An interview with Karen Walton
Screenwriter of Ginger Snaps, the greatest teen horror of all time!
Originally published 26 September 2020.
For this newsletter, I was incredibly excited to interview Karen Walton, an award-winning Canadian screenwriter who won the won the Best Film Writing Canadian Comedy Award in 2002 for writing GINGER SNAPS and who has worked as a writer and producer on television series including QUEER AS FOLK, FLASHPOINT, THE LISTENER and ORPHAN BLACK.
Karen is also credited with establishing the online community inkcanada – Canadian Screenwriters and their Sketchy Friends, a digital venue where Canadian and international screenwriters share their ideas. In the interest of transparency, this interview actually took place back in July, but let’s be honest. Time has been pretty fluid in 2020!
To understand why this interview meant so much to me, let’s circle back to how much of my life has revolved around horror. I make no secret of my unashamed love of horror. Some of my earliest memories are of drawing skeletons and monsters, hinting at passions that I’ve carried throughout my life. What can I say? I love to be scared. I love ghost stories and kaiju wrestling matches. I love subtle reimaginings of classic movie monsters and I love tactless torture porn. I’m a relentless gorehound and a lover of doomed Gothic romance.
As a teenager growing up, there was a point where I voraciously watched every horror film that I could get my hands on, and there was a decade period from about 1995 onwards where slasher films gave birth to a teen-horror renaissance that included stories like SCREAM, THE CRAFT, IDLE HANDS, THE FACULTY and FINAL DESTINATION. Most of these movies complemented and built on the work being done on television alongside them in BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, the 1997-premiering series based on the 1992 movie of the same name, in many cases sharing cast members and an irreverent love of classic horror tropes like vampires and zombies.
The best examples of teen horror at the time used these tropes as visual metaphors for other things, but none did so with such transcendental brilliance as GINGER SNAPS, a coming-of-age story about two sisters on the verge of being visited by “the curse”. This was a movie that tackled the messier elements of adolescence whilst portraying teen nihilism and the perils of intense teen friendships with relentless honesty and wicked humour. GINGER SNAPS is unquestionably one of my favourite films and for me one of the things that takes it beyond a good to a great movie is the way that it doesn’t shy away from following the themes and ideas being explored to their natural conclusions, ending in a catastrophic bloodbath that seems inevitable from the opening frame. It was a privilege to speak to GINGER SNAPS screenwriter Karen Walton for the first, but hopefully not last, time.
1/ What first motivated you to write and have you found over the course of your career that your reasons for writing have changed?
As a child of a Canadian Navy officer, I actually only knew most of my extended biological family by the handwritten letters we exchanged, growing up. So I was never so much ‘motivated’ to write but rather, personal writing was just ‘normal’ to me always. I never intended to write professionally. Screenwriting was a mad notion suggested to me by some independent filmmakers I met at my local filmmaking co-operative, when I was sort of at loose ends after graduating.
I had a degree in Drama, but no clear career path before me. The local filmmakers had all kinds of interesting backgrounds and invited me to assist with their scripts, as my studies focussed on Dramaturgy. Truly, I was motivated by curiosity about films, and what other artists were up to, back then.
Over the decades, my reasons for writing have evolved from sheer curiosity re. how it’s done, to whether I could do it myself, to keeping it up and still eat, to — Okay I can do it and eat but then… how much control do I have over what’s happening to what I write and how best to use the stories I tell, for Good. Now when I write, I’m doing it fully aware of my privilege to do so, and am pretty intent on changing the world for all sorts of social underdogs and outliers, one odd little story at a time.
“Recognize the difference between being used as a means to others’ ends, versus being a true creative partner and an unflinching stakeholder in (your) work.” – Karen Walton
2/ What piece of artwork, in any medium, has most inspired you and why?
Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN has inspired me since I was in a grade-school class that read the book and then went to see its stage adaptation… at a rather impressionable age. I think of it constantly when I’m writing, and when I’m looking at anybody else’s work. It made me addicted to the ‘making of monsters’ socially - who decides what a ‘monster’ really is, what ‘horror’ really is, to whom. Add the context in which that woman wrote that story, the unnerving experiences the book and the play gave me as a young girl.
Gradually FRANKENSTEIN became my bar for what a good story does: you can’t finish one without feeling something, viscerally, about the beliefs you came to it with. From all the infinite subsequent adaptations of it, I keep learning how potent and unpredictable Interpretation is. That guides what I’m looking for in stories, and looking to achieve with stories, myself.
3/ What does your creative process look like from conception to the finished piece? I’m particularly interested in what that early stage looks like for you, when ideas are forming, before they begin to crystallise.
Each project is different for me, creative process-wise. If I’m working-for-hire, it’s a bit dull: there are standard steps to creating a screen- or teleplay by contract. A lot of formal conversations, informal drafts debated, in between. My focus there is on clarity of execution; most of my time is devoted to a war with words, while seeking consensus with my partners on what we’re actually after. Accuracy is the aim: endless rewriting and editing toward a Common Goal. Literally, lots of typing and talking and retyping.
If I’m working on my own originals, I work the way I prefer to:
research the life out of it (reading, art, films, TV, history, what else is out there)
talk to as many strangers who have lived experience of/like it as possible
let it rest. keep a notebook dedicated to it: pen and paper, stickies in my handbag for random associations and untimely ideas at other project meetings
I never have the ending. I won’t start writing though until I have the First Sequence, The Way In. I write for audiences, so I’m looking for Tone and Experience first.
Then it’s super-sticky notes up on a window looking out on a brick wall in my home office. Colour-coded by Character, I’m a Character-Driven Writer. Plot for me comes from building Who We’re With, not from Pop Hit Templating. I like Originals. To be Original, they actually need to be second-guessed to death, for me anyway.
Start putting together the soundtrack that puts me In the Main Character’s world. I am often hopping in and out of several projects at once. The right music takes me to the feelings that most excited me about each. A sensory shortcut: if I wait for ‘the mood to strike me’, frankly I’d starve.
Block off the Time, begin Outline. This is the first time, early stage, typing my actual story. I’m a careful worker, a sloppy typist, and I read slowly: I need more time than many in my line do, to produce anything worth reading. Never fall in love with the first-blush idea of anything; usually means it has already been done to death. Question every word, every conceit, unconscious assumption. Walk around what I have - or don’t yet have - in every single character’s shoes.
Enlist a Friend to Read and Proof Read, in progress - at Outline. These I pay when possible. We trade work when we can’t afford to pay. All the best results come for me before I’m ever at Script, when a colleague and I look at what I’m really saying.
4/ What have you learned through experience that you wish you knew at the start of your career?
To value my own voice, my own point of view, and to make room, learn from others’ too; to recognize the difference between being used as a means to others’ ends, versus being a true creative partner and an unflinching stakeholder in my own work. To know, state, and stand by my own creative values upfront, to honour those all the way through. To say Yes only to opportunities with those prepared to do the same.
5/ If you woke tomorrow and were no longer constrained by time, budgets or even skills that you haven’t learned yet, what would you make?
Easy: I would become a producing-patron to those who traditionally have not had my dumb luck and/or my harder-won opportunities, I’d make their stories. If I could do that, I wouldn’t write another word, quite happily.