didn’t need it, this is the most goddamn romantic moment in the film:
BRIGITTE “I’m turning into something totally else.” SAM “You’re serious.”⁴
In some ways, Sam’s death in the first film is even more tragic because it means that Brigitte has lost every single person who was ever on her side by the time she ends up at Happier Times. She had someone who believed her and helped her, and then she lost him, and now she has to face, again, the grim reality of what it means to be female in society, and she has to do it completely alone.
Until Ghost: who figures out Brigitte’s problem and decides to stick around to help. Here’s where Brigitte’s story gets all tied up with something bigger, something more sinister than just a sad ending for a beloved character. Because sad endings are fine: think Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water (2001), or another heartbreaking film about co-dependent sisters, Jee-woon Kim’s A Tale of Two Sisters (2003). What guts me about Unleashed is that the ending doesn’t really feel like a way to allude our expectations, it doesn’t feel like a message, or a question, the way the first film’s ending did. It feels like a kick in the teeth, a stab in the back.
As others have pointed out, Brigitte “graduates from little sister to big”,⁵ and sort of by accident ends up united with Ghost against the care facility that keeps them there. A bit of a variation on “United against life as we know it.” Brigitte needs a way out, and Ghost has one.⁶ She and Brigitte suddenly need each other to get out of the clinic, and once they make it they both relax a little. They settle into each other. Brigitte gets her monkshood, Ghost gets back home and mostly unsupervised, and they fall into something more friendly, more genuine, more sisterly than they ever could at Happier Times.
The sleepover scene at Ghost’s grandmother’s cabin in the woods is the most intimate moment of their relationship in the film. Brigitte willingly offers up information about herself, something she rarely ever does. The only characters who ever get anything from Brigitte without asking first (often repeatedly) are Ginger, Sam, and Ghost. Brigitte, at probably-seventeen-years-old, has only ever been close to three people in her entire life.
The film’s commentary track delves into Brigitte and Ghost’s burgeoning relationship further when they discuss the fact that the sleepover is “an emotional point for Brigitte”.⁷ The scene where Brigitte puts her arm around Ghost harks back to the scene at the beginning of the film with Brigitte and Ginger’s apparition on the bed in the motel room:
PAULA DEVONSHIRE (producer): I really love this moment, here, when [Brigitte] puts her arm around Ghost, because anyone that knows Brigitte’s character knows how difficult it is for her to reach out to someone. JOHN FAWCETT (executive producer): …I love this, what we’re doing with the character, here, and just — someone who is so antisocial and doesn’t want any people in her life and is missing her sister, that she would take this girl under her wing at this point and kind of hold her, I think is a really beautiful thing for her.⁸
Director Brett Sullivan even says that “if Brigitte knew she was going to eventually start attacking and killing others, she would take the bullet herself. The only reason for her not to choose death would be if she had something/someone else to care about. Brigitte needed a reason to live. Along came Ghost.”⁹ So, Brigitte finds someone she cares about enough to keep living, something she hasn’t had since Ginger died, and with that Unleashed gives us the beginnings of a very tentative friendship, but one filled with potential, and then destroys it.
You could say that the same thing that happened in the first film with Brigitte and Sam, but Karen Walton discusses why Sam had to die in the writer’s commentary: It was because a man couldn’t save the day, because he couldn’t be standing there with Brigitte in the final showdown between the girls in their bedroom. It had to be just them,¹⁰ and that, as a story, makes sense. It’s a beautiful, heartbreaking conclusion that doesn’t provide any solutions for effects of the patriarchy, especially on teenage girls, but it does show the repercussions of it. The ending of the first film is tragic, but it works. The ending of Unleashed almost seems to negate the message of its predecessor, and Brett Sullivan admits that he wanted the “worst possible fate for Brigitte.”:
In regards to Unleashed, I think people really like to root for Brigitte. She is having a really bad year. And we do NOT help her out! She goes from the frying pan into the fire. And she meets a very unkind fate. We didn’t want her to have a happy ending. We were looking for the worst possible fate for Brigitte. . . I wanted Brigitte’s character to have a fate worse than death, and I wanted to attach this fate to the theme of innocence as evil. Who better to have as the ultimate villain for our heroine, than the one person she was trying to protect?”¹¹
If Ginger Snaps was a film that was all about the restrictions placed on women by society, Unleashed doesn’t really leave its viewers with any message other than female friendships fail. For the narrative of Unleashed to force Brigitte into a subordinate position (to Ghost), and to have her become something she would rather die than become (“I’d rather be dead than be what you are”),¹² the film strips Brigitte of all autonomy: she loses control completely over her body, she loses control over her mind. She becomes every single thing she never wanted to become, and she is forced, by a woman who she cared for and protected, to do what she would rather die than do. It rips Brigitte completely from herself and it is a fate worse than death, and why? Why does the main predator become not the lycanthrope; not even the clinic or its predatory orderly; but the film itself? Why build up a character so steadfast, intelligent, and brave as Brigitte — a character who became beloved to so many strange, outcast women, a character who fights and fights and fights against what she doesn’t want to become — why continue her story only to force her to become just that? To break her down beyond healing? What kind of message is that sending? What is its purpose?
