Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (2004) is the second sequel to Ginger Snaps.
This movie is a prequel set in 1815, featuring the ancestors of the two Fitzgerald sisters.
This film contains examples of:
- Bittersweet Ending The movie ends with Brigitte, after being given the chance to kill Ginger and end the Curse, choosing instead to join Ginger as a werewolf, fulfilling their oath to be "together, forever" and presumably doom generation after generation of reincarnations to the fates they suffered in the first movie. It's the closest thing to a happy ending that the series got.
- Don't Go in the Woods: It abounds with countless werewolves.
- Driven to Suicide: Wallace commits suicide after losing everything and everyone and sinking to worse depths before the werewolves overrun the fort.
- Dwindling Party: One by one characters are killed off until only the sisters remain.
- Evil-Detecting Dog: The Hunter has an evil detecting wolf.
- Eye Scream: They identity one of the dead werewolves as a former team member by cutting out his glass eye.
- Hate Sink:
- Reverend Gilbert is shown throughout to be a fire and brimstone preacher of Fort Bailey, expressing vehement racist views in his sermons, blaming Native Americans and interracial marriages for the presence of werewolves — even though they were brought over from Europe. A particular target of his ire is his leader Wallace Rowlands for his marriage to a "savage" woman. Taking an immediate disdain for the Fitzgerald sisters for being a "temptation", Gilbert tries to have them killed by a werewolf and later tries to burn Brigitte alive, denouncing her as a witch.
- James is an arrogant, thuggish, and racist Sargent of Fort Bailey who regularly bullies everyone around him. Over the course of the film, he leaves one of his soldiers to be ripped apart by werewolves, attempts to rape Brigitte, throws a mixed race boy out of Fort Bailey to die after his father's death, and tries to batter Ginger herself when she shows up to rescue Brigitte.
- Incest Subtext: It’s pretty heavily implied that Brigette and Ginger ran away from their family and had to brave the Canadian wilderness in winter because of their unnaturally close sibling relationship.
- Jerkass: Wallace, James, and Reverend Gilbert can all be quite aggressive, judgmental, cold, and just flat out unpleasant at times. The same is true of Claude and Cormac once they start following James more in the second half (although the worst Cormac does is knock down a woman they know has been infected).
- Pyrrhic Victory: All the frontiersmen and natives are dead and Fort Bailey is burned to the ground, but the sisters walk away with their lives... and the werewolf curse.
- Take a Third Option: The Hunter tells Brigitte that there are two options: kill Ginger and end the curse, or be killed by Ginger and doom the New World to be plagued by werewolves forever. At the end, Brigitte decides on a third option: she kills the Hunter and leaves with Ginger, willingly offering her arm to her sister to bite so that the two of them can be "together forever".
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: The Hunter is willing to kill Ginger in order to break the werewolf curse forever, and it's hard to argue with his reasoning.
- Wendigo: What the natives call the werewolves. Claude the Frenchman calls them the Loup-Garou.
