Video Scripts: The Departed, Halloween 4, Ginger Snaps
Cody shares another batch of videos he wrote for JoBlo YouTube channels.
I have been writing news articles and film reviews for ArrowintheHead.com for several years, and for the last couple years I have also been writing scripts for videos that are released through the site's YouTube channel JoBlo Horror Originals. Recently I started writing video scripts for the JoBlo Originals YouTube channel as well. I have previously shared the videos I wrote that covered
Three more videos that I have written the scripts for can be seen below; two for the JoBlo Horror Originals channel and one for the JoBlo Originals channel.
For the non-horror Revisited series, I wrote about Martin Scorsese's Best Picture winning 2006 crime film The Departed, a remake of the Hong Kong production Infernal Affairs:
The Departed:
INTRO: Martin Scorsese is considered to be one of the greatest directors in cinema history. So it makes sense that he has been nominated for the Best Director Oscar nine times over the years. What’s shocking is that he has only won the award once. It wasn’t for Taxi Driver, he wasn’t even nominated for that one. It wasn’t for Raging Bull or Goodfellas. It was for The Departed, a crime film set in Boston but based on a Chinese production. Featuring an incredible all-star cast, The Departed was named the Best Picture of 2006. And we’re looking back at it in this episode of Revisited.
SET-UP: Before there was The Departed, there was Infernal Affairs. A 2002 movie that took place in Hong Kong, directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak from a screenplay Mak wrote with Felix Chong. The basic concept was inspired by John Woo’s Face/Off, which shows a cop and a criminal swapping identities. And faces. Inspired to do a more realistic version of that scenario, the makers of Infernal Affairs crafted a story about a corrupt cop who reports to a gangster. The story also focuses on one of the gangster’s lackeys, who is actually an undercover cop. The movie was an award winner at home and abroad, a critical success around the globe, and such a financial success that it spawned a prequel, a sequel, and a TV series. And, of course, it caught the attention of Hollywood.
Warner Bros. and Brad Pitt’s production company Plan B secured the rights to make an English-language version of Infernal Affairs. The idea was that Pitt would star in the remake, in addition to producing it. It wasn’t clear if Pitt would play the crooked cop or the undercover cop, but there was some hope that after he chose one the other role would go to Tom Cruise. Warner Bros. and Plan B then picked William Monahan to write the screenplay. Monahan had written an adaptation of his novel Light House, sold a spec script about the Barbary Wars called Tripoli, and wrote an early draft of Jurassic Park 4. None of those got made, but around the time he was hired for the film that would become The Departed he was also working with Ridley Scott on Kingdom of Heaven. His first produced screenplay. When given the job to transplant a Hong Kong crime story to America, many writers probably would have set the action in New York. But Monahan was from Boston, and chose to set his version of the story in his hometown. Which had plenty of crime of its own. Monahan was specifically able to draw inspiration from the story of Boston crime boss and FBI informant Whitey Bulger.
Monahan chose not to watch Infernal Affairs because he didn’t want the film to influence his writing too much. But he did read the translated script, and stuck very closely to it for his English adaptation. The Departed follows the story of Infernal Affairs and keeps all of the major scenes and sequences intact. It also spends more time setting up situations and digging into characters. Some of the things Monahan added to the story seem like they were inspired by elements of Infernal Affairs 2 and 3, but he said he never read those until well after The Departed had been released.
Once the script was complete, it made its way into the hands of director Martin Scorsese, the go-to guy if a studio wants to make a prestigious crime movie. The script was also sent to actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who Scorsese had recently made Gangs of New York and The Aviator with. Scorsese and DiCaprio read the script the same day, and called each other the next day to confirm that they were both in. Scorsese hadn’t seen Infernal Affairs yet, which is somewhat surprising, given what a cinephile he is. But he was drawn to the material because the set-up of an undercover cop dealing with a mobster reminded him of the 1949 classic White Heat.
DiCaprio wasn’t sure which role he wanted to play, so Scorsese decided he should be Billy Costigan, the undercover cop. This was the character DiCaprio was more nervous to play, because Billy is constantly in fear for his life as he deals with the mobsters. His cover could be blown at any moment. They could find out he’s a cop and kill him. DiCaprio described the character as experiencing a “constant, twenty-four hour panic attack”. Now Scorsese had to fill out the cast around DiCaprio – which proved to be more difficult than you might imagine. Since DiCaprio was on board, Pitt decided to step away because he thought Billy’s counterpart should be played by someone younger. After all, Pitt and DiCaprio are about eleven years apart in age. So the role of crooked cop Colin Sullivan went to Matt Damon, who is just four years older than DiCaprio. Scorsese felt Damon had a cocky attitude and bravado that would be perfect for Colin.
Scorsese had Al Pacino in mind for mob boss Frank Costello, but Pacino wasn’t interested. So the role was offered to Jack Nicholson. Nicholson read the script and also turned it down. He wanted to play a villain after working on a string of comedies, but he felt that the Costello character was underwritten. So Scorsese did the logical thing: he promised Nicholson the character would be expanded. Much of what we see from Costello in the finished film was brought to the table by Nicholson, who wanted to play the guy as the ultimate incarnation of evil. Monahan had written Costello as a post-sexual old man; Nicholson turned him into a lascivious slimeball. He made his character so sexual, Damon suggested going the opposite way with his. They added moments where it’s implied that Colin is impotent. Since the cast was going to be packed with tough guy characters, Damon also wanted to make sure his character would lose every fight he gets in.
Nicholson improvised many of his scenes, which was fine by Monahan, who said the actor may have changed some of the words that were written for him, but he didn’t change the good ones. DiCaprio knew going into any scene with Nicholson that he should expect the unexpected. Which helped him play his own perpetually nervous character, because he never knew what Nicholson was going to do. He really was on edge.
Only two people on the police force know the identity of the undercover cop they have embedded in Costello’s organization. They are Captain Queenan and Staff Sergeant Dignam. Scorsese envisioned these roles as being a Goodfellas reunion: he wanted to cast Robert De Niro and Ray Liotta. But De Niro was gearing up to direct The Good Shepherd and Liotta had scheduling issues, so they both had to decline. Gerard McSorley was cast as Queenan and had even met with Boston police officers to research the part before he was notified that Scorsese was going in a different direction. That direction was casting Martin Sheen in the role. Denis Leary was offered the role of Dignam, but couldn’t do it. So Scorsese offered the role to Mark Wahlberg, who didn’t want it. Like Nicholson with Costello, Wahlberg didn’t like how the Dignam character was written in the script. Scorsese had to talk him into accepting the role by assuring him that he’d be able to rework the character. Scorsese asked Mel Gibson to play police Captain Ellerby, but he was another actor who had to turn down an offer to be in The Departed. He was busy working on Apocalypto. So the role went to DiCaprio’s The Aviator co-star Alec Baldwin.
