Karen Walton

Karen Walton is a Canadian screenwriter best known for writing the film, Ginger Snaps, for which she won the Best Film Writing Canadian Comedy Award in 2002. Her writing for the film received both critical scrutiny and academic analysis. Walton has since been recognised with multiple awards. She has also written for the Canadian television series What It's Like Being Alone and three episodes of the American version of Queer as Folk, for which she also served as executive story consultant. She appeared in the 2009 documentary Pretty Bloody: The Women of Horror. In recent years, she has served as a writer and producer on a number of Canadian television series including Flashpoint, The Listener and Orphan Black, which is distributed by BBC Worldwide and airs on BBC America in the United States.

Early life
Karen Walton was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and grew up in nearby Dartmouth. As a teenager, she moved west to the suburbs of Edmonton, Alberta.

Career
Walton had experience in acting before she began to focus primarily on scriptwriting. She began her work in the film industry by assisting local film production companies in Edmonton. After she entered and won a CBC radio play writing contest in the early 1990s her early work in scriptwriting gained traction. Walton was recognized and given access to lessons in screenwriting at the Canadian Film Centre where she later graduated. She has since been credited with establishing the online community inkcanada – Canadian Screenwriters and their Sketchy Friends, a digital venue where Canadian and international screenwriters can share their ideas.

Awards
In May 2018, Walton received the Nell Shipman Award in Toronto for her contributions to Canadian film and television. Walton won the Margaret Collier Award for screenwriting in 2016, an award offered by the Canadian Screen Academy. Other past awards received by Walton include a Crystal Award for Women in Film and Television, (specifically in the mentor-ship category), and the Denis McGrath Award for her contributions to screenwriters.

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Work in Ginger Snaps (2000)
Walton’s initial writing for Ginger Snaps was titled Wolfer Grrrls. It was written in collaboration with director John Fawcett as well as other creative think-tanks taking place at the Canadian Film Centre during the late 1990s. Walton has since worked with John Fawcett on other writing projects, including for the television series Orphan Black. While writing for Ginger Snaps, however, Walton has been credited with having had significant creative leeway in how she re-formulated certain classic horror genre tropes under an alternative feminist lens. Walton’s subversion of typical representations for societal minority groups is a running characteristic throughout much of her written work in film and television. Her collaboration with Fawcett saw that details to mark protagonists Ginger and Brigitte Fitzgerald as "other" from accompanying characters also fell into the department of costuming. The idea was that the protagonists could not fit into a typical high school group in both world view and visual style. Walton’s experience in having lived in suburbs is also a factor that influenced the setting of Ginger Snaps. Ernest Mathijs recounts that the sameness of the residential buildings often seen in Canadian suburbs inspired much of the fictional setting for Bailey Downs. It is specified that Walton lived in the Sherwood Park suburb of Edmonton, and it is alluded to by Mathijs as a source for some of her inspiration.

Critical reception of Ginger Snaps (2000)
Ginger Snaps has been analyzed and critiqued for its ability to satire the puberty-related biological changes that occur during female adolescence and has been mentioned by Patricia Molloy as an example of "witty" writing by Walton on such subject matters. Other critiques like that of Katherine Monk place Ginger Snaps in the broader category of Canadian cinema and links the film’s sexual-related narrative elements to a perceived "Canadian-psyche," whereby having no control over one’s sexual desires is purportedly more frightening. Monk also criticizes the film for focusing too heavily on gory motifs that she finds typical of the horror genre as a whole.

These sections should be worked into the article on Ginger Snaps. This level of detail is not required in an individual's biography. --->

Filmography (screenwriting)

 * Elevated (1996)
 * Straight Up (1998)
 * The City (1999-2000)
 * Ginger Snaps (2000)
 * Heart: The Marilyn Bell Story (2001)
 * The Many Trials of One Jane Doe (2002)
 * Queer as Folk (2002)
 * The Eleventh Hour (2003–04)
 * Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed (2004) (characters based on)
 * The Human Kazoo (2004)
 * Flashpoint (2011)
 * The Listener (2012)
 * Orphan Black (2013-2014)