Inky Horizons

Drops of Crimson is having a well-deserved birthday! This magazine is now one year old and they're working on the second volume. They've just published again and it's full of the kind of horror fiction you've come to expect: scary and well-written. Can't beat that. Chock full of interviews and reviews, too. 

This issue is very good and like all the others a fun read. I loved  "House of Worship" by Brady Golden. It really stood out for me.

Another awesome issue. Enjoy!

If you haven't seen this phenomenal silent film then by all means do. It's a Swedish film about witchcraft and the frenzied denials and condemnations that surrounded it during the Middle Ages, and up until the present. Well, 1922, anyway, which is when this film was made.

The visuals of Haxan are astounding, on a par with any CGI magic you see today. These pics only represent a fraction of what is in the film. It's an absolutely gorgeous piece of art and seriously, if you haven't seen it, try. You will not be disappointed.

Because, you know, she's awesome. And it's October and coming on Halloween fast. And it's in honor of her great work in Nosferatu the Vampyre with Klaus Kinski. And every Halloween since I've joined LJ I've posted Isabelle Adjani pics. So, yeah. It's a tradition. *nods*

Here's the "white rats" scene from the 1979 Nosferatu the Vampyre. It works all on its own as a short-short. Amazing film making, imo.

Okay. So I have a thing for Isabelle Adjani. (That's the rumor, anyway.) Which doesn't mean I don't think Nosferatu with her and Klaus Kinski is a stand up classic in every sense of the word. In fact I believe it's the best retelling of Dracula since the PBS production decades ago. (Wow, that dates me. Eep.)

But. Yeah. Isabelle Adjani is in it. And that scene with the white rats still creeps me out big time and you know how jaded I am when it comes to movies.   *nods*

The Old Time Radio Show Catalog is offering free Halloween shows on their website.

I love Old Time Radio. People look at me askance when I say "I don't watch television" like I'm some kind of cultural freak or something who lives outside the acceptable loop of modern society. Well, yeah. I admit that I am and I do. I'm funny that way.  I'm also a bit of a fuddy duddy about some things. Guilty on all counts, thank you very much.

But I'm not watching television because I'm listening to OTR programs. Man, I just love that stuff and I've blogged about it lots of times here so I won't go into it again.

But if you want a taste of what Halloween was like way back in the Olden Days, haha, then you might want to make with the click and give these shows a listen. They're all public domain, too. Enjoy!  :)

Scary Halloween Old Time Radio Shows

The new Drops of Crimson magazine is up. And while I'm not in this issue (okay, that's not entirely true, the superb Haxan artwork wedschilde did accompanies her interview) I urge you to give it a look-see. I personally like this little mag, it often has good, quality horror in it.

So, please, make with the clickie on the banner below and if you like the stories then tell the authors. Thanks! :)

I happened to come across an anthology I wanted to share with you. It's called Northern Haunts: 100 Terrifying New England Tales. It's pretty good and I want to recommend it to you.

The stories are short but spooky and all of them are based in New England. The editor, Tim Deal, said he wanted the anthology to be used for ghost stories around a campfire and I can easily see that. Some of the stories are bloody, some ghostly, some psychological, some historical, and so on. You don't have to read this from front to cover. It's not that kind of book, imo. Just crack 'er open and start reading anywhere. Skip ahead, go back, carry the book with you and read a couple of stories while you're waiting in the grocery line or at a coffee shop.

And make damn sure you bring it with you next time you go camping. Read it while the firelight is flickering on your face and the dark is closing in and a hoot owl is watching you from the bare branches of a tree overhead.

Give it a peek. I think you'll like this collection.

Horror, more than any other genre, has the ability to manifest its power in many different forms. This stems first and foremost from the fact horror is primarily an emotional and visceral genre, whereas science fiction, say, might have more of a cerebral background.

Because this is true for horror we often find stories that work on many different levels: poignant, evocative, and fundamentally human.  When these stories find their way to film, and when everything clicks from characterization to script, we have a real gem on our hands.

Monster House is such a movie.  In fact this is one damned cute movie.  The script is not only well-written, it's highly intelligent and at no time condescends to the viewer.  That's something we don't see everyday from the formulaic schlock normally churned out from Tinseltown.

I mean, come on, let's face it.  With dialog like this from a little girl: "If that's its teeth, and the carpet is its tongue, then that (a chandelier) is its uvula."

