It finally got made in 1999, in the months right after Columbine, when a violent movie about a murderous teenager was the last thing most studios wanted to fund.

One financier after another called the project too dark and too feminist. It was Telefilm Canada, along with a stack of government film agencies, that finally provided the money.

The Toronto Star stirred up controversy when it announced that Telefilm was putting public money into a "teen slasher movie," linking the film to recent school shootings in the US and Canada.

In John Fawcett's GINGER SNAPS (2000), two outcast sisters in a bland suburb called Bailey Downs are bound by a death pact - until Ginger is bitten and starts to change. The conceit, of course, is lycanthropy as metaphor for adolescence.

The casting took six months and turned up no one until Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins auditioned on the same day. The two actors had been born in the same hospital. They had gone to the same preschool, the same schools, the same Vancouver agency.

Screenwriter Karen Walton, who was not directly involved with the casting, looked at the tapes and said they were exactly the girls she had imagined.

Bailey Downs is a play on Bonnie Doon, a real neighborhood where Walton grew up. It is also the name of a neighborhood in Orphan Black, which was created by the same team.