In the original Chinese film, the crooked cop character is engaged to a woman named Mary. The undercover cop has regular appointments with a therapist named Lee Sum-yee, who he has fallen for even though she’s taken. Monahan combined those two characters into one, which was a clever choice. Billy falls for his therapist, Doctor Madolyn Madden, who also happens to be in a serious relationship with Colin. Scorsese considered several actresses for Madolyn: Emily Blunt, Hilary Swank, Kate Winslet, even producer Brad Pitt’s then-wife Jennifer Aniston. He ended up casting the up-and-coming Vera Farmiga because he had been impressed by her work in the 2004 movie Down to the Bone. While trying to figure out how to approach the character, Farmiga showed the script to a real police psychiatrist – who thought the writing of Madolyn was preposterous. There was no way a police psychiatrist would interact with a patient the way she does with Billy. She wouldn’t behave that way, and she definitely wouldn’t sleep with him. When she realized how far outside the norm Madolyn is, Farmiga became even more interested in diving in and bringing her unusual behavior to the screen.
Farmiga isn’t the only one who met with a real world counterpart to her character. DiCaprio went to Boston and met with people who were allegedly connected to the Irish Mob. The actors playing police officers met with real Boston cops and worked closely with technical advisor Thomas Duffy, who had just retired as a Major in the Massachusetts State Police. Damon even got to ride along on a police raid of a crackhouse – although they took twice as many officers on the raid than they would usually take, and they kept Damon, who was wearing a bulletproof vest, behind all of them. They didn’t let him enter the crackhouse until they made sure the place had been cleared. But still, he got to see how a crackhouse raid works in person.
With the leads cast, Ray Winstone was chosen to play Costello’s right hand man Frenchy. And even though Costello and Frenchy are close, Winstone felt like Nicholson didn’t like him. Anthony Anderson and James Badge Dale were cast as troopers Billy and Colin first meet during their training. There’s also David O’Hara and Mark Rolston as a couple of Costello’s lackeys, Kevin Corrigan as Billy’s troubled cousin Sean, and Kristen Dalton as Costello’s much younger girlfriend Gwen.
REVIEW: Scorsese has said that “Infernal Affairs is a very good example of why I love the Hong Kong cinema, but The Departed is not a remake of that film.” He feels that Monahan did such a good job of immersing the story in its new Boston setting, it no longer qualifies as a remake. But the fact is that Andrew Lau, Alan Mak, and Felix Chong provided the blueprint for Scorsese and Monahan to follow – and we got two great movies out of it. Each with their own distinct personality and setting. The Chinese movie already proved that the set-up, structure, and sequences worked. And of course, Scorsese had no problem bringing these things to the screen effectively in his own way. Where the two movies most strongly stand apart are in the performances of the actors and the portrayal of the characters.
It may have been a struggle to fill the roles in The Departed at times, but Scorsese ended up with the right cast for the film. Every actor in the movie perfectly inhabits their character and makes their actions believable, even when their actions are preposterous. According to the psychiatrist Farmiga talked to. Other than the White Heat similarities, Scorsese was also drawn to Monahan’s script because of the way it dealt with trust and betrayal. And the movie is a fascinating examination of those topics. The lead characters are all betraying trust in some way. Colin is betraying the police force to protect Costello, a man he has known since he was a child. Billy is betraying Costello, working for the police. Madolyn betrays Colin by sleeping with Billy. And characters are also betraying their own personalities. Colin is a criminal masquerading as a cop. Billy is a good cop who has to play at being a criminal.
The stress and fear Billy feels in most of his scenes is palpable, and it makes sense because he has to endure some awful situations with Costello. DiCaprio said Nicholson could “go off the cuff and just say anything or do anything. In character, it instills this constant fear in you.” Completely unleashed, Nicholson could be accused of going over-the-top at times, but he still succeeds at what he wanted to do. He wanted to play Costello as a monster. That’s how he comes off in the movie. Especially in moments like the scene where he nonchalantly handles someone’s severed hand while having a conversation with Billy. He is despicable, and his violent, unpredictable nature makes us concerned for Billy’s safety. While Billy is falling apart out in the field, Colin is living the good life. He has a nice apartment, a comfortable job in the Special Investigations Unit. And he proves to be quite monstrous himself at times. He will destroy the lives of innocent people, get them killed. And laugh about it. We want to see Colin get his comeuppance, but he always seems to come out of things unscathed. Usually with a promotion. We can only hope his luck is going to run out at some point.
Most of the characters in The Departed aren’t quite as lucky as Colin. A lot of people die over the course of this movie. And if you want to know ahead of time who’s not going to make it, there is a game you can play while watching the movie. Watch for the X. Scorsese had fun putting in subtle foreshadowing of deaths by putting an X in the frame at some point with characters that are going to die. It’s an idea he lifted from director Howard Hawks’ 1932 version of Scarface.
LEGACY/NOW: The Departed is so vile, violent, and dark, it actually got to its own director. Scorsese has said that the post-production process on this one was highly unpleasant because he had to spend so much time focused on these characters and the subject material. He said, “I don’t care how much I’m being paid, it’ll kill me. I’ll die. Very simply.” He took to calling the movie Moral Ground Zero and didn’t do much press for it when it was released. He was proud of the movie, but he was also tired of it. He found it maddening. He told associate producer Emma Tillinger that they wouldn’t have to worry about going through the awards season routines. There was no way a movie like this was going to receive any nominations.
But, of course, it did receive many awards nominations. And won awards from several different organizations. Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson, and Mark Wahlberg earned Golden Globe nominations for their performances. The movie was also up for best dramatic motion picture and best screenplay. But the sole Golden Globe it won went to Scorsese for Best Director. Shockingly, Wahlberg was the only actor to receive an Academy Award nomination for this movie. DiCaprio was in the running for Best Lead Actor that year, but not for The Departed. He was nominated for Blood Diamond. Warner Bros. had tried to get him a Supporting Actor nomination alongside Wahlberg, but it didn’t work out. The Academy was content to just acknowledge his work in Blood Diamond.
While the Academy largely overlooked the cast, they made sure to show their appreciation for the film in other categories. While Scorsese figured the biggest awards were going to go to the movie Babel, it turned out to be The Departed’s night. Monahan won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar. Thelma Schoonmaker won for the editing. For the first and, to date, only time, a Scorsese movie won Best Picture. And Scorsese finally won his Best Director Oscar. It was his sixth time being nominated. Fittingly, the Oscar was presented to him by his old friends Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, and George Lucas.