With the riposte from the little boy: "Oh, you mean it's a girl house....!"

And other gems like semi-precious stones: "Good luck with puberty!" and, "I'm sorry about your house.  I mean your wife.  I mean, your housewife."

The characters, especially the three computer generated children, are fantastically drawn and lovingly created. These are true three-dimensional characters in every sense of the word.  Like I said, everything clicks in this movie and it's a real treat.  From the beginning we believe these children are alive.  What's more, we are willing to risk an emotional investment in their spooky escapades...and we are not disappointed in the outcome.

Horror doesn't always work.  When it misses the mark it's achingly bad to watch (or read).  But when it does work, especially in an intelligent and unforgettable movie like this one -- chock full of delicious in-jokes -- it can't be dismissed. 

If you ever get a chance, please, give this worthwhile movie a peek.  I think you'll be glad you did.

I love conceptual albums.  That's why when I was knee-high to a pine cone my favorite rocker was Alice Cooper and my favorite album was Welcome To My Nightmare.  (It's still in my top ten.)

Of late I've been talking about a couple of movies directed by Rob Zombie.  It occurred to me there might be  people who are unfamiliar with his work.  First off, Alice Cooper was and still is a direct influence on Zombie's musical style.  Zombie actually loves and respects the monster/horror genre and the depth of his knowledge of the genre itself is nothing short of phenomenal.  All too often we see bands who slap on makeup and eye-shadow and expect us to take them seriously.  But they rarely know anything about the horror genre and tropes they are trying to affect, and what little they do know comes from modern slasher films or their own misguided preconceived notions.

Zombie, on the other hand, has a deep and intimate knowledge of all things horror and most things Grade-B. He loves it.  He cultivated a spectacular sound known as "heavy sound" or "slam sound" with an industrial base when he was fronting for the band White Zombie.  But when he left that band and went solo he took all the creative force with him...not unexpected since he was the sole creative force.

He's that rare breed of musician who is also a bona fide artist.  He knows how to write a hook for a song and he knows how to grip your emotions between his fists.  A rare talent indeed in this age of cookie-cutter techno shit.

So for the uninitiated I want to provide two links to a pair of Rob Zombie videos.  The first is "Dragula", an homage to the coffin-shaped dragster first seen on The Munsters.  Good hook, deep sound, just the right amount of camp.  It's damn near the perfect Rob Zombie song and if you don't know anything about him this will pretty much tell you all you need to know.  And with lyrics like

Dig through the ditches
Burn through the witches
I slam in the back of my
Dragula

you're pretty much safely ensconced in his frenetic world of horror and mayhem, with not a little whimsy added for flavor.

Dragula

The second song I want to present is "Living Dead Girl".  This is a mosh-pit fave with a memorable hook that crawls through your brain like a cadaver worm.  The video is particularly cute since it's a direct homage to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.  That's Zombie's wife, Sheri Moon Zombie, in the title role, BTW. 

Living Dead Girl

For anyone interested in an album, I recommend Hellbilly Deluxe.  The interior art is by Gene Colan and the little booklet is fashioned after the old Film Monster Magazine, thus showcasing Zombie's absolute love of old movie monsters.  Pretty cool for those who like horror rock or music annealed from the stoked fires of  a campy hell.

The Devil's Rejects (2005) is the sequel to Rob Zombie's excellent horror film House of 1000 Corpses which we reviewed earlier.  Except it's less of a sequel than an entirely different film altogether.  All the old gang is reprised: Sid Haig as the clown head of the psychotic Firefly family, Sherri Moon Zombie as his blood-thirsty daughter Baby,  and everyone else.  The actor who played the grandfather in the original film died before production so Zombie dedicated this film to him.  A nice touch.

The film opens with the cops surrounding the Fireflys' secluded home. Seems the local law enforcement has finally figured out where all those missing people went and who is responsible.  In a violent shootout the Fireflys escape but Mother Firefly is captured by the Sheriff; his brother fell victim to the family's predations.

The remaining members of the family go on a shooting and kidnapping spree.  At first you're thinking, "This is no different from any other pyschos-on-the-loose-who-kill-and-torture film."  Seen it a dozen times, right?  Hell, it's even derivative of Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers.  Yawn.

But I want you to stick with this film.

You see, Zombie, who wrote and directed The Devil's Rejects, knows what he's doing.  He knows you've seen this setup before.  When he switches gears on you (and he will) you realize he's telling you, "Okay, this is how these films used to be made...but I'm changing the formula."

