How to get back in the habit of writing regularly? Hmmm....oh, I know! Random horror subgenre hyperfocus time!!!
I'm taking a break from reviewing werewolf movies for bisexuality. This week, what is really capturing my interest is the messy as heck genre of the Fem Revenge flick!
When you think of the #FemRevengeFlick (often called the "Rape Revenge" exploitation subgenre), what is probably the movie that most comes to mind as the classic example of the genre?
"I Spit on Your Grave" (1978) is the one that comes to my mind first and foremost.
In case you don't know, this movie is has a long history of controversy and censorship due to the uncut version having many long depictions of rape. Depending on the version you see, this may be so heavily edited that almost none of the actual sexual assault is seen, or you might see a clear simulation of multiple acts of rape by multiple people.
When it was first released, it was heavily opposed by feminists and others for these depictions of rape, with the assumption that it was glorifying or celebrating the sexual assault. Heck, looking up reviews today, there sure are a lot of folks calling it trash and filth and awful.
The thing that strikes me though is that the reviewers who despise it most often seem to be men, such as Roger Ebert famously calling it "a vile bag of garbage." Meanwhile, there are many women, femmes, and non-binary people who love it, with references in songs like Zand's "I Spit on Your Grave" (https://youtu.be/8s7blmZXUiI?si=Zw2Z01l9642jlZnq).
I am one of those women who love this movie.
I do want to say up front: If you do not like this movie or hate it, that's okay. If you are a survivor and never want to see it or despise it, that makes a heck of a lot of sense. That said, I want to note that there are survivors who have talked about why this movie is important to them, like BJ Colangelo (https://www.fangoria.com/problematic-films-in-defense-of-i-spit-on-your-grave/).
I also want to note: there are some shitfuckers out there who like this movie and others for exactly the wrong reasons. There are vile people out there who get off on seeing violence done to women. I wouldn't mind if those awful creeps met a real life Jennifer Hills.
I also share some criticisms many do, especially of the original uncut version. I think it does spend too much time on depicting some of rape scenes, in a way that I think enables some of the worst ways of viewing the film. Not to mention, there's very complicated ethics to depicting sexual assault on film, and it's easy to stray over the line onto the wrong side of it.
All that said, here's why I actually like this movie and what it says to me.
For those that have never seen the film, here's the TLDR: Jennifer Hills is a writer from NYC that goes to a cabin by the lake to work on her novel. She is then targeted, abducted, and violently sexually assaulted by four men in the woods. She is left out there at first, and struggles her way back to the cabin. The four men decide to go to the cabin too, raping her again, and leave, expecting one of them to kill her. He pretends to kill her, but is unable to, and she is left for dead.
We then watch her painful and slow recovery. She is spotted by some of the men one day while she is still recovering, and she decides then what she is going to do: kill them. She lures one of them out to the cabin, pretends she wants to have sex with him again, and hangs him. She does this again with another one, cutting off his penis in the bathtub and listening to him die slowly over classical music. Lastly, she finds the two who first abducted her and murders them using their own motorboat they used in the abduction.
The original version of the film does not flinch away from simulating and depicting both the first and second sexual assaults. And in my opinion, it depicts it as violent and horrific, with Jennifer clearly being in fear, pain, and attempting to resist.
The first thing I want to talk about is how the initial abduction and sexual assault is depicted.
Jennifer is relaxing by herself in a canoe on the lake. She is in a bikini, just trying to enjoy some peace in nature as she takes in the summer sun. Two of the men approach her on a motorboat. I would describe them as being depicted as "good ol' boys" who are often "boys being boys" despite both clearly being grown-ass men. They speed up on her, piloting the boat in circles around her canoe, causing it toss and turn in the waves. While hooting and hollering, they start harassing her while circling.
She screams at them to leave her alone, and even swings her canoe paddle at them, trying to scare them off. To these men, this is all fun and games, while she is clearly frightened. They grab the rope at the front of the boat that's used to tie it up to the dock at the cabin, and speed off dragging her in her canoe far away from the cabin.
