There is no genre more honest about adolescence than horror. Not drama, not comedy, not the well-meaning coming-of-age film where someone learns something and a record plays. Horror. Because horror understands that growing up is not a gentle process. It is loud and messy and frequently unsettling, it happens to your body before it happens to your brain, and the people around you are either oblivious or actively making it worse. Horror gets this. Horror has always gotten this. For my generation, the most well known and beloved examples of the horrors of being a teenager was Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The TV show that is, not the often overlooked movie.
With The Ginger Snaps Trilogy Standard Edition Blu-ray arriving on 25 May from Second Sight Films, it feels like the right moment to look at the films that use genre not as escapism but as the most precise language available for what it actually feels like to be seventeen and furious and absolutely losing your mind.
Carrie (1976)
Brian De Palma’s adaptation of Stephen King’s debut novel remains the template. Sissy Spacek’s Carrie White is bullied, smothered by a fanatically religious mother, and completely unprepared for her body’s changes, because nobody in her life has seen fit to prepare her for anything. The telekinesis is a metaphor so clean it barely needs explaining, and the prom sequence remains one of cinema’s great acts of catharsis. What makes Carrie endure is not the horror, it is the sorrow. You are not watching a monster. You are watching a girl who was never given a single reason not to become one. Often remade, yet never rivalled, the original is a horror classic, and is set for a TV series remake from Mike Flanagan later this year on Amazon.
The Craft (1996)
Four teenage girls find power in a coven and promptly discover that power is, like most things at sixteen, considerably harder to control than anticipated. Andrew Fleming’s film is frequently dismissed as a glossy 90s curio, which is both unfair and inaccurate, and the dismissal usually says more about the person doing it than the film itself.
Sarah, Nancy, Bonnie, and Rochelle are not a coven because they are evil. They are a coven because high school is hostile and this is the only place their strangeness is an asset rather than a liability. The magic is almost incidental. What the film is really interested in is the moment belonging curdles into control, the point at which one person’s hunger for power starts consuming everyone else’s sense of safety. Fairuza Balk as Nancy is extraordinary, a girl so comprehensively failed by the adults around her that her eventual unravelling feels less like a horror movie climax and more like a foregone conclusion. The horror is almost beside the point, it’s the social mechanics that are the thing. Six years ago a reboot, (The Craft: Legacy) arrived, but the final scene revealed a connection (and returning cast member) to the original, sadly it didn’t save the movie from being an utterly run of the mill rehash that forget everything that made the original work.
Ginger Snaps (2000)
John Fawcett’s film is the best of the lot, and it is not especially close. Set in the aggressively beige suburban sprawl of Bailey Downs, Canada, it follows sisters Brigitte (Emily Perkins) and Ginger (Katharine Isabelle), two death-obsessed outsiders who have made a pact to stay weird together forever. Then Ginger gets bitten by something in the woods on the night of her first period, and the pact gets complicated.
What Fawcett and screenwriter Karen Walton understood, and what makes Ginger Snaps so endlessly rewatchable, is that the werewolf transformation and puberty are not just analogous, they are the same story. The body changing without consent. The new appetites. The way other people start looking at you differently before you have even caught up with what is happening to yourself. Ginger’s transformation is horrifying and seductive in equal measure, and the film never lets you forget that Brigitte is terrified of losing her sister not to lycanthropy but to adolescence, to the version of Ginger that is emerging whether anyone likes it or not.
The two sequels, Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed and Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning, extend the mythology in genuinely interesting directions. The second film relocates to a rehab facility and gives Perkins a showcase she absolutely earns, while the third goes full period horror in 19th century Canada. All three are now collected in the Second Sight Blu-ray release, and if you have been sleeping on this trilogy, now is the time to stop.
Teeth (2007)
Mitchell Lichtenstein’s film is so committed to its central metaphor that summarising it for a general audience requires a certain amount of delicacy. Dawn is a teenage abstinence advocate who discovers, under extremely (I can’t stress enough just how extremely) unpleasant circumstances, that she has a biological defence mechanism the anatomical literature has not yet caught up with. If I have danced around the subject too much, just watch the trailer below so we can spare my blushes.
Jess Weixler is extraordinary in the lead, playing Dawn with a genuine sweetness that makes the film’s escalating dark comedy land properly. The men in Dawn’s life range from negligent to predatory to outright dangerous, and the film is precise about this without ever becoming a lecture. It knows it is operating in exploitation territory and is entirely comfortable there, which is part of what makes it work. Teeth is funny, horrifying, and genuinely angry, and it uses its outrageous premise to say something serious about bodily autonomy and the violence done to young women under the guise of protection. It is not a subtle movie, but at no time was it was it trying to be.
Jennifer’s Body (2009)
Karyn Kusama’s film was mismarketed on release, sold as a horror film for teenage boys when it is actually a horror film about what teenage boys do to girls, and specifically about what fame and appetite and the performance of desirability can do to a female friendship.
The detail that tends to get lost in discussions of the film is how good Amanda Seyfried is as Needy, Jennifer’s best friend and the film’s actual protagonist. The central relationship is a specific and recognisable dynamic, the brilliant, overlooked girl in orbit around the magnetic one, and the film understands that this kind of friendship has its own complicated power structure long before the demon possession starts. Megan Fox is genuinely excellent, Diablo Cody’s script is considerably smarter than its detractors claimed, and the film’s critical rehabilitation is now well underway. Watch it again if you wrote it off, it holds up. There’s been talk of a sequel for years, but currently looks no closer to actually happening.
Raw (2016)
Julia Ducournau’s debut feature follows Justine, a committed vegetarian who arrives at veterinary school, goes through a hazing ritual, eats meat for the first time, and discovers something deeply alarming about her own appetites. Raw is the most sophisticated film on this list, a genuinely disturbing piece of work that uses cannibalism as a metaphor for desire, for the terror of becoming an adult with wants you cannot fully account for. It is also, for a film about eating people, surprisingly moving.
The through line across all of these films is not the blood, or the high school corridors, or the specific mechanics of whatever supernatural device is doing the work. It is something more uncomfortable than that. It is the feeling of being stranded inside a body and a social world that are both mutating faster than you can process, surrounded by people who are either oblivious or making it actively worse, with no reliable way to know whether any of what you are experiencing is normal. It probably is. It does not feel like it. Horror is the only genre that takes that feeling seriously instead of resolving it.
Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024) is worth mentioning here even though it sits outside the teenage frame, following a TV presenter, played by Demi Moore in a performance that earned her an Oscar nomination, whose body becomes a site of violent competition between who she is and who the world insists she should be. While it doesn’t belong on this list, it does belong on the sequel list, the one about what happens when everything described above does not, as you were promised it would, go away when you turn twenty.