My God, does he ever.

The Fireflys drive to Father Firefly's half-brother who runs a whore house in the desert.  Meanwhile, the obsessed Sheriff hires two bounty hunters to find the family.  He then goes to interrogate Mother Firefly, but loses it and guts her with a hunting knife in an act that suggests sexual intercourse.  As the life goes out of her ecstatic eyes he kisses her blood-stained lips.

As you may have guessed there's no Good vs. Evil in this film. It's Evil vs. Evil.  And no one looks good; Zombie shoots and blocks the scenes so the light is always harsh; people's faces are revealed as corrugations and lines which delineate their inner demons.  No one, even the hapless victims of which there are many, escape this harsh exposure under Zombie's camera.

In a mesmerizing sequence shot with music and no sound the bounty hunters invade the whore house and capture the Fireflys.  The Sheriff drives them in a convertible back to their home.  He will exact his revenge there.  He ties them to chairs and nail-guns photographs of their victims to their chests.  There is  a crucifixion scene.  Finally, he douses the place with kerosene and lights it up, but not without releasing Baby and telling her to run for her life.  He wants to hunt her down.

Outside Baby ducks into a cattle chute, following the metal railings into the dark.  The Sheriff comes after her wielding an axe.  We are reminded of the scene in the original film where Baby was chasing the teenager in the bunny suit before she stabbed her victim and licked her knife under the full moon.  The Sheriff pauses, a smile on his face, and remarks, "I smell rabbit."

Baby is now flat out running.  Time to slow her up.  He pulls his sidearm and fires.  The round goes through her calf.  "I bet that hurt," he tells her.  "I could hear the bone shatter."

But he wants to show Baby that Karmic payback can be a real bitch so he puts the axe aside and begins to beat her with a thick leather strap.  Baby is clawing and squirming on the hard desert floor in a vain attempt to get away.  The Sheriff asks her if she likes being a victim, likes being tortured by a sadist.  Hey, this is Baby we're talking about.  You're goddamn right she does.

But the Sheriff has made a mortal mistake.  He forgot to check his six when in the presence of a Firefly.  Baby's brother, Tiny, an eight-foot shambling freak, saves her life.  Whaddya know, that axe came in handy after all.

Tiny saves the Father and Brother Otis from the fire.  They tell him they will be back to get him.  Tiny nods and, with his deformed body silhouetted against the orange conflagration, he shambles back inside the burning house to die.

The Fireflys escape only to come upon a police roadblock the next day while "Free Bird" plays in the background.  The final assault begins.  Again reminiscent of Bonnie and Clyde but with Zombie's own surrealistic touch added to the mix.  The credits roll scored by "Seed of Memory" by Terry Reid while we are shown sweeping camera moves that fly along the road and arc above the scrub-covered hills as if in a vain attempt to escape the carnage. When the screen goes black we say softly to ourselves, "Wow."

Rob Zombie has without a doubt become the preeminent director of the horror and violence genre.  His use of music for the soundtrack is nothing less than phenomenal.  He is not only willing to take chances with both material and artistry, but to demand this is the direction horror must turn if it wants to survive, even evolve, as a genre.  Don't miss this one.

Horror is a visceral medium.  And when it comes to movies, horror can be very visceral indeed.  I tend to love the old Universal monsters, mainly for personal reasons.  They are my favorite.  And when it comes to other horror movies I lean towards surrealism like the excellent Suspiria by Dario Argento.

But there are other movies that, after you see them, change you in some way -- and not always for the better.   I Spit on Your Grave is such a movie, along with Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, and The Hills Have Eyes.  Though a slick mainstream movie, I would place The Exorcist in that same category.

House of 1000 Corpses is another one.

This is a movie written and directed by Rob Zombie.  There's a ton of in-jokes and black humor sprinkled throughout this film like lost spatters of black blood topped with candy sprinkles.  The comedy is dark, very dark.  But there's fun here, too. The main characters are named Captain Spaulding, Otis Driftwood and Rufus Firefly.  All names from Groucho Marx characters.  Plus, Karen Black plays the matriarch of the Firefly family with outright verve and gusto. Hell, that's a selling point in its favor right there. 

