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lucymonsterHelp, I started watching these notorious, near universally panned exploitation films because I was in a bad mood and wanted something to be angry about, except I accidentally ended up thinking they were KIND OF FUCKING GREAT, ACTUALLY, and now I am forced to declare myself a card-carrying member of the Dead Rapists Cinematic Universe fanclub. I swear with hand on heart that I'm not trying to be iconoclastic here. I just. I thought these were good films. I enjoyed them. I can see where the critical consensus is coming from and I don't think it's Wrong, per se, but I also really just completely disagree, which I guess means that I am either a bad feminist or (I'd prefer to think) just vibrating on a different frequency than the mainstream in this case.
Anyway, backing up a bit: I Spit On Your Grave is an extremely controversial rape-revenge horror movie franchise. It's about...well, I guess the genre label is pretty self-explanatory. A rape survivor exacts murderous revenge on her rapists. The original film was released in 1978, and widely banned or censored around the world for its graphic depictions of sexual violence. (A brutal gang rape scene takes up 30 full minutes of runtime.) A remake came out in 2010, followed by a couple of sequels; in 2019, the original director and lead actress returned with a sequel to the 1978 version. So far I have only watched the 2010 remake and its 2015 direct sequel. I plan to watch the 1978 as well but will probably skip the 2019 sequel (which apparently kills my first movie Final Girl blorbo) and am undecided on the 2013 middle movie of the remake trilogy (unrelated plot with all-new characters).
I'm going to put the entire rest of this post under a cut for obvious reasons. But tl;dr, if you can stomach the sexual violence, these movies absolutely have a place in the feminist conversation imo and are very impactful, successful horror in their own right.
I Spit On Your Grave (2010): I picked the remake to start with because the 1978 film apparently has, um, dubious production values even by low-budget-70s-horror standards and I didn't think I could stomach that AND the horrible subject matter right out the gate. To my understanding, the remake closely follows the plot of the original, though it re-choreographs much of the violence from scratch. Yes, it preserves the 30 minutes of graphic gang rape.
So, the opening does kind of set you up to expect something eroticised and male-audience-catering. Jennifer is a self-assured, conventionally attractive woman who trots around her holiday cabin in bikinis and tiny shorts, sipping wine and smoking weed and flaunting ample tits and ass for the invisible camera. But then the actual assault starts, and - holy fuck, it is gruelling to watch. Just really, truly repulsive and unsexy and awful. Anyone expecting titillation is in for an extreme shock here. The pathetic pseudo-masculinity of her attackers is on full display, their sadism and power fantasies portrayed for the bullshit they are, while Jennifer's almost unbearably authentic pain and terror take centre stage over any actual sex acts. I guess there is no stopping a truly determined misogynist, but this film did everything a film could possibly do to prohibit its audience from enjoying her ordeal or identifying with the rapists. I've seen a handful of movies with graphic rape scenes, including ones that were supposedly far more straightforwardly feminist and anti-exploitation, and this did a better job than any of them at portraying rape as an irredeemably revolting act of violence devoid of anything resembling either a ravishment fantasy or an assertion of genuine male power.
Then after that we get Jennifer's revenge rampage, which - look, yes, it is crude. The whole concept of rape-revenge is crude, and this not a film that feels the need to put on one atom's worth of airs about what it really is. Each of the rapists is dealt a fate that echoes his signature act of cruelty towards her. The man who held her face down in a puddle gets drowned/burnt to death in a lye bath; the man who filmed and rewatched the rapes gets his eyeballs plucked out; the man who messed around with her mouth has his teeth extracted by pliers; the man who sodomised her dies to a shotgun up the rectum. At times it got so gory I had to close my eyes, but there's no denying the primitive catharsis on offer here.
The movie also makes it extremely, heavy-handedly clear that Jennifer did not turn sadistic vigilante as a first resort. She pleaded with her rapists, offered them money, tried everything to pacify them; then she escaped and sought help from law enforcement, who delivered her back to the gang and joined in; then she tried to simply flee, and was caught and raped again; finally they tried to kill her to dispose of the evidence, and only at that point, after just barely escaping with her life, did she snap and turn murderer herself. Every single story beat is designed to put Jennifer "in the right". Does it hold up to three seconds of actual philosophical scrutiny? Well, no, of course not. It's not supposed to; it's a hastily scrawled moral hall pass so that we can enjoy the violence without thinking any deeper. But the bloodthirsty glee with which the filmmakers treated all the fish-hooking of eyelids and chopping off of penises even more underlines how intentionally joyless and realistic the gang rape was.