As for what the makers of Infernal Affairs thought of The Departed… well, they preferred their version of the story. Actor Andy Lau, who played the crooked cop character in the Chinese film, thought The Departed was too long. And at a hundred and fifty-one minutes, it is fifty minutes longer than Infernal Affairs. The film’s director Andrew Lau, not to be confused with Andy Lau, gave The Departed an eight out of ten score and said, “Of course I think the version I made is better, but the Hollywood version is pretty good too. Scorsese made the Hollywood version more attuned to American culture.” He thought the remake had some great dialogue in it, but also too much profanity. It has been said that there are over two hundred and thirty F-bombs in The Departed – and Monahan claims he didn’t script that many. It’s just that, as he said, actors come to the set of a Scorsese movie prepared to swear their heads off. Clearly the Academy can’t be put off by swearing.
The Departed wasn’t just a success with critics and awards organizations. It was also a financial hit. Made on a budget of ninety million dollars, it earned close to three hundred million at the global box office. That makes it one of the biggest hits of Scorsese’s career, surpassed only by Shutter Island and The Wolf of Wall Street. Movies that also starred Leonardo DiCaprio.
It’s no surprise that there was talk of a sequel being made, especially since Infernal Affairs became a franchise. Monahan had the complete story for a follow-up in mind – one that would have left the Infernal Affairs connections behind to show what was going on with Dignam before, during, and after the events of The Departed. He and Wahlberg pitched it to Warner Bros. together, and were hoping to get Brad Pitt and Robert De Niro into the cast of this one. But it never got off the ground. And Scorsese had no interest in returning to the world of The Departed anyway. One trip to Moral Ground Zero had been enough for him.
So all this time later, The Departed remains a standalone movie, and it works perfectly as one. It’s highly respected, and a bright spot in the careers of Scorsese and the actors involved. There is just one dangling, unanswered question… what is in that envelope Billy gave to Madolyn near the end of the movie? It looks like we’re never going to know.
For the WTF Happened to This Horror Movie series, I dug into the making of my favorite Halloween sequel, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers from 1988:
Halloween 4 script:
Making a Halloween III without iconic slasher Michael Myers hadn’t worked out very well. The plan had been to turn Halloween into an anthology series – but that plan went down in flames. Fans were disappointed. The Halloween franchise was tarnished so badly, major studios didn’t want to touch it. Michael Myers needed to come back for Halloween 4, and the filmmakers had to make sure his return was a triumphant one. And they did, which is why we’re still getting Michael Myers movies to this day. How did they accomplish their mission? Let’s find out in this episode of What the F*ck Happened to This Horror Movie?
Halloween began when producer Irwin Yablans contacted director John Carpenter about making a movie called The Babysitter Murders. The concept was sold right there in the title: it was going to be about some kind of madman stalking and killing babysitters. The title changed when the decision was made to have the events of the film play out in one night. The night of Halloween. Carpenter wrote the script with his then-girlfriend Debra Hill, who also produced the film alongside Yablans. The madman they created was Michael Myers, who murdered his teenage sister on Halloween in 1963, when he was just six years old. For fifteen years, Myers sits in Smith’s Grove Sanitarium, silent, staring at a wall. Creeping out his doctor Sam Loomis with his intensity. Then he escapes just in time for Halloween 1978. With Loomis following his trail, he returns to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois. Where he stalks babysitter Laurie Strode and murders her friends. He almost kills Laurie – but then Loomis shows up and shoots his patient six times. Moustapha Akkad provided the three hundred thousand dollar budget for Halloween, which turned out to be a great investment. Halloween was a huge hit.
So of course everyone wanted a sequel. Everyone except Carpenter and Hill. They wanted to focus on original projects. But Halloween II did present a chance for them to make some money, and they were still owed some cash from the first movie. So they agreed to make a sequel. Legendary producer Dino De Laurentiis had been very impressed by Halloween, so he bought his way into Halloween II and got the project set up at a major studio. Universal Pictures. Carpenter has been very open about the fact that he found it difficult to write the script for Halloween II. He realized there wasn’t any more story to tell. So he just had Michael Myers continue going after Laurie Strode on Halloween night 1978. Following her to the hospital, where he proceeds to slash his way through the staff. Carpenter was so desperate to get some kind of substance into the story, he even dropped in a twist. Which he now regrets. A twist that reveals the acts that appeared to be random in the first movie weren’t random at all. Michael was specifically targeting Laurie because she is his long-lost sister and he wants to kill her just like he killed their other sister in 1963. Carpenter didn’t direct Halloween II himself, he gave first-timer Rick Rosenthal the chance to bring this one to the screen. Then handled some reshoots himself to enhance the shocks and scares. And in the end, he tried to make sure he would never have to worry about Michael Myers again by having both the slasher and Doctor Loomis get caught in an explosion. There’s no way they’d be coming back from that.
But Halloween II was a hit, and Dino De Laurentiis had it in his contract that he could produce another sequel. Carpenter and Hill agreed to shepherd Halloween III to the screen, but not as a Michael Myers slasher movie. That story really was over now. Their idea was to turn Halloween into an anthology franchise, a series of movies that would only be connected by the fact that they’re set on Halloween. The first movie’s production designer Tommy Lee Wallace was hired to direct and rewrite a script that was written by the uncredited Nigel Kneale. The result was the madness of Halloween III: Season of the Witch. The story of a toymaker who harnesses the power of Stonehenge to turn Halloween masks into deadly weapons. On Halloween night, any kid who watches a commercial for his company Silver Shamrock while wearing a Silver Shamrock mask will be killed. The mask will turn their heads into a pile of bugs and snakes. Halloween III is considered a cult classic now, but it made substantially less at the box office than its predecessors had. Fans were not happy to receive a Halloween movie without Michael Myers in it.
Halloween III marked the end of the deal with Dino De Laurentiis and Universal. And after seeing their anthology idea fail, Carpenter and Hill were done with Halloween as well. But they weren’t the only ones making decisions for the franchise. Yablans and Akkad were both still rights holders as well, and they continued pushing for another sequel. One that would get the series back on track. Halloween was a lucrative property, they couldn’t just sit on it. But years went by without Carpenter or Hill showing any interest in making a sequel, and the rights holders all had to be in agreement to get a new movie into production. Then Cannon Films offered Carpenter a multi-film deal with the condition that one of the movies he’d make for them would be Halloween 4. So he took the deal and hired Dennis Etchison, who had written the novelizations of Halloween 2 and 3 under the name Jack Martin, to write the script. They knew Michael Myers would have to be brought back in order for the film to be a success. The question was, how could he return?
