I Was a Teenage Werewolf. Teen Wolf. The Craft. Even Carrie. Horror moviemakers have long equated coming-of-age with otherness, monstrosity. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it’s tragic, but whatever the result —the witches of The Craft or the mermaid of Blue My Mind, the zombie of Maggie or the werewolf (it’s so often a werewwolf!) of When Animals Dream, it’s a ripe metaphor. Here, recorded live at Gateway Film Center at the heart of The Ohio State University Campus, is our list of the five best teenage monsters in horror movies.
5. Jennifer’s Body (2009)
If Ginger Snaps owes a lot to Carrie (and it does), then Jennifer’s Body finds itself even more indebted to Ginger Snaps.
The central premise: Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them. Better still, lure them to an isolated area and eat them, leaving their carcasses for the crows. This is the surprisingly catchy idea behind this coal-black horror comedy.
In for another surprise? Megan Fox’s performance is spot-on as the high school hottie turned demon. Director Karyn Kusama’s film showcases the actress’s most famous assets, but also mines for comic timing and talent other directors apparently overlooked.
Amanda Seyfried’s performance as the best friend, replete with homely girl glasses and Jan Brady hairstyle, balances Fox’s smolder, and both performers animate Diablo Cody’s screenplay with authority. They take the Snaps conceit and expand it – adolescence sucks for all girls, not just the outcasts.
4. Fright Night (1985)
Fright Night takes that Eighties, Goonies-style adventure (kids on an adult-free quest of life and death) and uses the conceit to create something tense and scary, and a bit giddy as well. The feature debut as both writer and director for Tom Holland, the film has some sly fun with the vampire legend.
Roddy McDowall got much deserved love at the time for his turn as a washed-up actor from horror’s nostalgic past, and Chris Sarandon put his rich baritone to campy, sinister use.
Still, everyone’s favorite character was Evil Ed, the manic, pitiful loser turned bloodsucking minion. Credit Stephen Geoffreys for an electric and, at least in one scene, heartbreaking performance.
3. The Faculty (1998)
The film exaggerates (one hopes) the social order of a typical Ohio high school to propose that it wouldn’t be so terrible if all the teachers and most of the students died violently, or at least underwent such a horrific trauma that a revision of the social order became appealing.
Indeed, in this film, conformity equals a communicable disease. Adults aren’t to be trusted; high school is a sadistic machine grinding us into sausage; outcasts are the only true individuals and, therefore, the only people worth saving. Director Robert Rodriguez pulls the thing off with panache, all the while exploring the terrifying truth that we subject our children to a very real and reinforced helplessness every school day.
Interestingly, the infected teachers and students don’t turn into superficial, Stepford-style versions of themselves. For the most part, they indeed become better, stronger, more self-actualized (ironically enough) versions, which is interestingly creepy. It’s as if humanity – at least the version of it we find in a typical American high school – really isn’t worth saving.
2. Ginger Snaps (2000)
Sisters Ginger and Bridget, outcasts in the wasteland of Canadian suburbia, cling to each other, and reject/loathe high school (a feeling that high school in general returns).
On the evening of Ginger’s first period, she’s bitten by a werewolf. Writer Karen Walton cares not for subtlety: the curse, get it? It turns out, lycanthropy makes for a pretty vivid metaphor for puberty. This turn of events proves especially provocative and appropriate for a film that upends many mainstay female cliches.
Walton’s wickedly humorous script stays in your face with the metaphors, successfully building an entire film on clever turns of phrase, puns and analogies, stirring up the kind of hysteria that surrounds puberty, sex, reputations, body hair and one’s own helplessness to these very elements. It’s as insightful a high school horror film as you’ll find, peppered equally with dark humor and gore.
1. The Transfiguration (2016)
Milo likes vampire movies.
So, it would seem, does writer/director Michael O’Shea, whose confident feature debut shows us the relationship between the folklore and the life of a forlorn high school outcast.
Eric Ruffin plays Milo, a friendless teen who believes he is a vampire. What he is really is a lonely child who finds solace in the romantic idea of this cursed, lone predator. But he’s committed to his misguided belief.
O’Shea’s film borrows ideas from George Romero’s Martin, Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In, and openly gushes over Murnau’s Nosferatu. Inside and out, the film draws on the best in vampire cinema to help Milo deal with a world in which he is a freak no matter what he decides to do.