Zombie wanted this to be an homage to the horror films of the '70s.   Early on he wanted to make the film with the same equipment and technology available to directors at that time, but money and creative pressure got in his way.  There's still a lot here to entertain.  And despite the body count and the buckets of gore, this film is entertaining. Quick cuts of old black and white horror movie hosts and off screen monologues by principle characters a la Natural Born Killers keeps us confused and riveted.  Judicious use of sound, color, and a fantastic music track make the experience memorable. 

The movie starts with four teenagers are on a road trip across America writing about weird places tourists might want to visit.  In a shithole of a town in the Deep South they learn of a local legend called Dr. Satan.  In the interim they stumble across a family of freaks.  Oh, and it's Hallowe'en Eve. So far it's your normal horror-type movie fare, right?  Wrong. 

Dead wrong.

From the candlelit dinner to the tortured cheerleaders upstairs to the ersatz floor show we are now on a mind-numbing roller coaster ride...and it's getting more claustrophobic with each twist and turn.  The police show up.  They're whacked by the freaks, and one of the deputies is killed in what has to be the longest suspenseful pauses in moviedom as the action reverts to slow motion, the camera flies away in the sky, yet  we cannot turn from what we know is going to happen.   It is the distance from which Zombie forces us to watch, not the murder, that is the true horror.

But what of our four young friends?  Well, it doesn't look good.  One of the male characters is asked by Baby to guess who her favorite movie actress is. Oh, and she's holding a straight razor at the time.   He guesses Marilyn Monroe.  Nope, it's Bette Davis.  Fitting she would choose such a notorious man-eater. Baby commences to scalp the young lad while she giggles.  That's not something you see everyday.

The other poor fellow, well, let's just say  "Fish Boy" and leave it at that.  The two girls are then dressed in bunny suits, along with our scalped friend, and taken outside on Halloween night for more fun and frivolity.  Teenagers dressed as bunnies on a night when they are to be tortured and murdered.  That's not something you see everyday, either.

One of the girls runs.  She's chased down by Baby and stabbed.  Baby licks her knife under the light of a full moon. The other two are thrown in a casket and lowered into a well.  The tortured victims from the past who are living down there reach out of the black water and drag them out, but one girl escapes.  She finds a tunnel and, still wearing her bunny suit, goes deeper into the black earth.

Shades of Alice in Wonderland...except what she's found is a labyrinth of 1000 corpses, more past victims of the Firefly family. She loses her bunny suit and stumbles into the lair of Dr. Satan.  Wow, he's not a legend after all, who would have guessed?  But he's deeply involved in an "experiment."  She escapes his axe-wielding associate, crawls out into the daylight and a car comes down a dirt road to pick her up.

The denouement is typical, and most horror movies would end the shenanigans right there.  But Zombie isn't done with us quite yet.  Our heroine awakens --  only to find herself strapped to Dr. Satan's table, ready to be his next "experiment."  The final thirty seconds when she awakens and realizes where she is just might be the scariest thirty seconds I've ever witnessed in any horror film.  We don't see anything, just her face, but that's more than enough.

This movie weathered a lot of controversy when it was released in 1997.  Much of it came from young adults who think Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer are the only models available for horror movies.  But this isn't the cartoonish efforts of serial movies like Friday the 13th and the one-liner ridden and outlandish Nightmare on Elm Streets.  Rob Zombie knows what horror, real horror, is all about.  Yes, there is black comedy and there is camp in House of 1000 Corpses, but there's film-making here as well. Zombie isn't phoning it in.  This movie wasn't written by a tube worm, as evidenced by the deliciously black comedic elements of naming people after Groucho Marx  characters and having teenagers abused whilst wearing cute bunny suits.  Horror, on any level, rarely gets any better than that.

Time has been kind to Corpses.  A decade has mellowed much of the original criticism it received, and Zombie made a sequel, The Devil's Rejects, which continued the bloody antics of the Firefly family.  The latter movie even made money and garnered some critical acclaim. 

If you're looking for something different, a horror film that breaks the mold, if you want to feel the walls close in on you, rent House of 1000 Corpses.  Then turn out the lights and hang onto a friend.

Within the pages of the magazine it's argued horror is either on the edge of a horrendous implosion or on the cusp of a golden renaissance.  I think that's about right.  Horror literature itself is a fairly shallow field.  Widespread, but shallow.  It makes half-hearted attempts every ten years or so to break out and become more mainstream, but often the impetus behind these efforts dies out and the genre, at least as far as fiction goes, lapses into senescence for another decade. 