Etchison’s idea was to turn Michael Myers into a supernatural force. The human side of him was dead, burned away. But the evil spirit that lived within him was still around. It feeds on fear, and is brought back into the world because the adults of Haddonfield are still so afraid of Michael Myers. They banned Halloween after what happened in 1978, but as the tenth anniversary approaches their kids are desperate to celebrate the holiday again. An all-night horror movie marathon is set up at a drive-in just outside of town. And that event is crashed by this supernatural version of Michael Myers, who wears a black T-shirt and a black coat instead of the usual coveralls. He kills everyone at the drive-in marathon while they sit in their cars. When the police show up and open fire on the slasher, it doesn’t take him down. It makes him more powerful. And taller. Michael gets bigger and bigger as the bullets hit him, growing to a height of twelve feet. But then he gets caught in an explosion again, and that gets rid of him. Carpenter worked closely with Etchison as he wrote multiple drafts of his script full of strange events and trippy nightmare sequences. He contacted The Howling director Joe Dante about taking the helm. There was a chance Halloween 4 was going to start filming in April of 1987. But while Carpenter was happy with the approach Etchison had taken to the story, there were others who were not. Namely, Yablans and Akkad. They wanted Michael Myers back, but without this supernatural baggage. They wanted him to be a flesh and blood killer like he was in the first two movies. So they blocked Etchison’s version of Halloween 4 from happening.
That was the last straw for Carpenter and Hill. They decided to sell off their stake in the franchise… and their share was purchased by Akkad. Who also bought Yablan’s share of the rights. Akkad was now in complete control. And a Halloween 4 that would be more along the lines of the first film in the series was on the fast track. At this point, five years after the release of Halloween III, Hollywood studios didn’t have any interest in producing or distributing a new sequel. So Akkad would produce and distribute HHalloween 4 himself, through his company Trancas International. An open call was put out for story pitches. Anyone could bring a Halloween 4 idea to Trancas, whether they were in the Writers Guild or not. Submissions came pouring in. As revealed in the book Taking Shape II: The Lost Halloween Sequels by Dustin McNeill and Travis Mullins, one script that was submitted had Michael Myers going after Laurie Strode in Chicago. That script, by Daniel Kenney and Marc Allyn Medina, found that Laurie was married and had a daughter. She was working for a magazine, putting together an article on a famous rock star. And when Michael returns, he kills the rock star, steals a leather outfit from his closet, and goes joyriding in his Porsche.
That script was rejected because Jamie Lee Curtis wouldn’t be reprising the role of Laurie Strode. The winning script was sent in by Dhani Lipsius, Larry Rattner, and Benjamin Ruffner. Those writers delivered exactly the sort of set-up Akkad wanted to see: a sequel that would echo Halloween 1. This time, Michael Myers would escape from a sanitarium ten years after the events of the first two films – and since Laurie has passed away, his new target would be her young daughter. Doctor Loomis would once again be on Michael’s trail, with Donald Pleasence on board to play Loomis for the third time. And there would be a twist ending in which Michael’s young niece – after surviving a night of being pursued by her homicidal uncle – attacks someone with a knife herself. Akkad was confident that the Lipsius, Rattner, and Ruffner script was a solid foundation for Halloween 4. It just needed a bit more work.
Playwright Shem Bitterman was hired to do a rewrite of the script. And Bitterman brought some twisted ideas to the table. In his version of the script, Michael’s niece isn’t afraid of him. She thinks she’s misunderstood and wants to play and bond with her uncle. Like the script written by Kenney and Medina, this one had Michael pairing his iconic mask with a wardrobe change. But in this case, his stolen clothes were from a priest who picked him up hitch-hiking. In the finished film, it’s Doctor Loomis who gets a ride from a man of God. Bitterman’s revision didn’t make it to the screen, but he would get another chance when he was hired to work on Halloween 5 the following year. Some of the ideas he originally had for part 4 did end up in the next sequel.
The job of directing Halloween 4 went to Dwight H. Little, who was a fan of the franchise and had his agent pursue the gig for him. Little’s movies KGB: The Secret War and Getting Even hadn’t made much of an impact, but he had just finished filming an action adventure movie called Bloodstone. He was able to bond with Akkad over that one, because it reminded Akkad of a film he had made himself, The Lion of the Desert. Little also had the vision Akkad wanted for Halloween 4. He wanted to try to bring back the style and tone of the first movie, while also making sure the film would have the proper Halloween atmosphere. Little was from Ohio, so he knew exactly how a Midwestern Halloween should look and feel on screen. He wasn’t satisfied with the Lipsius, Rattner, and Ruffner script, though. It’s not clear if he ever saw the Bitterman drafts, but he knew who he wanted to have work on the script. His friend and fellow Ohioan Alan B. McElroy.
McElroy was hired to rewrite Halloween 4 on February 25th, 1988. And he was in a tough spot. Not only was the movie set to start filming in April, but the Writers Guild was going to go on strike as of March 7th. As a member of the guild, McElroy wouldn’t be able to work on the script past that date. So he knocked out his version of the script in just eleven days. His rewrite was so substantial, he receives the sole screenplay credit on the finished film, and also shares story credit with Lipsius, Rattner, and Ruffner.
As far as Carpenter was concerned, Michael Myers was burned down to ash at the end of Halloween II. But Halloween 4 tells us that he made it out of the hospital alive. He was so severely burned that he has been in a coma for the last ten years. In that time, Laurie Strode has gotten married and had a daughter named Jamie. Sadly, Laurie and her husband were both killed in a car accident around the end of 1987. Jamie, who is said to be seven years old, now lives in Haddonfield with the Carruthers family and has a teenage foster sister named Rachel. It’s common knowledge that Jamie is the niece of the infamous Michael Myers. She’s teased and bullied at school for being an orphan, and the fact that her uncle is the boogeyman. Although she shouldn’t know what her uncle looked like while wearing a mask and carrying a knife, she has recurring nightmares about him. She calls him the Nightmare Man. But as Halloween 1988 approaches, she wants to celebrate the holiday like any other kid in town. She wants Rachel to take her trick-or-treating, since their parents will be attending a party that night. And when it’s time to get a costume, she just happens to pick a clown costume, like Michael was wearing when he killed his sister in 1963. Unfortunately, Michael returns to ruin Jamie’s holiday fun. The head of the Ridgemont sanitarium he has been in for ten years decided Halloween Eve would be the perfect time for a patient transfer. He’s sending Michael back to Smith’s Grove, the sanitarium he escaped from in 1978. But in the midst of the transfer, the medics make the mistake of mentioning that Michael has one living relative. A niece living in his hometown. That wakes him from his coma and he escapes. Once Doctor Loomis hears about the escape, he knows exactly where Michael is going. He follows – but is slowed down by some car trouble. Because Michael causes his car to explode when they cross paths at a gas station. Other versions of the script had Michael keeping his classic mask but getting a wardrobe change. The Halloween 4 that was made puts him back in coveralls, which he steals from a mechanic at the gas station.