This, for me, is the core of the fear of the movie. Growing up in the Midwest, I have known boys and men that act like they are "just having a little fun" and playing around as they harass a girl or woman. Often, the woman in question is scared and does not share the feeling that this is "just a prank." And this film depicts what the real fear of those moments is: what if these men don't stop there? Literally, what is the worst that could happen?
And this movie takes us there. I think this part of the reason a lot of men describe this movie as awful - they are uncomfortable because they are relating to these men and are seeing what the violence is that is implied in their "just boys being boys" behavior is.
They drag Jennifer out into the woods from there, and while she kicks and screams, and begs for them to stop, they rip off her clothes, they hit her, and they rape her multiple times. They then leave her beaten and scarred in the dirty, grimy lake. She has to stumble back to the cabin severely injured, bleeding, and covered in muck and dirt. This scene is harrowing and if you identify with the woman in the scene, it is taking you through that fear.
This is part of what horror movies do for us. Part of the catharsis experience of horror is to simulate something we fear while we know in the back of our minds that we are safe because the thing behind the screens isn't actually happening. It's like a roller coaster or even kink in that way, allowing us to play with our fears while knowing we are actually safe.
For me, "I Spit On Your Grave" does that for me. I have encountered groups of men who have harassed me or made me feel unsafe, and known that I can't control or stop them if that group decides to overpower me and do violence to me. In one case, I was stalked down the street at night by two drunk men who had shouted transphobic and misogynistic sexual harassment at me. These scenes allowed me to ride through that sense of insecurity that sits inside me and let that fear play out while knowing I am actually safe, releasing the tension of that insecurity.
I also want to discuss the way the rapists are depicted, because there are things that I both appreciate and think are extremely problematic about it.
A lot of times, rapists in movies and TV are depicted as basically total strangers. This feeds the copaganda narrative of those inherently evil and dangerous men, usually Black men or men of color, who women need other men to protect them from. This depiction is extremely misleading of what the real risks and who often are the real perpetrators of sexual assault.
The majority of sexual assaults are done by someone the victim knows. And A LOT of them are committed by white men and men that are believed by others to be "protectors" and "providers."
This is where the writing of the movie really works for me. The leader of the group of men is a small business owner and veteran who is married and has children. All four of them are white men. And Jennifer has met these men multiple times before the assault, one of whom she even calls a friend. This is far more realistic in who perpetrators of SA often are. These are the kinds of men I actually fear.
Now, for probably the two most problematic aspects of how the perpetrators are depicted:
1) One of the perpetrators is an intellectually disabled man who is often bullied by the others using slurs, and is bullied into participating in the sexual assault. I have really conflicting feelings about this, as it reinforces a lot of tropes where disabled and neurodiverse people are depicted as dangerous and violent threats in horror cinema. Not to mention, it's not really an accurate portrayal, in my eyes, of any particular disability and I'm assuming there were no intellectually disabled people involved in portraying this character.
I honestly think the plot would be better served by having someone who is not intellectually disabled be bullied into and eventually participating in the violence. That is the role the character serves, showing how some men might not necessarily be wanting to engage in sexual assault themselves, but are all too easily able to become complicit in it.
2) There is a clear dichotomy of rural, working class people as dangerous and urban, educated, middle-class people as vulnerable innocents. This is a trope in horror cinema broadly (e.g. Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, etc.). There is a certain verisimilitude to this depiction, as there really are creeps like this in the world, but this dichotomy is problematic as heck. Working class people are often more likely to victimized by violence and crime, as our criminal justice system is largely built to serve middle-class people, but it is far less common to see the reverse of this.
Moving forward from all that, I want to talk about how Jennifer gets her revenge.
Often one of the most lasting impacts of sexual assault is that is an act that violates one's agency and autonomy over their own body and life. For those that support survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence, one of our biggest guiding principles is supporting the survivor in their own agency. Restoring that sense of agency and autonomy over oneself is vital.