I suppose it's because horror is so visceral, that's why it works so well in film.  To be sure there are classic horror novels that not only helped shape modern science fiction but, I would argue, modern fantasy as well, if not most other genres.  Horror is by far the oldest form of storytelling.  The first storyteller, I'm willing to bet, didn't tell a story about happy people and golden love around that Neanderthalic camp fire.  It was a story of woe, fear, darkness, angst.  You know, horror.

So it was with some, well, not trepidation but not exactly optimism, either, that I opened this magazine. I am happy to report I stumbled upon a little treasure myself.  

I've talked to other writers about this and many agree horror, good horror, is very difficult to write.  If you doubt me go to the horror section of your local bookstore, pick up a book at random, and read the first page. Nine out of ten times it'll be crap.

But horror based on H.P. Lovecraft's stories is even more difficult to write, and on the face of it you might think it's damn near impossible. No one writes like Lovecraft except Lovecraft, and despite all the attempts since his death, no one ever has come close.

But, fortunately, the stories in this issue don't try to imitate Lovecraft.  They use his work as a springboard.  That gives the authors enough creative room to do some real broken-field running.  There wasn't a clinker in the bunch.  Which is not to say some stories were not better than others.  The centerpiece of the magazine was an interview with Brian Lumley followed by his story, "The Man Who Killed Kew Gardens."  The interview was awesome, the story less so. Lumley makes the awful mistake of trying to scientifically ground the reason behind his horror.  Okay, we can live with that, but does it really have to come from the old hoary idea of a meteorite from outer space?   C'mon.  Lumley's better than that, and he seems to know it, too.

The other stories were good, standouts being "Daddy," a reprint by the late Earl Godwin, and the deliciously satiric "The Paramount Importance of Pictures" by Lynne Jamneck.  An in-depth review of Japan's horror boom rounds out the memorable issue.

All in all, I highly recommend you check out this magazine.  The layout is good, the tone is perfect, and the fiction ain't half bad.  I think you'll like it.

Today I had occasion to read the revamped Weird Tales magazine.  You remember Weird Tales.  That's the magazine Robert E. Howard used to write his Conan stories for.  Along with Lovecraft's Cthulhuian horrors and the lurid, colorful covers by Margaret Brundage.  Horror and fantasy and the unknown leavened with a healthy dose of the unexpected from Clark Ashton Smith and Seabury Quinn. That was what WT used to be like.  You know, cool stuff like that.

That's not what I read today.  Hell, it didn't come close.

First, the new cover design.  In a word it sucks.  Weird Tales has been around in one way or another since 1923.  That's a long time.  It earned a brand that was easily recognizable from across the bookstore.  It screamed at you to come pick it up and carry it home under your arm, preferably in a paper bag to hide the semi-clad Brundage nudes ornamenting the cover.  Can't let the pastor see that, or Mom.  Best read under the blanket at night with a flashlight, too....

Even Ward Cleaver, on an episode of Leave it to Beaver admitted to June he used to have a subscription to Weird Tales when he was a kid, and loved them.  How cool is that?

Now?  Eh.  Now it has all the panache of an indifferent shrug.  The new logo is a maniacal scrawl no different from the umpteen thousand other maniacal scrawls we've seen in horror movies and other magazines that only wished they had the cachet of the original WT.  At least the publishers are willing to admit they've taken a bold step with this new logo.  In the Eyrie (thank God it's still there) we read "The most immediately obvious change, of course, is the new logo on the cover.  We've already heard quite a bit about it from readers who've seen sneak peeks."

Yeah, I fucking bet you did, too.

Forget the past, Weird Tales now wants to be hip, modern, street-wise, cutting-edge.  Yeah, you read that last sentence right.

I know. I feel your pain. Trust me.

But modernized logos aside, WT has always been about the fiction first and foremost.  That's the core engine that runs this magazine.  It's why we remember it, it's why we read it, it's why we thought of stealing it from the drugstore when we didn't have the money to buy it.  So in good conscience I buckled down and read all the stories in the latest issue.  Quite frankly, I didn't read too many Weird Tales-type stories.

