Ginger Snaps

Ginger and Brigitte Fitzgerald are teenage sisters in Bailey Downs, a featureless Ontario suburb, who have built their entire identity around a shared obsession with death. They photograph staged death tableaux. They've made a pact to die together before turning sixteen. They move through high school as mutual outcasts, entirely self-sufficient in each other, and they like it that way. The night Ginger gets her first period — long delayed and secretly dreaded — something attacks her in a park. A large animal lunges from the dark and tears into her shoulder and thigh. Brigitte drives it off. By the time they reach home, Ginger's wounds have already closed.

The changes arrive quickly after that. Hair grows from the bite sites. A tail emerges. Ginger becomes more aggressive, more predatory, magnetic in a sexual way that unsettles even her — like she has access to a frequency she didn't before. She starts going out at night. A boy who sleeps with her later develops strange symptoms. A neighborhood dog goes missing. Brigitte notices everything and catalogs it without panic. They got into this together; they'll find a way out together.

Brigitte connects with Sam, a local drug dealer with a knowledge of botany who has come across evidence that monkshood — aconite — might interrupt the transformation. But developing the cure takes time, and Ginger is accelerating. Her body changes faster than their ability to keep pace: more animal by the week, harder to reach, the sister Brigitte knows receding behind something older and hungrier. When Ginger kills a person, the situation moves past cover-up and into territory Brigitte can't navigate alone.

Brigitte injects herself with Ginger's blood — part solidarity, part proof of concept, part desperate bid to stay connected across whatever distance is opening between them. The monkshood tincture works as a suppressant, confirming a true cure is possible. But time is the problem. Their mother — oblivious in the cheerful, absolute way of certain parents — senses something is wrong and wants to help in ways that threaten to expose everything. Sam is their only outside resource, and Ginger is almost gone.

In the final confrontation, Ginger is fully transformed: no longer recognizable as human, operating on instinct, the architecture of her body rearranged around something that was always inside the infection waiting to fully emerge. Brigitte doesn't want to use the knife she's holding. She tries once more to make contact with whoever is still in there. She can't. She drives the knife in and holds Ginger as she dies. The pact they made — to never leave each other — is kept, technically, even here.