Additionally, in most countries, the criminal justice system and legal authorities do not serve survivors in seeking justice, accountability, or security. In fact, police and government officials are often rapists themselves, or have been complicit in enabling it and protecting perpetrators. So for survivors, we often have to go outside legal authorities and systems to restore our sense of agency and security in our lives. Murderous, vigilante vengeance is, more or less, the logical extreme of that.
It probably goes without saying, but for many women, and just anyone who is not a cis man right now, we are currently enduring an active assault by those in power upon our bodily autonomy, personal agency, and sense of security. As a trans woman, it's especially terrifying to have many of the most publicly frothing transphobes actively criminalizing our lives and bodies. So a genre like Rape-Revenge stories can be a deeply cathartic metaphor making this experience more immediately concrete and visceral, supporting us in our own sense of power and agency again.
The way Jennifer goes about getting her revenge is also interesting and speaks to something that feels true in many ways. The first two perpetrators she kills, she does so by pretending to be sexually interested in them and inviting them to have sex with her again.
Now, this should actually seem bonkers, shouldn't it? Why would men who sexually assaulted, attempted to murder, and left a woman for dead think she actually wants to have sex with them?
Like, how would we expect someone to react if they punched me in the face repeatedly and left me bloody and bruised in the woods, and then I show up two weeks later and say, "Oh, yes, please punch me in the face again! I love getting the shit beat out of me! Please!" Probably going to freak them the fuck out, right?
But this is saying something about how our cultures often portray and discuss sexual assault - not as being about violence but being about sex. And today even, we literally see cis men online who threaten women, fems, and trans mascs with rape and suggest they would enjoy it. Heck, as a trans woman, I have been around cishet men when they talk about sexual assault in this way, suggesting a woman actually enjoyed it or wants it. This is so distinctly different than the way people talk about almost any other form of violence.
And we even see these men in the movie try to justify themselves by saying that the way she dressed and just existed in public as a woman was "asking for it." The man she kills in the bathtub by cutting off his penis literally points to what happened when she first arrived in town. She was wearing a red dress that went down to her knees and high heels. She gets out of her car at the gas station and asks him to fill up her gas tank, and just walks back and forth for a bit stretching her legs because she's been driving for hours...and this man says she was asking for it because of that.
I have been in this woman's shoes, stopping off at a gas station in a dress and heels, needing to walk around a bit to stretch out. And I have felt vulnerable, worrying what if some creep did decide I "deserved" to be sexually assaulted in such an isolated place because I was feminine in public.
By playing into the rape culture and misogyny of these perpetrators to kill them, the poetic justice of it all is even more pronounced. Their fatal flaw - their toxic masculinity and rape culture way of thinking - is what she uses to kill them.
It's worth noting that there is also an interesting difference here in this film versus many other women survivors in horror films. Often, the final girl or survivor takes their power and fights back by using a phallic symbol - a knife, a gun, a chainsaw, etc. Jennifer doesn't really. Heck, her tools are almost yonic (vulva-like).
Her first kill is done using a noose and hanging the perpetrator. A noose is literally a yonic shaped hole that she sticks the man's head through...very on point. 😅
The second man, while technically killed by a knife, is literally emasculated in a bathtub (which is yonic shaped) and bleeds out from his groin...almost a simile to bleeding during menstruation.
The last two kills...okay, those are more phallic, as she uses an axe and a motorboat. But by then, she has already claimed her own power.
So she reclaims her autonomy and power by exploiting the rape culture that oppresses her and destroying these rapists with dangerous vulvas and emasculation. There is something sadistically and viscerally satisfying in this extreme and almost campy form of poetic justice.
Another aspect of this film that I find fascinating is the gaze that is employed by the camera. Many of the most famous horror movies of the 70s and 80s, as pointed out in "Men, Women, and Chainsaws," start with a male gaze (often that of a man who is a killer) and switch somewhere in middle to a female gaze (the final girl fighting to survive).
Think of "Halloween" (1978). In many parts of the first half of the movie, we find ourselves looking from the perspective of Michael Myers as he stalks his victims. Then we switch to being almost solely in the perspective of Laurie Strode as she is hunted and fights to survive his violence.