Basically, a lot of the harshest criticism of I Spit On Your Grave seems to come down to the idea that depicting the sexual brutalisation of women is always inherently harmful, and that the more brutal and more graphic you get, the more harm it does. To that my honest answer is: women are living this anyway. It's happening. It's part of our reality, a danger that every single one of us automatically modifies her life to try and avoid, and for approximately one in five of us, that effort proves futile anyway. I appreciate a movie that's this sickeningly honest about what rape actually looks like, absent the layers of taboo, squeamishness, and sexualisation with which we usually drape it.
I also appreciate a movie that's ultimately about rapists getting their dicks cut off. Can any among us truly claim to have never fantasised about cutting the dicks off rapists, even a teensy bit? I mean, come on. My prefrontal cortex knows perfectly well that cutting the dicks off rapists would not improve anything, but this is hardcore lizard-brain stuff. Men get their lizard brains catered to in mainstream pop culture all the time. I can have this one thing. Let *clap* women *clap* suck *clap* too!!!
I Spit On Your Grave III: Vengeance Is Mine (2015): If you like the sound of rapists getting their dicks cut off but don't think you can stand to watch a 30 minute rape scene, then this is the movie for you. It has a several nasty but brief flashbacks to Jennifer's ordeal, and some extremely graphic retaliatory sexual violence against male rapists, but no other women are raped onscreen this time. The plot picks up some time after the end of the 2010 movie: Jennifer has moved to a new city, assumed a new name, and is trying to rebuild her life while dealing with crippling PTSD and a total loss of faith in humanity. She joins a support group, where she quickly befriends Marla Finch, a tough, loud, chain-smoking, hard-drinking fellow survivor who talks a big game about vengeance and starts dragging Jennifer along with her into a relatively petty campaign of vigilantism (and when I say petty I mean ordinary bashings as opposed to the Jigsaw traps of Jennifer's last rampage). But then Marla is murdered by her abusive ex-boyfriend, and the police investigation goes nowhere, and Jennifer goes off the deep end and starts once again raping the rapists. To death. With steel pipes, and tasers to the crotch, and lengthways penis bisection that is shown onscreen in gruesome, up-close detail. Seriously, it is SO gory and SO graphic. I think if you have a penis you should probably just not watch this part at all.
Some of the critics who were mad about the first movie's ~mindless violence~ gave this one grudging respect for taking a more nuanced view of its subject matter. I think actually from a strictly feminist analytical perspective it is worse, because the "nuance" it adds is stuff like "being raped will turn you into a man-hater" and "hating men will turn you into a vicious psycho" and "this vicious psycho man-hating rape survivor is just as bad as her rapists now, hmm, Really Makes Ya Think, Doesn't It?" All made explicit and sweeping and societal instead of being isolated to one horrible, specific event. But to be honest with you guys, I REALLY do not think we should be taking any of this too seriously. I certainly don't think the movie wants us to take it too seriously. I think its crude, primitive take on gender relations discourse is just a new way the filmmakers have found of being crude and primitive on purpose. Whether they intend that primitive crudeness to make an even more nuanced point in its own right or whether they're just maxing out the cheap shock value, I have no idea. But for me, as just one viewer with strong personal feelings about misogyny and the pervasive culture of sexual violence that has shaped my life as a woman, it is so unbelievably cathartic the way this movie flays its subject matter of all decency and forces you to see the raw, bloody ugliness underneath. Like, THIS is female rage in its purest form. This is brutal, destructive, uberviolent hatred set loose against a world full of men who violate women's bodies for fun and a "justice" system that gives no fucks and does nothing to stop them. And the fact that Jennifer has now clearly gone too far is just one more part of the catharsis. She has carried her rage so far that even this steaming pile of lowbrow, ironically pseudofeminist schlock can no longer pretend she's righteous, and quite frankly, that is what I WANT out of a rape-revenge movie! LET *CLAP* WOMEN *CLAP* SUCK *CLAP* TOO!!!!!!!
So, um, yeah. I loved III even more than I. I am SO glad these films exist, I love Jennifer SO much, and I am SO gutted about Marla's death because I REALLY REALLY REALLY wanted her to have her chance to join in on the carnage. I wanted her and Jennifer to rampage together and maybe also fall in love and have passionate sex in the blood of their victims, which would have been a WHOLE NEW LEVEL of problematic, but at this point, why not?