Unleashed makes it clear that Brigitte never became what society expected her to be after the end of Ginger Snaps. Her killing the monstrous feminine in Ginger and becoming the final girl didn’t result in her conforming to society, to accepting heteronormativity or hegemonic beauty standards or even socially acceptable behaviours. Emily Perkins, does a stellar job of making that clear in both films, especially in the scenes between Brigitte and the orderly, Tyler. Ginger Snaps does not end by telling its audience that female friendships will fail. If anything, it enforces the enduring bonds of sisterhood and love between women.
Even if some people think that Ginger Snaps ends on an anti-feminist note, because Ginger is punished for her excesses by the final-girl archetype in Brigitte, I think that Brigitte had to move away from Ginger to become stronger. The first film is as much a love story between these two sisters as it is a film about escaping abuse or oppressive control. It ends in a death because it is a commentary on the options for women like Ginger who don’t fit into the neat little boxes society has prescribed to them.
There is something almost sadistic about wanting “the worst possible fate” for Brigitte, and after years of watching and re-watching and loving this film, I still have to question why it was done. The ending of Unleashed not only does Brigitte a deep disservice, but it also seems to state that women who escape one abusive relationship will only end up in other, different abusive relationships. After Ginger (who Brigitte loved deeply despite the fact that it was not always a healthy relationship to be in), Brigitte careens from one emotionally-violent person to the next: first to Tyler — who forces her into a sexual act she does not want to participate in¹³ — and then to Ghost who not only pushes Brigitte to forsake her identity and her autonomy, but then also locks her up to do her “evil bidding.” Just to add insult to injury.
Sullivan says he wanted to explore themes of “innocence as evil”¹⁴, and I think he did that, with Ghost, who is an extraordinarily compelling character, but it is Brigitte — an already full-blown, existing character — who suffers for it. Maybe this is just another case of men using women (fictional or not) to support their own storylines, and I know, it’s like: who cares, it’s fiction, but stories always have and always will tell our our collective history better than any history textbooks ever could.
Ultimately, my trouble with the ending is bigger than just a directorial decision. It’s bigger than horror films and films in general. At Hal-Con, a convention held in Nova Scotia in 2015, the interviewer tells Perkins that he wanted Brigitte to “get revenge” on Ghost for locking her in the basement. To “bite the hand that feeds her.”¹⁵ To him, it would have been an ending that gave Brigitte back some of her self-determination, but never all of it, and his vision is still an ending that results in the destruction of female friendship. Perkins responds: “Yeah, I dunno, I think if Ghost could have stopped the transformation, she would have, so, I think they’re still friends in the end.” Perkins adds that she “like[s] to think that [Brigitte] once in a while would get out of that cellar and run wild.”¹⁶
Women were clearly looking for a different outcome from this film. Maybe they just wanted Brigitte to have the freedom to control what happened to herself and to their own body.
Because women are not just fodder for men’s own narratives or gains, but they continue to be used as though they are. Ultimately the ending of Unleashed seems to be catering to the classic, imagined horror audience: men. The ones who turn ceaselessly to thoughts of “revenge” or “getting even” or assigning “the worst possible fate” to women who deviate from the norm. The reality, however, is that women make up the majority of horror fans, and always have. They probably always will.