In "I Spit on Your Grave" (1978 - same year!), things are different. The camera is often looking at these perpetrators from Jennifer's perspective from the beginning. Before the SA, we first meet one of the men when he drops off a grocery order at the cabin for Jennifer. We see him from her perspective, leaning in just a bit too close at times, creating a sense of unease and discomfort. I think some people misinterpret these shots as being bad cinematography, but it honestly works really well for me. It visually represents to me the experience of being a woman with a man who is obliviously leaning in way too close and talking in ways that make me uncomfortable (the problematic aspect that it is the intellectually disabled character aside).
And many of the shots of Jennifer that take on a male gaze, like when the two men in the motorboat pass by and leer at her in a bikini, are actually contextualized in a way that I think makes it an indirect male gaze. Sometimes, she is looking at them first, and then we see how she might be seeing their gaze upon her. Or the shot of her from the male gaze is immediately followed by her looking at the man, almost like she suddenly realized how they might be seeing her. This is a technique that is not used often enough when dealing with the male gaze in film, and did not immediately occur to me until reflection on this film.
Lastly, I want to look at the ending of the film.
After killing the last two rapists, Jennifer rides in the motorboat she stole from them into some unseen distance and the credits roll. This evokes the "riding off into the horizon" motif that so often follows a hero at the end of a movie. This conclusion declares she is a hero, like punctuation on a sentence.
But it is interesting that we aren't watching her from a distance as she disappears into the horizon. Instead, our gaze is fixed on her face. Her expression is ambiguous, but does suggest resolution and closure for her. One might also read some sense in which she had been changed and a loss of innocence, as she is no longer carrying what was once a carefree smile from the beginning of the film.
We are also literally being asked to look the survivor, and figuratively what she has been through, in the eyes. Much of this film demands a confrontation with the horrors of sexual violence and the recovery of survivors. And this does that too, not letting us being able to let it go and sail into the distance.
I think it also says something about the shape of her journey. She begins the film as a pretty, young woman, unmarked and unblemished. Following the sexual assault, she is injured, bloody, and covered in mud. During her recovery, we see her visually recovering too, with scars that take weeks to heal. But in this final scene, she is restored to wholeness and herself.
There is something ableist one can critique in this regarding what scarring and appearance is used to imply in cinema, but it does provide a certain visual symmetry: whole and independent --> injured, scarred, and having had her agency stripped from her --> once more whole and independent.
Her victory over these men is healing and restorative. And we as an audience who has followed the camera's demand to identify with her ride out on that boat too from this harrowing journey, powerful and restored.
All in all, I think one of the fulcrums of a person's reaction to "I Spit On Your Grave" (1978), and the genre as a whole, is a question of who one is identifying with and whose eyes one is vicariously experiencing the story through.
I find Roger Ebert's review of the movie actually quite interesting on this (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/i-spit-on-your-grave-1980). I often find Ebert misses the mark in a huge way on horror films, but this one is interesting in a lot of ways.
One of the things he notes is how different members of the audience reacted. He described how many middle-aged men were vocally celebrating the depiction of SA in a way that was disturbing (fair, that's creepy as fuck), and how this switched when Jennifer goes on her revenge spree, with a woman in the audience celebrating and cheering her on (which Ebert is actually curious about, to his credit).
Ebert talks about leaving the film feeling "unclean, ashamed, and depressed." He earlier describes the heroin as "simply a girl" with no character development, which is weird because we learn she is writer from NYC, we see her working hard and also taking pleasure in her peaceful breaks, and we find out she is a religious Catholic when she visits a church to ask for forgiveness for the revenge she plans to carry out. We also see development in her attitudes towards violence, as she first encounters a gun in a drawer in the cabin, quickly closing the drawer in discomfort towards the idea of violence it implies, and later see her pick up the gun when her attitude towards violence develops, justifiably so.
Part of Ebert's discomfort seems to come from the lack of an explicit editorial voice clearly passing judgment on these things, since we are often presented these scenes without dialogue or exposition. He is not a fan of ambiguity in film, or relying primarily on show don't tell.