Has anyone else here watched any of these movies? Or want to use my "objectively" bad taste new obsession as a jumping-off point to gush about your own favourite exploitation media? Just tell me I'm not alone here in actually really, really liking something I'm by all accounts supposed to hate.
Anyway, backing up a bit: I Spit On Your Grave is an extremely controversial rape-revenge horror movie franchise. It's about...well, I guess the genre label is pretty self-explanatory. A rape survivor exacts murderous revenge on her rapists. The original film was released in 1978, and widely banned or censored around the world for its graphic depictions of sexual violence. (A brutal gang rape scene takes up 30 full minutes of runtime.) A remake came out in 2010, followed by a couple of sequels; in 2019, the original director and lead actress returned with a sequel to the 1978 version. So far I have only watched the 2010 remake and its 2015 direct sequel. I plan to watch the 1978 as well but will probably skip the 2019 sequel (which apparently kills my first movie Final Girl blorbo) and am undecided on the 2013 middle movie of the remake trilogy (unrelated plot with all-new characters).
I'm going to put the entire rest of this post under a cut for obvious reasons. But tl;dr, if you can stomach the sexual violence, these movies absolutely have a place in the feminist conversation imo and are very impactful, successful horror in their own right.
I Spit On Your Grave (2010): I picked the remake to start with because the 1978 film apparently has, um, dubious production values even by low-budget-70s-horror standards and I didn't think I could stomach that AND the horrible subject matter right out the gate. To my understanding, the remake closely follows the plot of the original, though it re-choreographs much of the violence from scratch. Yes, it preserves the 30 minutes of graphic gang rape.
So, the opening does kind of set you up to expect something eroticised and male-audience-catering. Jennifer is a self-assured, conventionally attractive woman who trots around her holiday cabin in bikinis and tiny shorts, sipping wine and smoking weed and flaunting ample tits and ass for the invisible camera. But then the actual assault starts, and - holy fuck, it is gruelling to watch. Just really, truly repulsive and unsexy and awful. Anyone expecting titillation is in for an extreme shock here. The pathetic pseudo-masculinity of her attackers is on full display, their sadism and power fantasies portrayed for the bullshit they are, while Jennifer's almost unbearably authentic pain and terror take centre stage over any actual sex acts. I guess there is no stopping a truly determined misogynist, but this film did everything a film could possibly do to prohibit its audience from enjoying her ordeal or identifying with the rapists. I've seen a handful of movies with graphic rape scenes, including ones that were supposedly far more straightforwardly feminist and anti-exploitation, and this did a better job than any of them at portraying rape as an irredeemably revolting act of violence devoid of anything resembling either a ravishment fantasy or an assertion of genuine male power.
Then after that we get Jennifer's revenge rampage, which - look, yes, it is crude. The whole concept of rape-revenge is crude, and this not a film that feels the need to put on one atom's worth of airs about what it really is. Each of the rapists is dealt a fate that echoes his signature act of cruelty towards her. The man who held her face down in a puddle gets drowned/burnt to death in a lye bath; the man who filmed and rewatched the rapes gets his eyeballs plucked out; the man who messed around with her mouth has his teeth extracted by pliers; the man who sodomised her dies to a shotgun up the rectum. At times it got so gory I had to close my eyes, but there's no denying the primitive catharsis on offer here.
The movie also makes it extremely, heavy-handedly clear that Jennifer did not turn sadistic vigilante as a first resort. She pleaded with her rapists, offered them money, tried everything to pacify them; then she escaped and sought help from law enforcement, who delivered her back to the gang and joined in; then she tried to simply flee, and was caught and raped again; finally they tried to kill her to dispose of the evidence, and only at that point, after just barely escaping with her life, did she snap and turn murderer herself. Every single story beat is designed to put Jennifer "in the right". Does it hold up to three seconds of actual philosophical scrutiny? Well, no, of course not. It's not supposed to; it's a hastily scrawled moral hall pass so that we can enjoy the violence without thinking any deeper. But the bloodthirsty glee with which the filmmakers treated all the fish-hooking of eyelids and chopping off of penises even more underlines how intentionally joyless and realistic the gang rape was.
