Bailey Downs High School is a high school, also known as a secondary school, located in the town of Bailey Downs, Ontario, Canada. The school mascot is the buzzard.
History[]
The school was founded to provide intermediate education to older teens of Bailey Downs. Notably, late 1999, a series of missing students and staff were reported.
On October 24, 1999, Trina Sinclair was a student first reported missing, with police investigations finding no leads. Missing posters were distributed all over the school.
On October 31, two staff members, Mr. Wayne and the school's janitor, were reported missing. Brigitte and Ginger Fitzgerald were students who were also missing.
Academics[]
The school features a social studies class that has a unit on the life in Bailey Downs, biology class, and a mandatory gym class.
The school features field hockey as an extracurricular, possibly as a mandatory gym class unit. Several posters throughout the hallways featuring various clubs signify an active student community.
Appearance[]
The school building is a sprawling two-story structure with multiple wings and entrances. The facade design, combining brown bricks and grey concrete slabs, is relatively uniform, making it hard to identify specific sections of the building by looking at one portion of the walls alone. The roof seems to be flat. The walls are lined with single narrow windows, rather than continous window rows. The doors both inside and outside are light purple.
Surroundings[]
The immediate area around the school building (E) is covered with a lawn, dotted with trees and plants, with paved foothpaths running across, connecting the different entrances and areas of the school or leading to the adjacent roads. To the west, directly bordering the building, lies the school parking lot (A), typically used by students but also guests, with road access to the north. It also borders a large green area to the south of the main building and the sports field (B) which is itself at the south of the premises. The field is surrounded by a grey ash track and has two combined soccer/football goals on it. On its northern side, touching the parking lot, stand the bleachers (D) with five tiered rows of benches and footrests.
On the eastern side is a paved entryway that leads to a small parking space in front of a side entrance. It borders a concrete basketball court (H) surrounded by a chain-link fence.
The side facing the road on the north has several entrances. On the western end a footpath runs alongside the building, leading to the parking lot. On this part of the building, right above the walkway, is a large sign that reads "Bailey Downs High School".
The school premises are bordered by roads to the north and east and residential areas to the south and west. Across the road from the northern side is an external parking lot with green areas and trees next to a small brick-clad commercial building (F), often used by students to park their cars or to hang out after school.
Interior[]
The interior design mirrors the external appearance of the school with red-brown bricks and combines them with white painted concrete blocks. As all outer entrances, all doors in the inside are purple as well. Neon tubes provide lighting when no windows are around.
Classrooms[]
The school has several classrooms. They are typically equipped with the same purple-colored doors found everywhere. The desks have blue legs and skirts and beige wooden table tops. The chairs are light blue. A computer science room is close to the central hallway[1].
Hallway[]
Between classes, many students can be found in the hallways of the school, which are lined with blue lockers. The large double-leaf entry doors are equipped with panic handles and have spraylite glass windows. The hallways connect to other rooms such as teacher's offices, toilets and utility closets.
Nurse's office[]
Nurse Ferry provides medical advice to students in her small office equipped with a desk and filing cabinets. On the walls are a notice board and several medical posters. There's also a potted plant. The wall facing the hallway is as purple as the door and has a spraylite glass window.
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Guidance office[]
Students get called to Mr. Wayne's guidance office to discuss personal matters or whenever their behaviour raises the concern of the faculty. The Fitzgerald sisters had an appointment there when Mr. Wayne, who incidentally also was their social studies teacher, deemed the subject matter of their project disturbing.[2] Ginger was also sent there by Ms. Sykes after beating up Trina Sinclair.[3] Mr. Wayne called Ginger one last time to his office on Halloween after he noticed her flashing Ben and Tim in the hallway. The guidance office is a small room with a desk and a filing cabinet. A potted plant and two paintings on the walls accentuate the drap interior.[4]
Other rooms[]
The school is equipped with the typical assortment of other rooms, such as locker rooms, school toilets and utility closets.
In the movie[]
Interior[]
Major interior school locations seen in the movie include the classrooms, the hallway and the offices.
The classroom is the first part of the school that appears in the movie. We see it one time, immediately after the Fitzgerald sisters' had their project presentation. The Fitzgerald sisters' classroom has windows in the back and a green blackboard in a recessed niche at the front. Two purple doors are on the wall to the right of the windows. This wall also has another blackboard close to the front of the room. The walls are decorated with posters. There are also filing cabinets and potted plants. Desks are evenly spaced in rows and columns. Typically four columns to the side and about five from front to back.
Later, another classroom is seen during biology class. It has two windows in the back and a door with a clear window.
The central hallway is seen several times. It's a wide corridor with sets of large double-leaf panic handle doors on either end. On one end we can find the guidance office to the left of the double-door. On the other end the hallway is crossed by a perpendicular corridor with another double-leaf door but with ordinary handles on one site and another panic door on its opposite end where we also find a drinking fountain on the wall. A fire hose cabinet with break glass can be found in the hallway. On Halloween and the day before, Halloween decorations, mostly pumpkins with balloons, were placed in the hallways.