When Loomis reaches Haddonfield, thanks to a ride from a drunken reverend, he enlists the help of the local sheriff. While Etchison’s draft called for Sheriff Brackett to return from the first two films, the final draft tells us that Brackett retired and moved to Florida. The sheriff in Haddonfield now in Ben Meeker. But just like Brackett in the first movie, Meeker has a teenage daughter who is going to end up becoming one of Michael Myers’ victims. Kelly Meeker also happens to be in a love triangle with Rachel Carruthers and Rachel’s boyfriend Brady. Who works at the pharmacy Michael steals his fresh mask from. Loomis, Meeker, and Rachel do their best to keep Jamie safe from her uncle. Which is quite difficult to do, given that Michael is even able to massacre the entire Haddonfield police force. With no more cops around other than Meeker, Loomis stirs up a vigilante mob in hopes they’ll be able to stop Michael. Jamie is taken to the Meeker home, where the doors are locked and the windows are nailed shut. They don’t realize Michael is already in the house with them. More murder and chase sequences ensue.
It’s impressive that McElroy was able to write the script so quickly, but he did have the foundation of an existing script to work from. And it was also a benefit that Halloween 4 is basically a reworking of the first movie. They just had a five million dollar budget to work with this time instead of a three hundred thousand dollar budget. So while there are moments in part 4 that are similar to part 1, they play out in a bigger, flashier way. For example, in the first movie we see that Michael got his coveralls from a tow truck driver. Loomis finds his hospital gown at the tow truck, and the driver’s corpse is laying on the ground nearby. In part 4, we see Michael kill the mechanic he gets the coveralls from. Loomis shows up to find the mechanic’s corpse and other dead bodies. He fires some shots at Michael. Then Michael speeds away in a tow truck and causes the gas station to explode on his way out. Another example: at the end of part 1, Loomis fires six shots into Michael, knocking him off a balcony. In part 4, Meeker and state police open fire on Michael with handguns and a shotgun, knocking him into a well.
Pleasence liked the script for Halloween 4 and agreed to reprise the role of Loomis early on. He told Fangoria magazine that he decided to be in the movie not only because he was available and the money was good, but because “The story of Michael and Loomis continues to be a very good one. The series could have easily turned into a pointless exercise in moneymaking and greed, but the script is very good and care has been taken with the development of the characters.”
Dwight H. Little built a strong cast around Pleasence. While future Sabrina the Teenage Witch star Melissa Joan Hart auditioned for the role of Jamie, it ended up going to Danielle Harris, who turned eleven during filming. The child actress delivered such a good and endearing performance, Harris still has a big following in the horror community and is considered to be a genre icon. Rebecca Schaeffer, who would be tragically murdered by a stalker in 1989, was up for the role of Rachel Carruthers. But Little cast Ellie Cornell, who turned Rachel into a fan favorite character. Sasha Jenson was cast as Rachel’s boyfriend Brady. Kathleen Kinmont as Kelly, Rachel’s rival for Brady’s affections. Beau Starr plays Sheriff Meeker. The role of Michael Myers initially went to stuntman Tom Morga, who had previously played Jason Voorhees and Roy Burns in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning and Leatherface for a moment during the first kills in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. But his time as Michael Myers didn’t go smoothly. Scenes shot with Morga can be seen in the finished film. When Michael kills the mechanic and causes trouble for Loomis at the gas station, that’s Morga. That’s him when Michael impales Kelly with a shotgun. And when he scares Jamie in the pharmacy. When Loomis tries to hide with Jamie in the schoolhouse and Michael attacks him, that’s also Morga. Some have said that Morga was fired from Halloween 4 because Akkad didn’t like his performance. But in the school scene, you get a hint at another reason. It’s tied into why the mask looks so strange when Michael attacks Loomis.
The original Michael Myers mask was a modified William Shatner mask from Don Post Studios. So when going into production on Halloween 4, makeup technician Ken Horn ordered a batch of six modified Shatner masks from the company. But when the masks showed up on set, they didn’t look like Michael Myers. They were pink and had white hair. As you can still see in the school scene. So Horn had to paint the masks white and dye the hair. On the set one day, a producer told him to do another modification before they shot the scene. He wanted the eyeholes to be made bigger. Horn explained that it couldn’t be done in the middle of filming because the mask would need a paint touch-up after the modification. If Morga put the mask on while the paint was fresh, it would knock him out. Morga backed him up on this. And the situation blew up into an argument that ended with Horn and Morga being fired. Luckily for Horn, a Fangoria journalist he was friends with was on set at the time and demanded that Horn be re-hired. Morga wasn’t so lucky.
So a call went out for someone big to play Michael Myers, and that call was answered by George P. Wilbur. He hadn’t seen the first two Halloweens yet, but he caught up on them and gave himself a crash course on how to move as Michael. Once he got on set, some extra bulk was added to his frame with hockey pads that he wore under the coveralls. In the movie we get a mixture of Wilbur and Morga – but it’s Wilbur playing Michael during some of the most famous scenes. Like the sequence where he chases Jamie and Rachel through the Meeker house and up onto the roof. This wasn’t as dangerous as it looks, because Wilbur and the actors weren’t really on top of a house. The roof was built in an open field, the gutters close to the ground, and the highest point was still under twenty feet. But Cornell got injured filming the roof chase anyway when a nail cut into her torso. This sequence was written as being even more intense in the script, as the Meeker house was supposed to be on fire by the time the characters are up on the roof. But the fire aspect of the roof chase was removed on the way to filming. The school chase was also more involved in McElroy’s script. There was supposed to be a moment where Jamie hides under a desk in a classroom. Michael can’t find her, so he starts flipping all of the desks over. While that didn’t make it into Halloween 4, the idea was used ten years later for a scene in Halloween H20.
Makeup technician Ken Horn ran into another complication on set when Pleasence watched some footage. Since Loomis was caught in the same hospital fire that put Michael into a coma, the character now has a burn scar on his face. And the actor was appalled to see that the first design of the scar made it look like he had a fried egg on his face. So the scar was re-designed and changes throughout the movie, depending on when the scene was shot.
Moustapha Akkad was not a fan of gore in movies, and he wanted Halloween 4 to have less bloodshed than part 2 had. Even though this sequel has a higher bodycount, he thought the kills should be presented in the same way as in the first movie. When Fangoria was on set, part 4 was hyped up based on two selling points: it had a twist ending, and there would be no gore. Well, the twist ending remains intact. The film does end with Jamie – seeming to be under the influence of Michael in some way – picking up a pair of scissors and stabbing her foster mother. To the horror of everyone, especially Loomis. But there did end up being more gore than was originally intended. Audience response from a test screening indicated that viewers felt the movie wasn’t edgy enough. They wanted to see more carnage. So the filmmakers did what they could to deliver that. Additional dates of filming were scheduled so extra blood could be supplied by FX artist John Carl Buechler, who directed Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood and worked on A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master this same year. So when you see Michael stick his thumb into someone’s forehead, or tear open the neck of a man who’s giving Jamie and Rachel a ride, you can thank Buechler and the test screening audience for that.