But there's more to it than that in my opinion...
Through out Ebert's review of the movie, he often emphasizes his sense of disgust, by talking about how the audience that enjoys the film are being invited to be "vicarious rapists." He talks a lot about how men in the audience reacted. And he fails to process and register the development of Jennifer.
This was not my experience of watching the film at all. Okay, to give Ebert some grace, if I first saw the film in an audience where I heard men celebrating the rape, my experience might be so soured that I couldn't see beyond it either. But the thing is, I *identified* with Jennifer and felt like I knew her within the first 20 minutes of the film. I never once felt like I was being asked to identify with the rapists, and always felt like I was watching through the survivor's eyes.
And when I look at random reviews of the film that I find on reddit and elsewhere, I see many people with masculine-coded usernames talking about the movie being awful and disgusting....is it just me or might their disgust come from their own discomfort at identifying too closely with the men who commit sexual assault and the experience of being forced to confront that?
I'm not saying these men all are secretly desiring to be rapists, but rather, the men that commit these acts are depicted as normal, straight, white men. One is a breadwinner and family man, with wife and children. In another film, maybe they would be protagonists. But they are not in this film, they are the monsters. And their monstrosity is merely an extension of a toxic masculinity that soooo many men either already embody or at least tolerate in their friends and acquaintances. This movie forces you to look on the violence these behaviors, beliefs, and complicity are capable of enabling.
And I think this an important compass to the whole genre of #FemRevenge (and Rape-Revenge films): who does the movie ask us to identify with, who do we actually identify with a audience members, and what is it saying to the two potential audiences, those that identify with the survivor, and those that have the capacity to identify with the perpetrators.
And just because if I don’t say it, I’m worried it might be misinterpreted: it is also completely valid to find this film, and any other in the genre, triggering or offensive. It’s an intense subject matter and people can be right who feel that way about these movies too. Both my appreciation and their dislike of these movies are valid and justified.
I would disagree with anyone who declares this genre or this movie in particular have no merit. Though I would agree with a lot of the unfavorable and negative critiques of the movie/genre too, it’s not the whole story. And i think this dissonance and greyness of the genre is an important part of it and should never be lost sight of.
After all, as Ebert pointed out, a lot of men seem to completely miss the point and messages of the movie. Much like Fight Club, Matrix, and similar movies - if there’s any ambiguity or grey zone, it is far too easy for dense shitheads to completely take the wrong things from these movies. And there are open questions about the ethics and place for that in movies. And some really fail at it spectacularly.
I want to come back around to something I didn’t clarify earlier: what am I talking about when I talk about “fem revenge” as a genre?
This isn’t how many of these movies are often described, and marks out a different but heavily overlapping territory with other genres. The core of this is simple: a person is wronged and carries out violent revenge upon the perpetrators. Importantly, I am only talking about movies where the protagonist is either a woman, femme, transfem, or otherwise fem-adjacent person. Additionally, the wrong done can be of almost any kind, but usually involves some form of violence.
For this reason, it heavily overlaps with the rape-revenge genre, though there can be rape-revenge movies that are not fem revenge, if the survivor who takes vengeance is a man or masc person. Additionally, fem revenge can include revenging other wrongs than SA, such as murder or false imprisonment. All of this also means most of these will fall under horror or thriller conventions and tropes, but it is not a necessary criteria, as there are action movies that fit this too.
The key to all this is that people who are seen as belonging to a vulnerable gender are harmed and then claim their own power to take it into their own hands to see accountability dealt out to their perpetrators through violent consequences. These are the kinds of movies I am talking about with #FemRevenge
A common feature of #FemRevenge that’s worth mapping is the structure of the plot and character development.
In early horror and thriller cinema through the period of the Hayes’ Code, the basic structure of the story was: 1) protagonist starts in the familiar, safe, and ordinary place and life often embodying the status quo of a society; 2) they venture out to some unfamiliar, foreign, and dangerous place, and the monstrosity is often violating the norms of the status quo; 3) the monster is vanquished and the protagonists return to the familiar and safe as the status quo is restored.
