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Of course, there isn’t one version of the lore. All the rules about what a werewolf should look like, behave like, where it comes from, what it wants from us — these are the inventions and enhancements of ages of storytellers from many cultures. Every culture has a story about something “half man–half beast,” and almost every culture has a story about something that appears out of the wilds of nature, deadly to humans who “stray from the accepted or safe way” through the wilds. Or, living among us, there’s the “wolf in sheep’s clothing.” So if I diverged, I suppose it was from letting the classic Hollywood version be my defining model.

Which is precisely how vampires have been treated in True Blood. Many of those “rules” have been put aside in favor of a more modern interpretation. The lore evolves alongside our metaphors, it seems.

In Ginger Snaps, we weren’t so interested in towing a story over a set of preconceptions. Rather we connected our version of the phenom of becoming a werewolf to unhappy adolescent benchmarks, for young women specifically. For example, the decision to build the narrative around that first, single transformation linked up neatly with my take on the horrors of coming-of-age: wake up and find hair that wasn’t there before, find you’re driven by nasty impulses you can’t explain, or in some cases even like about yourself, yet cannot seem to control, the outbursts, the lash-outs, the budding potential for real violence and harm — to yourself, to people you care about, to people you don’t care about — the desire, and then the scary ability to take your society apart and being unable to resist that. And then what both these phenoms can do to your childhood relationships.

It’s not dissimilar to the transformation Jessica makes from human to vampire in True Blood. It was great to see that first turn through the lens of a young woman.

At the time, Ginger Snaps was unusual because my main werewolf was female. In the Hollywood versions, that was pretty much unheard of: teen boys, yes, had been werewolves. But the whole brute force and snapping jaws and behaving like a horny dog-wolf on ’roids — the more visceral aspects of becoming a werewolf (and becoming a young woman) — were designed largely by and for men, with a distinctly male perspective. Hollywood was/is ever adverse to admitting young ladies too grow hair, anywhere but on their pretty little heads, etc.

Vampires have always been with us, but it seems as if werewolves are finding their way back into the supernatural consciousness. What do you think is the lasting appeal of any of these creatures?

I suppose the lasting appeal of all our monsters is, speaking only for myself, that they are a reflection of the cultures who create them, the funhouse mirror for the side of our psyches reality tends to socialize away. To me, we are what we fear, we define ourselves by our relationship with what threatens or terrifies us. The case-by-case, and decade-by-decade, versions of what we fear are all as old as the human race, in essence. Where honesty or prudery or morality tempers us, the monsters step in. And exorcise. Vigorously.

Different species — vampires or werewolves — fulfill by design different roles in the world of terror, and both are as flexible as icons to be made to serve any human relationship you want to challenge. Once fully manifested as creatures, they are both in theory tormented with some partial recognition, some fluency in the human condition, which they use to their own advantage, motivated by their own survival. Both often find that affinity with humanity bites them in the ass, if they get too involved with the treacherous empathy pure human beings ooze — they’re both stuck with the unreliable limitations humanity likes to impose on them. I guess we do that to inspire the hope that the irrational, the Other, the Unknowable is somehow manageable, perhaps even defeatable. Though what we really all love is their possibility, that there are yet beings and worlds