Halloween 4 had plenty of hurdles to clear on its way to the screen. But the end product was worth all of the trouble. This movie was exactly what it needed to be. A simple stalk-and-slash story that brought Michael Myers back just the way he was before. Laurie Strode wasn’t present, but Little and McElroy introduced us to some interesting new characters. People we could root for and care about. And they gave Pleasence a chance to dazzle us with another awesome Dr. Loomis performance. While the follow-ups to this film would get bogged down with unnecessary mysteries and supernatural elements, Little wanted his movie to be the straightforward story of a flesh and blood maniac wreaking havoc on Halloween night. He explained the logic of the film’s version of Michael Myers to Starburst magazine, “The reason he got out of the ambulance is because we needed to get him free. The reason he goes to the diner and kills the mechanic is so he can get his outfit, his coveralls. The reason he blows up the gas station is so that we can take down the telephone lines. The reason he goes to the drug store is so that he can get his mask. The reason he throws Bucky into the powerlines is so that we can knock the power down in the town. We wanted to make everything about his slow approach to Haddonfield. We wanted everything to be believable. We didn’t want it to be tongue-in-cheek.”
Halloween 4’s effectiveness is enhanced by the fact that Little really was able to capture the look and feel of a Midwestern Halloween on film. Even though the movie was shot during the spring, it’s convincing as Halloween. The decorations. The fallen leaves, which were spread around the set by greenskeeper Mike Lookinland – who is better known for playing Bobby Brady on The Brady Bunch. The pumpkins, some of which were painted squashes since pumpkins weren’t available at the time. The movie was shot in Utah, which helped with the small town Midwestern feel. The previous movies had been shot just outside Los Angeles. One of the most popular things about Halloween 4 is the opening title sequence, which immediately envelops the viewer in Halloween atmosphere. Even fans of the franchise who aren’t so fond of Halloween 4 will admit that the opening montage is a thing of beauty.
In his audio commentary, Little revealed that the idea behind showing these images – Halloween decorations in rural areas, shots of farmland – was meant to be a nod to the origins of the holiday. “We were trying to get to the idea of what Halloween was and how that holiday began. We started going through all these books and research materials and realized that it was part of an agrarian tradition. Starting in New England at the end of the harvest season. When the crops were all harvested and winter was coming. It was kind of a macabre festival. So we found these agricultural images and we wanted to go back to the roots of the Halloween tradition.” But even if you don’t know the reasoning behind these shots, they’re still great to look at.
Not long after this sequence is done, the theme music kicks in and we’re fully immersed in the return of Michael Myers. John Carpenter had composed the scores for the previous films, but he had washed his hands of the Halloween movies by now. So the filmmakers got the next best composer they could find: Alan Howarth, who worked alongside Carpenter on several of his movies. For the three films that make up the Jamie Lloyd trilogy, Howarth kept the Halloween sound alive in Carpenter’s absence.
Michael Myers himself had been absent for most of the ‘80s, and movie-goers gave him a warm welcome when he came back in 1988. Halloween 4 made almost eighteen million dollars at the box office, over three times the budget Akkad had put into it. It was so successful, Halloween 5 was immediately given a greenlight. Part 4 was released on October 21st, 1988, and Halloween 5 was in theatres less than a year later, on October 13th, 1989. That one wasn’t as well-received as 4 was… but that’s a story told in a different episode. For now, let’s just celebrate the success that Little, McElroy, and the cast and crew had with this sequel. They were tasked with bringing an icon back to the screen, and did so with a well-crafted movie that many fans love and continue to enjoy to this day, more than thirty years later. Michael Myers made his return – and it was so triumphant, it has allowed him to come back many more times.
And for the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series, I wrote about my favorite werewolf movie, 2000's Ginger Snaps:
Ginger Snaps script:
INTRO: Physical transformation. A troubling amount of hair growing in disturbing places. Raging hormones. Intense urges you’ve never felt before. Is this a description of what it’s like to become a werewolf? Or just what it’s like to go through puberty? For Ginger Fitzgerald, it’s both. She’s entering womanhood and has been infected with lycanthropy. That’s the story at the center of the 2000 horror film Ginger Snaps, one of the greatest werewolf movies ever made and the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw.
CREATORS / CAST: Director John Fawcett started building the concept of Ginger Snaps in the early ‘90s. He knew he wanted to follow in the footsteps of his fellow Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg and make a body horror movie. To tell the story of some kind of transformation. But beyond showing the gross visuals of a physical transformation, he also wanted to dig into the changes the character goes through psychologically. And he knew exactly who he wanted to have at the heart of the story. An image had occurred to him of two teenage Goth girls. In his mind, he saw them as the sort of characters you might see in a drawing by Tim Burton or Edward Gorey. Having these girls in mind helped Fawcett pick which horror sub-genre he wanted to work in. He was going to make a werewolf movie. Because werewolf movies hadn’t been done well very often, and there had never been one that centered on teenage girls.
Since his lead characters would be female, he wanted a woman to write the script. He and screenwriter Karen Walton were familiar with each other’s work and had been wanting to do something together. So Fawcett pitched the idea to her. Walton was hesitant to get involved at first because she wasn’t a horror fan. She had found most of the horror movies she had seen to be disappointing on the story level. And frustrating in the way they depicted female characters. Fawcett was able to convince her to join the project by telling her to write a horror movie that she would want to see. One that she would find satisfying. So she proceeded to do just that. Walton also helped Fawcett find a clever title for his movie. For a while, the working title was something generic like Wolf Girls. But then Walton spotted a package of ginger snaps cookies while she was working on the script. That’s when she decided to call the story Ginger Snaps and changed the name of the transforming character to Ginger.
The female leads Fawcett envisioned ended up being named Brigitte and Ginger Fitzgerald. They’re outsiders trapped in the hell of suburbia, living in a place called Bailey Downs, disgusted by the world around them. They don’t have friends at school, they barely talk to their parents. Their father hardly ever talks anyway. All they need is each other. They have even made a blood pact with each other: “Out by sixteen or dead in this scene, but together forever.” At one point, Fawcett and Walton had considered making the girls twins. But Walton felt that it’s already unfair enough that people expect twins to be like each other, and she didn’t want to add to that cliché. So Brigitte and Ginger are just incredibly close in age – close enough that they’re the same age for a while. Ginger is fifteen, almost sixteen. Brigitte has just turned fifteen. These strongly bonded sisters begin to be torn apart when they come face-to-face with the Beast of Bailey Downs. The ravenous creature that has been killing the dogs in their neighborhood. Everyone has thought the Beast was a wild canine, but it’s actually a werewolf. And it attacks Ginger. Brigitte manages to help Ginger get away from the Beast before it can kill her. As the girls are running for their lives, the creature gets smashed by a van. And by the time the girls make it home, Ginger’s wounds are already healing. So she convinces Brigitte not to call 911 or tell their parents what happened. Life goes on, but it gets very different for the Fitzgerald sisters after that. Ginger is changing.
