A question about the transformation process
-
Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Ginger Snaps
Morbius_Fitzgerald — 11 years ago(January 26, 2015 04:14 AM)
Okay, so this film is where werewolfism is used to parallel female puberty. I can get most of it, the skin changes, the sex drive going wild, violent impulses, it all adds up except for one part - bleeding out your genitals. My question is how does menstruation fit in with transforming into a werewolf? I'd probably not question it as much but we definitely see a man get bitten and we do see him piss blood so in this lore, its a basic part of the transformation. So what I'm asking is Why?
-
freeist — 11 years ago(February 01, 2015 11:57 AM)
That was definitely an addition to the werewolf lore. The legends apparently didn't mention that part. There's nothing in the movie that would tell you why it happened
There's also nothing that would tell you why the "ache" Ginger mistook for sexual desire turned out to be to tear things to pieces. Ordinarily, you could understand why she might get horny and want to tear things to pieces, but not mistake one drive for another. I would assume here, though, that Ginger's sex drive is being cross-wired.
So, if you want something that's in the movie, I can't help you. If you want me to conjecture (as I already have for the current draft of the fan fiction) I can do that. I you want me to conjecture why Karen Walton wanted to put it in no matter what the reason, I can do that, too. -
Dragonfly777 — 10 years ago(August 24, 2015 05:20 PM)
What do both the transformation into a werewolf and menstruation have in common? The werewolf myth has been used as a metaphor for puberty before (I was a teenage werewolf, braces on my fangs), but this one smartly uses it as a metaphor for female puberty, and the connection between changing from a child to an adult and changing from a person to a werewolf is clever, but bringing in menstruation, with its connection to the lunar cycle, is doubly so. The moon is the connection. Also, there is the curse associated with being a werewolf, and what was once a common euphemism for menstruation? The curse. This is a smart, funny, and scary little movie.
J
The moon is dead. Long live the moon. -
am-23762 — 9 years ago(September 07, 2016 02:30 PM)
Well, I think Jason pissing blood and his general hideous appearance, i.e. sores and blisters on his face, could well have been more metaphors, possibly to do with sexually transmitted infections. Brigette made a point of it, saying to Ginger that she "had unprotected sex, and gave it to Jason". Earlier on, during the navel piercing scene, she asked Ginger if she had used something while she and Jason had sex, to which Ginger replied no.
She seemed to be quite conscious of STIs and so on. Perhaps she took in more of the talk that the nurse gave them than Ginger did demonstrating the typical sort of arrogance that most people have regarding sex, that it will never happen to them, they won't get infected, and they don't care if they pass on whatever they have to someone else. -
freeist — 9 years ago(September 16, 2016 11:23 PM)
I thought the reason why Jason bled was to show that he actually lost his masculinity. Ginger made him menstruate. It's a joke: what if a macho man had "the curse" too? How would he react?
Inadvertently, I think, they gave a different edge to the werewolf legend. With Ginger, it looked superficially like she was suffering her period. Except it was a lot more suffering than she should have had. Maybe the infection set up operations in the mid-lower abdomen, and the bleeding was from tissue being torn down and replaced. -
am-23762 — 9 years ago(October 31, 2016 06:43 AM)
There's evidence in the director's commentary to support both opinions, yours and mine. Yes, on one hand, Jason did get his period from Ginger, but it was more than that. Most of the time in films, people get infected with lycanthropy through bites, scratches, especially when there's a transfer of blood from infected to uninfected.
Ginger Snaps explored a seemingly new avenue, and that was that the infection could spread through other bodily fluids, which is typical of STIs, although John stated that he wasn't addressing the issue of HIV/AIDS like some sort of PSA gone wrong, just STIs in general. It was something that he at least figured hadn't been done before.
The infection also results in different physical symptoms based on hormones, i.e. estrogen, testosterone, and Jason did look like he just had a really bad case of acne and was himself going through puberty and rather late too considering he was about 15, maybe 16, but of course the teeth would lead you to think there was more to it than that.
As for Ginger, I'm more or less inclined to agree with what you and others here have said, not forgetting the obvious metaphor for puberty. If you're looking at it in a very literal sense, then yes, I suppose it was a very severe infection that resulted in bleeding out of the genitals, which is all part of the gradual transformation process she underwent.