So, I don’t know. Maybe I could blame the ending of this film on that imagined male audience, and its restrictive effects on female stories. Maybe I can blame it on the fact that it seems, sometimes, that is is impossible for men to imagine girls coming together and not only surviving the odds, but beating them, and living larger than the labels society provides to them.
Or maybe we could all just blame it on the goddamn patriarchy.
Sullivan says that he’s fine with the fact that the ending pisses some people off¹⁷ and honestly, I’ll drink to that. Endings are hard, they can be challenging for the creators and the audience, and he’s right when he says that “it’s a passionate response. It means they care about Brigitte.”¹⁸ And I, like so many others, still really love this film, but now I think that that’s more a testament to the fact that I love women like Brigitte beyond the patriarchal parameters of storytelling, and the rules society has made up for women and what kind of relationships we’re capable of.
Brigitte deserved a better ending because she represents us — the strange girls, the freaks, the ones who don’t fit into the neat little boxes. We aren’t using her story to further our own narratives, we are her story. Brigitte is us, and like so many other women who identify with the women in the Ginger Snaps films, I am desperate to hear more stories about women who are like Brigitte and Ginger and Ghost, but I feel like they haven’t come along since Ginger Snaps debuted in 2000. More than that, I want their stories to have better endings. Brigitte — like all of us — deserves better, we deserve better, and I know that women like me will continue to rail against Brigitte’s fate until things change; and they are changing, now, fast (and full moons have nothing to do with it.) We are all that untameable, wild female creature beneath the floorboards. And soon? We’re gonna get out.
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Footnotes:
¹ Ginger Snaps: Unleashed commentary (2004).
² Packard, E. P. W. (Elizabeth Parsons Ware), 1816–1897. “Modern Persecution, Or Insane Asylums Unveiled, As Demonstrated by the Report of the Investigating Committee of the Legislature of Illinois.” Hartford: Case, Lockwood & Brainard, 1875.
³ Geller, Jeffrey F. (1994). “Women of the Asylum: Voices from Behind the Walls”, 1840–1945. Anchor Books.
⁴ Walton, Karen (writer). Ginger Snaps (2000)
⁵ Borders, Meredith. “What the GINGER SNAPS Sequels Get Totally Right and Entirely Wrong” Birth Movies Death. 2015.
⁶ Why Ghost hasn’t escaped on her own is a mystery… Maybe she needs someone who looks like they’re old enough to be taking care of her, in the real world. Maybe she knows there are things she won’t be able to do on her own on account of her age, and her lack of guardianship. Or maybe she just knows that she needs something or someone to feed her enemies to, but I don’t think so. I’ll write more about Ghost in another piece
⁷ Fawcett, John (executive producer). Ginger Snaps: Unleashed commentary (2004).
⁸ Fawcett, John (executive producer) and Paula Devonshire (producer). Ginger Snaps: Unleashed commentary (2004).
⁹ Mendik, Xanvier. “Menstrual meanings: Brett Sullivan discusses werewolves, hormonal horror & the Ginger Snaps audience research project.” Film International.
¹⁰ Fawcett, John (director) and Karen Walton (screenwriter) Ginger Snaps (2000)
¹¹ Mendik, Xanvier. “Menstrual meanings: Brett Sullivan discusses werewolves, hormonal horror & the Ginger Snaps audience research project.” Film International.
¹² Fawcett, John (director) and Karen Walton (screenwriter). Ginger Snaps (2000)
¹³ Although they never have any form of intercourse, I would argue that it was still a form of rape.
¹⁴ Mendik, Xanvier. “Menstrual meanings: Brett Sullivan discusses werewolves, hormonal horror & the Ginger Snaps audience research project.” Film International.
¹⁵ ¹⁶ Hal-Con Convention. “Hal-Con 2015 — Emily Perkins Q&A.” YouTube. 2 Feb. 2016. youtube.com/watch?v=Y-UfKnqzfZ0
¹⁷ ¹⁸ Mendik, Xanvier. “Menstrual meanings: Brett Sullivan discusses werewolves, hormonal horror & the Ginger Snaps audience research project.” Film International.