Fawcett and Walton knew they were going to make a werewolf movie, but they didn’t want to make a typical entry in the sub-genre. They threw out the Hollywood rules. The transformation isn’t brought about by the full moon. You don’t need silver bullets to kill werewolves. They are animals that can be killed the same way as any other creature. Movies often say lycanthropy is brought about by a curse. In Ginger Snaps, it’s treated like an infection. By being bitten and clawed by the werewolf, Ginger has been infected. But she also passes it on to another character through unprotected sex. Since this is an infection rather than a curse, the characters are able to search for a natural cure. There has to be a cure, right? Otherwise there would be werewolves all over the place. Going over the usual rules, thinking of how these things would or wouldn’t apply to their story and characters, Fawcett and Walton discussed the lunar cycle. That got them thinking about menstrual cycles. And that’s when the most clever aspect of Ginger Snaps started being worked into the script.
The gradual werewolf transformation in the movie is a metaphor for puberty. The changes females go through in adolescence. Walton laid the foundation for this in an early draft of the script, and story editor Ken Chubb helped her push the metaphor even further in revisions. A late bloomer, Ginger begins her first period moments before the werewolf attacks her. An element that brings to mind some interpretations of the Little Red Riding Hood story. Ginger is entering womanhood – and leaving Brigitte behind. Now she has to deal with all the trouble and discomfort that comes with periods. Cramps, bleeding. A cheerful nurse tells her all about it. She also has to deal with the mortifying aspects of going through puberty. Like hair growing in places you wish it wouldn’t. She just happens to be growing hair on the claw marks the werewolf left on her chest. And she’s growing a tail. And dewclaws. Her fingernails are changing. She starts having urges she never had before. She enjoys the attention she gets from boys. And becomes interested in sex. She’s also interested in tearing living creatures to pieces.
While Ginger is embarrassed by the hair and the tail at first, she comes to accept it. She doesn’t mind becoming a werewolf. It’s making her stronger. But Brigitte spends the film desperately trying to save her sister. To cure her. To avoid the full werewolf transformation she suspects is coming twenty-eight days after the attack. A transformation that will occur on Halloween night. She seeks the help of the person who accidentally killed the other werewolf with his van: Sam. A slightly older boy who works as a landscaper at their high school. And sells weed to the high school kids. Sam is surprisingly nice and helpful, suggesting potential cures like pure silver or monkshood, also known as wolfsbane. But Ginger isn’t pleased to see Brigitte talking to this guy. She’s supposed to be the only person in her sister’s life. For a while, Walton actually resisted the idea of making the helpful character a male. She didn’t want this to be another movie where a boy comes in and saves the day. When she first started working on the script, the helpful character was a tough, tattooed female school nurse. There was a chance the singer Bif Naked would play the role. Then Walton realized the story could benefit from putting a boy in between Brigitte and Ginger. Because nothing can break the bond between two teen girls like a fight over a boy. Especially when one of the girls is a bloodthirsty werewolf.
Brigitte and Ginger are very unique characters, which made their roles quite difficult to cast. Auditions were held in Los Angeles, New York, Montreal, Vancouver, and Toronto over the course of six months. Online trivia claims that Sarah Polley and Natasha Lyonne were offered roles in the film. Fawcett made inquiries about Laura Harris after seeing her in The Faculty. But the lead roles ended up going to two actresses who auditioned in Vancouver on the same day: Emily Perkins was cast as Brigitte and Katharine Isabelle as Ginger. It’s ironic that Perkins was cast as the younger sister, because she’s four years older than Isabelle. She does look younger than she is, though. Fawcett really thought she wasn’t even sixteen yet, but she was actually already in her twenties. Perkins and Isabelle came to Ginger Snaps with a pre-existing bond, as they had known each other for years. The filmmakers realized they were perfect for the roles as soon as they saw them, but there was a problem to deal with: Perkins had cut her hair between the audition and the start of production. So she had to wear a noticeable wig in the movie.
A strong supporting cast was assembled around Perkins and Isabelle, each actor equally perfect for their roles. Kris Lemche plays Sam. Jesse Moss is Jason, the guy Ginger carelessly infects with lycanthropy. Danielle Hampton is Brigitte and Ginger’s field hockey rival Trina, who is infatuated with Sam and doesn’t like that he’s showing the Fitzgerald sisters attention. John Bourgeois is Brigitte and Ginger’s mostly silent father Henry. Peter Keleghan, Lindsay Leese, and Pak-Kwong Ho make memorable appearances as the school guidance counselor, the cheerful nurse, and the janitor. Mimi Rogers plays Brigitte and Ginger’s mom Pamela, who desperately wants to bond with her daughters.
Some were surprised that Rogers would do a low budget Canadian horror movie, but she had a great read on the material. She knew exactly what they were making. She told Fangoria magazine, “On the surface, it’s a genre movie. It’s a werewolf movie, but it’s much smarter than that. For people who are more intellectually oriented, it will work, and for more traditional horror fans it will also work. There are so many metaphors. … There’s a certain perception about women that when they reach puberty and begin menstruating, they become monsters. This is very much hormonal and visceral – the idea that adolescence is a time of confusion and rage, and hormones do make you kind of crazy. So tying in this idea of transformation and metamorphosis and making it about women makes sense.”
BACKGROUND: Years of work went into getting the Ginger Snaps ready for production – but not everyone saw the potential in the project that Rogers did. It actually faced strong opposition when it was heading into production. Opposition that wouldn’t have been there if it had started filming in the fall of 1998, as originally intended. Canadian distribution was secured in early ‘98, and Trimark was interested in handling distribution in the rest of the world. But the negotiations with Trimark took so long, Ginger Snaps missed the deadline to receive funding from Telefilm Canada. They could either start filming with only sixty percent of the budget in place, or they could wait until the next fiscal year. They chose to wait. And while they were waiting, Trimark dropped out. Thankfully, Unapix Entertainment and Lionsgate quickly stepped into their place. And in 1999, Ginger Snaps got its Telefilm Canada funding. Sadly, the school shootings in Columbine, Colorado and Taber, Alberta had happened by the time casting began. Casting directors turned down the project because they found it to be in poor taste. A news report that Telefilm was funding what was described as a teen slasher movie outraged vocal members of the Canadian public. The debate got so intense in the press, Telefilm had to release a statement defending the project. It moved ahead with a budget of four-point-two million – but Fawcett did have trouble finding a school that would allow them to film there.