What's that you say?  There's a certain story that must be a Weird Tales story? Betcha, bunky.  And I didn't see many examples of what the magazine's strengths were, are, and should be.  Okay, there were a few.  Richard Parks had a good story called "The Man Who Carved Skulls" along with "Six Scents" by Lisa Mantchev.  These two came closest to reaching what we know and all remember as WT stories.   The others?  Pedestrian.  Pedestrian horror, pedestrian humor, pedestrian science fiction, pedestrian fantasy.  Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with pedestrian.  Pedestrian sells.  Bookshelves are filled with it.  Television makes a living off of it. But this is Weird Tales we're talking about!

Uh, that is, it used to be Weird Tales.

And it's not that the writing was bad, overall.  It was fine, really.  But it wasn't Weird Tales fine.

There were other good parts of the magazine that bear mentioning.  Darrel Schweitzer had a nicely done article about Kafka's  "The Metamorphosis".   Some decent book reviews were included.  But the fiction fell short, in my opinion.

Now I want to go on record and say I'm not predicting the death rattle of Weird Tales.  This isn't a classic fuck up like we saw happen to Amazing in the 80s.  But the clock is ticking.  I hope this latest incarnation of WT survives, I honestly do.  I hope they do well and if I write a story I think is appropriate for their new editorial direction I will happily and proudly submit it to them.

But it comes down to this.  When I want to read an Analog story I buy Analog.  When I want to read a Realms of Fantasy story I read Realms.  When I want to read a Weird Tales story...well, I guess I'll just have to read the backdated issues.

And that's a goddamn shame.

I like werewolf movies.  No, let me rephrase that.  I like good werewolf movies.  My favorite is The Wolfman (1941) with Lon Chaney, Jr.  And from a writerly perspective it gives me a tickle to know the writer of that film, Curt Siodmak, made most of the werewolf tropes out of whole cloth.  But they're as accepted today as any legend.  And it's hard to pass up a late night showing on TCM with Chaney's tour de force  performance in Frankensteim Meets the Wofman (1943).  That final scene of the dam breaking and flooding Frankenstein's lab while the fur flies is one of the best in the genre.  Not to mention the fact Maria Ouspenskaya appears in both films; she's always a treat to watch with her heavy accent and sorrowful, brooding manner.  Great fun.

 But last year I came across a trilogy and had a chance to review them again recently, and, boy, are they great.

It's the Ginger Snaps trilogy.  Never heard of it?  I'm not surprised.  They were indies shot in Canada which gives them a different feel both in tone and emotional texture than the slickly produced cartoonish efforts we see out of Hollywood.

The first movie, Ginger Snaps, dwells on two sisters who decide that if one of them dies the other will kill herself.  There's the usual teenage angst and sexual awakening you would expect to see in a film about  a 16 and 15 year old sisters.  But Ginger Snaps ties those deep and powerful emotions into a stylish reworking of the werewolf mythos.   So when Ginger gets the bite, her sister, Brigitte, must do everything she can to protect her.  It's a stylish film with a look and dialogue that really pushes the limits both in context and what we thought we knew about werewolves.  And you won't need a silver bullet to whack one, because as Brigitte observes, a big knife will do since "they aren't superheroes."  Classic.

Of course, things start going downhill fast for the sisters.  Dogs start disappearing.  Ginger suddenly has a huge craving for meat.  When a tail appears she and Brigitte have to duct-tape it to her leg.  Well, no one ever said being a wolf-girl was easy.

The second movie is called Ginger Snaps: Unleashed.  Here's where the trilogy takes a very unexpected turn.  Ordinarily, there would just be much more blood-spattering and chomping in a sequel like this.  Not so with the Ginger movies.  Now Brigitte is in an insane asylum, waiting for the curse to take hold of her while she wrestles with a horrific decision she had to make in the original film.  This movie dwells more on the psychological aspect of wolfdom than the usual crunching of bone by the light of a silvery moon.  Oh, and there's a male werewolf out there who  wants to mate with Brigitte if she would just hurry up and let the transformation take its natural course.

Just when you think you're safe, the third movie, Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning is actually a prequel to the other two.  Better yet, you aren't sure if this is a parallel universe, an alternate history, or the beginning of an eternal curse involving these two young women.  Maybe it's all three.  It doesn't matter because the sisters are together again in 19th Century Canada in the dead of winter and they've come upon a fort while packs of hungry wolves roam the frozen countryside.  Hang on tight to a friend when you watch this one because it's a doozy.

The Ginger Snaps movies.   You should check them out even if you're not a werewolf fan.  It's great story arc filled with pathos and sharp humor and biting (pun intended) dialogue.  Give 'em a peek if you have the time....