Think of the simpler versions of the Dracula story: usually the protagonist starts in familiar and safe England, ventures out to that foreign and dangerous Transylvania where the queer-coded and sinful monstrosity resides, and in the end, the monstrosity is defeated as safety and civilization are restored to the survivors back in England.
This changed with new horror cinema, like Night of the Living Dead and Rosemary’s Baby in the 60s and 70s. In these stories, our protagonists often start in the familiar and safe, but the danger itself resides in the familiar and safe, and invades their lives. And in the end, frequently, safety and the status quo is not restored, but instead, if anyone does survive, they and their world are forever changed.
In fem revenge, we often see a pattern that mixes both the old and new horror plot beats. A woman is living her life and has a sense of security, she goes somewhere unfamiliar, the danger is found there, but the source will often represent the status quo and be familiar to the audience to some degree. And finally, the woman will overcome the danger to restore her sense of safety, though she has likely been permanently changed by the experience and the status quo is not restored.
Next up in my #FemRevengeFlick hyperfocus marathon: Tamara (2005).
Okay, I have never heard of this movie but the description says a girl who is a witch comes back from the dead to take vengeance on those that wronged her - and it looks low budget and like it probably is going to be a mess!
Surprisingly, it is a Lionsgate production…did not see that coming. Maybe slightly bigger budget than expected. 😅
Anyway, first thought on the credits: Buffy Font! What is this, the Pink Opaque?!
Second thought: first scene after credits is a nightmare Tamara is having where she starts making out with her teacher in a classroom and then is caught by her classmates and made fun of.
And it’s already stumbling onto the wrong side of that thin line at the crux of any #FemRevenge movie that involves SA: the camera looks at Tamara’s body with a stereotypical cishet male gaze and she is portrayed as wanting and enjoying the statutory rape by her teacher - ick. It only turns into a nightmare when her classmates laugh at her and her teacher says he doesn’t love her….oof, well, let’s see if this gets any better? 😬
Oh, thank goodness, they turned that around and it reads more like a teenage girl’s fantasy about her teacher. When she wakes up, she gets bullied and he is being a good supportive teacher, then she tries to kiss him and he dodges back and is clearly rejecting that. Thank goodness we are not portraying child SA as something that is rationalized or excused. 😮💨
Honestly, already looking better than several TV shows and movies contemporary to it.
Ooof, okay, "Tamara" (2005) is basically the perfect example as a contrast to the thin line that I think "I Spit On Your Grave" stays on the "done well" side of for #FemRevengeFlicks .
Before I dive into what goes wrong here, for me, I'm going to do a quick plot description.
Tamara is a nerdy girl in high school who gets bullied by some popular kids and has a crush on one of her teachers. The bullies decide to punish her by convincing her that the teacher wants to be with her and lure her to a hotel room, where they record video of her getting undressed before revealing the "prank." A fight ensues and she dies accidentally during the struggle. Rather than go to the authorities, the bullies decide to bury her body in the woods and cover it up.
Well, little did they know, she practiced real witchcraft and the "love" spell she cast to bind her and her teacher worked. She comes back to life and shows up at school on Monday, much to their shock. What follows basically plays like a slasher movie, with her taking off the bullies one by one in revenge.
It finally ends when the teacher finds out that the spell will keep her alive as long as he is alive and they are not together. To protect his wife, he tricks Tamara and jumps off a building with her, killing them both and ending the spell.
TLDR: Basically, "The Craft" + "I Know What you Did Last Summer" + "Fatal Attraction" = "Tamara"
@puffer Oooooof. Yeah, Ebert was problematic in a lot of ways, and some of his reviews have just been god awful (looking at you, Ebert's review of "Night of the Living Dead" which is so wrongheaded it almost reads like moral panic parody).
That said, I do find him useful for getting a sense of some things with audience reception, since he did take note of that kind of stuff.
Mallie Sinn
C Puffer