Filming took place in the suburbs of Toronto over six weeks, lasting from October 25th to December 6th of 1999. The cast and crew had to work a lot of long days to get things wrapped up on schedule. Sixteen hour days became the norm, pushing the start time further back each day. Eighteen days into the shoot, the crew found themselves blasting high wattage lights on set to film a daylight greenhouse scene in the middle of the night. Working so much in the cold nights of winter also caused illnesses to spread through the production. Cast and crew were stricken with the flu at one point, with laryngitis at another. At the time, Katharine Isabelle described working on Ginger Snaps as the most difficult thing she had done in her life. She had it the worst of anyone, because she’s the one who had to wear the werewolf prosthetics when the transformation gets to an advanced stage.
Speaking with Ginger-Snaps.com, Isabelle said the makeup took “five hours to apply and two hours to remove. … Because my whole face was covered my skin couldn’t breathe, so my nose would run constantly. As a result I had to have Q-tips stuck up my nose the whole time! I dread to think what people thought when they saw this wolf walking around with 2 Q-tips up her nose! It was fun, though.” In the press materials, Isabelle was also quoted as saying, “All day long I’m covered in blood. I can’t sit down, I can’t move, I can’t walk. With the contacts I can’t see, with the teeth I can’t talk without a lisp, with the hair I have to scrub it out with Borax and dishwashing liquid. There’s glue on my face and blood in my ears and my legs and my face are stained pink. It’s tedious. It looks pretty cool in the end, though, so that makes it all worthwhile.”
Fawcett insisted on using practical effects on Ginger Snaps. While Cube director Vincenzo Natali was involved with the project, working on storyboards and designs, it was prosthetic effects supervisor and creature designer Paul Jones who brought the werewolf action to the screen. And Jones definitely brought his own vision to the concept of a werewolf, choosing to show skin and muscle rather than covering the beast in fur. The werewolf isn’t always entirely convincing, but there is some impressive design and animatronic work on display in the film. And the scenes involving the Ginger werewolf are so deeply emotional, Perkins’ performance as Brigitte makes you believe in it even if the wolf’s head does look rubbery.
Ginger Snaps had its premiere at the Munich Fantasy Filmfest in August of 2000, then started making its way out into the world. Although it generated positive word-of-mouth through festival screenings, the theatrical release wasn’t handled in the most effective way. The movie was the fifth highest grossing Canadian film of 2001 – but it only had to make about five hundred thousand dollars to achieve that. It did well in Australia and the UK, despite being banned from some UK cinemas due to its mixture of teens and violence. But it came and went in the United States. Ginger Snaps’ biggest success came when it reached the home video market. On VHS and DVD, it was one of the fastest selling horror films of the time. It did so well, it even earned a sequel – Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed – and, very unexpectedly, a prequel set in the 1800s, Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning. There’s sort of a Bailey Downs Cinematic Universe now, because the anthology film A Christmas Horror Story and the TV show Orphan Black also partially take place in that suburb.
Ginger Snaps quickly found an appreciative audience, and its cult following has been growing over the last twenty years. Now the horror fans who first saw the movie when they were around the same age as Brigitte and Ginger are creating a new generation of fans by showing the movie to their teenage children. Ginger Snaps has gained the reputation of being one of the best werewolf movies ever made… but still needs to be seen by more genre fans.
WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: Making a good werewolf movie is not easy to do, as is clearly evident from how lackluster so many entries in the sub-genre are. Ginger Snaps works because of Fawcett and Walton’s dedication to character. Walton wrote a great script and made sure that Brigitte and Ginger come across as real people with depth. We come to care about them and Sam, we get invested in seeing how the story is going to play out. And the cast did an incredible job of bringing the characters to life.
The performances given by Perkins and Isabelle in this movie rank up there with the all-time great horror movie performances. Isabelle as the out-of-control monster girl and Perkins as the sensible heroine. Any scene that involves Brigitte and Ginger interacting with each other or one of the other characters is fun to watch – and thankfully, at least one of the sisters is in nearly every scene. It’s a joy to see these actors inhabit their characters and bounce smart, often amusing dialogue off of each other. Ginger is the title character, but Brigitte really carries the story on her shoulders. She has a transformation of her own, going from a meek girl who prefers to stay in her sister’s shadow to finding her inner strength. Becoming her own person. It’s fascinating to watch the changes both of the Fitzgerald sisters go through. And the movie’s use of a werewolf transformation as a metaphor for adolescence is very smart and handled perfectly.
There is a dark and melancholy tone to the film at times, enhanced by the excellent score that was composed by Michael Shields. But in the midst of the horror and drama, it also has a terrific sense of humor. And it earns more points through the fact that it’s set during the Halloween season, with the climax happening on Halloween night. The fall feeling is very strong throughout the film, and is even helped out by the orange glow that comes from the streetlights in Bailey Downs. Making Ginger Snaps a good horror movie to watch every October.
BEST SCENE(S): There are intense scenes throughout the movie. Starting with the scene where Ginger is attacked by the werewolf in front of Brigitte. There’s a very twisted sequence where Brigitte finds that Ginger – who is on the edge of the full transformation – has killed someone at their school. And proceeds to kill another person while Brigitte is forced to watch. There’s also a lengthy climactic sequence where Brigitte and Sam face off with the Ginger-wolf in the Fitzgerald house. They want to try to inject the wolf with a monkshood solution in hopes of curing the infection and turning Ginger back to normal. But it’s not easy to do. Especially since Brigitte has gotten infected herself at this point. Which is why the climax looks a bit different from the rest of the movie: since Brigitte is infected, Fawcett wanted to show these scenes through her perspective. So the last reel of the film has the bleach bypass appearance, with increased contrast and graininess.
Ginger is only slightly wolfy in one of the best scenes, where the sisters’ field hockey enemy Trina Sinclair comes over to their house to confront them. This doesn’t go well for Trina, who ends up dead and stuck in the chest freezer. A freezer that Pamela needs to put items in when she arrives home just moments later. In an effort to keep her mom from noticing the corpse in her freezer, Brigitte asks the one question she knows Pamela would be most delighted to answer: “What do guys want?”
PARTING SHOT: Ginger Snaps is a brilliant film that is at turns unnerving, gross, heartbreaking, and hilarious. It may not have the best werewolf you’ve ever seen, but it still manages to be one of the best werewolf movies. Because Fawcett, Walton, the cast and the crew did an excellent job of bringing a clever story and great characters to the screen. It’s a Halloween classic that deserves a spot in any horror fan’s October viewing rotation. So if you haven’t seen it yet, seek it out. Take a trip to Bailey Downs. Meet the Fitzgerald sisters. And watch their lives get ripped apart.
More video scripts have been written, so another batch of videos will be shared here on Life Between Frames eventually. In the meantime, keep an eye on JoBlo Horror Originals and JoBlo Originals!
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