Jazmina Cininas | Blood Sisters (2016) Reduction linocut with 2nd block. Image: 69.5 x 56cm. Paper: 78 x 63cm. | Courtesy the artist and Australian Galleries, Melbourne.

The cult Ginger Snaps trilogy from Canada employs lycanthropy as a metaphor through which to explore the coming of age of two anti-social sisters, Ginger and Brigitte Fitzgerald. In the first film of the trilogy, Ginger is bitten by a werewolf attracted to the smell of her first menses. Ginger goes on to develop symptoms of rampant hormones, bloodlust and hairiness, to the increasing alarm of her younger sister. In the second film, the wolfsbane that promised a cure in Ginger Snaps turns out to be a dependency-forming prophylactic to which Brigitte becomes addicted in a bid to keep her own lycanthropy and burgeoning sexuality at bay. The third film in the trilogy returns the girls to Canada’s colonial past where they first encounter their ‘curse’, in an age when European superstitions of witchcraft still coloured perceptions of women, and cast a dark shadow over the shamanistic practices and lives of Canada’s First Peoples.