The location is first seen during Ginger's hallway-walk scene.[5] Later when Brigitte and Ginger come from the guidance office[3] and decide to visit Sam. And then on Halloween, starting with Ginger encountering Ben and Tim, continuing with Brigitte arriving at the school and then when Ginger kills the Janitor and intimidates Brigitte. This is always the same hallway. Only when Brigitte is looking for a way to clean up Mr. Wayne's murder-site we leave this area and see different sections of the school corridors.
The nurse office is featured when Brigitte and Ginger visit Nurse Ferry. Her desk is in the rear right corner of the room, when seen from the door. The guidance office looks largely indentical[4] and is first seen when it is revealed that Ginger killed Mr. Wayne inside. Later she hides there until the janitor discovers her. There was also a deleted scene in this office when Ginger has to meet Mr. Wayne there after assaulting Trina. In this deleted scene we get a better understanding of the arrangement of furniture in the room. The desk stands in the rear portion of the room, facing the right wall (when seen from the door). Chairs for visitors stand in front of the desk. There is also a low table in the rear right corner with a potted plant on top. Ginger cowers in front of it when the janitor enters.
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The locker room is seen two times: when Brigitte needs to clean up after falling into the dog on the field and when she helps Ginger hide her tail. The school toilets are seen when Ginger is in a stall after she discovered her werwolf hair on the healed scars and when Jason is on the men's toilet pissing blood. Lastly, there is the utility closet where Jason confronts Brigitte, which is in another previously unseen portion of the school corridors.
Exterior[]
In exterior shots, various different angles of the building are shown. During field hockey, the southern side of the building can be seen. The bleachers (D) stand between the field (B) and a lawn behind the school.
When Ginger and Brigitte sit on a patch of grass at a parking lot across the street from the school (3) on the day of their project presentation, they observe Jason and Trina waiting for Sam and the high school can be seen in the background. This is the northern side of the school.
During Brigitte's encounter with Sam, when Ginger smokes weed inside his truck (4), we see the eastern side of the building with a fenced-off concrete basketball field in the background. Later when Sam is looking for Brigitte and sees her when she walks on a pedestrian path along the western end of the north side of the school (6). His van (5) is parked opposite of Duffield Road on the T-junction with Trehorne Drive[6].
The school parking lot (A) is seen twice. For the first time when Ginger and Jason make out in front of his car (7). We see a grey box in the background (B) and learn that the bleachers (D) are right next to the corner of the parking lot. We also get the only view of the school's west-most facade. The next time we see the parking lot when Sam wants to talk to Brigitte during hockey. The van, this time at (8), is parked close to the bleachers.
Notable People[]
Staff[]
- Ms. Sykes (sports teacher)
- Mr. Wayne (teacher, guidance counselor)
- Nurse Ferry (school nurse)
- The Janitor
- The announcer
Students[]
- Brigitte Fitzgerald
- Ginger Fitzgerald
- Trina Sinclair
- Jason McCardy
- Ben
- Tim
- Kid with blue backpack in the background
Observations[]
- The high school has no school uniform but during hockey class all students wear sweaters or shirts with the Buzzard logo.
- Somehow, no one notices the dead dog in the middle of the soccer field where the school's field hockey class was taking place before their match started. Trina pushes Brigitte head first into the dog, and the team players seem visibly disgusted once that happened and not before. Also, the carcass apparently did not have a strong smell alerting the players and the coach.
- The exact student population is not known, but is estimated to be a small school and number no more than 400 students. As it is located in a small town in Canada, the high school is presumed to serve grades 9-12, like most high schools there. Based on observations, the majority of students are white; this is supported by the fact that the majority of students seen appear white, with very few African American and Asian students.
- The school's logo is a buzzard, which is a scavenger, an animal that preys upon dead animals. Maybe the founders of the high school were foreshadowing the coming of the Beast of Bailey Downs and Ginger's lycanthropy?
Production[]
Scarlett Heights Entrepreneurial Academy in the Etobicoke district of Toronto, Ontario, Canada served as the shooting location for exterior shots of Bailey Downs High School in Ginger Snaps. The brick-clad building on the northern parking lot is a convenience store/gas station.[7] According to director John Fawcett, this school was the only one they found that would allow them to film on their property.
Interior scenes were shot in a studio. This interior set was only available for a week. Scenes shot there were among the first that were filmed for the movie.
References[]
- ↑ A door labeled "108 Computer Science" can be found behind Brigitte in the scene where she confronts Ginger about transmitting the curse to Jason.
- ↑ The appointment is neither shown nor mentioned again in the movie.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 This meeting was part of a deleted scene (Brigitte Takes Over).
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Both the nurse's and the guidance office are very similar but not identical in layout. Notably, the nurse's office has a stretch of wall continuing to the left of the purple door frame, while in the guidance office, the purple section touches a corner on its left edge.
- ↑ An earlier deleted scene (Cause I Rule?) takes place in the hallway directly after the presentation.
- ↑ Road names from the real shooting location, see map.
- ↑ This might be the shooting location for the scenes inside the drug store. Or if not, still possibly its in-universe location, since the girls weren't too far from the school. In real life, there is also a strip mall directly north of this gas station.