Basically, a lot of the harshest criticism of I Spit On Your Grave seems to come down to the idea that depicting the sexual brutalisation of women is always inherently harmful, and that the more brutal and more graphic you get, the more harm it does. To that my honest answer is: women are living this anyway. It's happening. It's part of our reality, a danger that every single one of us automatically modifies her life to try and avoid, and for approximately one in five of us, that effort proves futile anyway. I appreciate a movie that's this sickeningly honest about what rape actually looks like, absent the layers of taboo, squeamishness, and sexualisation with which we usually drape it.
I also appreciate a movie that's ultimately about rapists getting their dicks cut off. Can any among us truly claim to have never fantasised about cutting the dicks off rapists, even a teensy bit? I mean, come on. My prefrontal cortex knows perfectly well that cutting the dicks off rapists would not improve anything, but this is hardcore lizard-brain stuff. Men get their lizard brains catered to in mainstream pop culture all the time. I can have this one thing. Let *clap* women *clap* suck *clap* too!!!
I Spit On Your Grave III: Vengeance Is Mine (2015): If you like the sound of rapists getting their dicks cut off but don't think you can stand to watch a 30 minute rape scene, then this is the movie for you. It has a several nasty but brief flashbacks to Jennifer's ordeal, and some extremely graphic retaliatory sexual violence against male rapists, but no other women are raped onscreen this time. The plot picks up some time after the end of the 2010 movie: Jennifer has moved to a new city, assumed a new name, and is trying to rebuild her life while dealing with crippling PTSD and a total loss of faith in humanity. She joins a support group, where she quickly befriends Marla Finch, a tough, loud, chain-smoking, hard-drinking fellow survivor who talks a big game about vengeance and starts dragging Jennifer along with her into a relatively petty campaign of vigilantism (and when I say petty I mean ordinary bashings as opposed to the Jigsaw traps of Jennifer's last rampage). But then Marla is murdered by her abusive ex-boyfriend, and the police investigation goes nowhere, and Jennifer goes off the deep end and starts once again raping the rapists. To death. With steel pipes, and tasers to the crotch, and lengthways penis bisection that is shown onscreen in gruesome, up-close detail. Seriously, it is SO gory and SO graphic. I think if you have a penis you should probably just not watch this part at all.
Some of the critics who were mad about the first movie's ~mindless violence~ gave this one grudging respect for taking a more nuanced view of its subject matter. I think actually from a strictly feminist analytical perspective it is worse, because the "nuance" it adds is stuff like "being raped will turn you into a man-hater" and "hating men will turn you into a vicious psycho" and "this vicious psycho man-hating rape survivor is just as bad as her rapists now, hmm, Really Makes Ya Think, Doesn't It?" All made explicit and sweeping and societal instead of being isolated to one horrible, specific event. But to be honest with you guys, I REALLY do not think we should be taking any of this too seriously. I certainly don't think the movie wants us to take it too seriously. I think its crude, primitive take on gender relations discourse is just a new way the filmmakers have found of being crude and primitive on purpose. Whether they intend that primitive crudeness to make an even more nuanced point in its own right or whether they're just maxing out the cheap shock value, I have no idea. But for me, as just one viewer with strong personal feelings about misogyny and the pervasive culture of sexual violence that has shaped my life as a woman, it is so unbelievably cathartic the way this movie flays its subject matter of all decency and forces you to see the raw, bloody ugliness underneath. Like, THIS is female rage in its purest form. This is brutal, destructive, uberviolent hatred set loose against a world full of men who violate women's bodies for fun and a "justice" system that gives no fucks and does nothing to stop them. And the fact that Jennifer has now clearly gone too far is just one more part of the catharsis. She has carried her rage so far that even this steaming pile of lowbrow, ironically pseudofeminist schlock can no longer pretend she's righteous, and quite frankly, that is what I WANT out of a rape-revenge movie! LET *CLAP* WOMEN *CLAP* SUCK *CLAP* TOO!!!!!!!
So, um, yeah. I loved III even more than I. I am SO glad these films exist, I love Jennifer SO much, and I am SO gutted about Marla's death because I REALLY REALLY REALLY wanted her to have her chance to join in on the carnage. I wanted her and Jennifer to rampage together and maybe also fall in love and have passionate sex in the blood of their victims, which would have been a WHOLE NEW LEVEL of problematic, but at this point, why not?
Has anyone else here watched any of these movies? Or want to use my "objectively" bad taste new obsession as a jumping-off point to gush about your own favourite exploitation media? Just tell me I'm not alone here in actually really, really liking something I'm by all accounts supposed to hate.
