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Is Revenge Sweet? My Thoughts on Rape Revenge Horror

I’ve talked about my feelings towards rape revenge films in previous posts (Revenge, The Perfection). It’s not a genre I’m exactly well-versed in since sexual assault and rape is something that I can’t really handle in film. There are exceptions (such as the posts I linked above), but overall it’s a genre I try to avoid. Recently, my sister watched I Spit on Your Grave which she thought I had recommended to her.

I can assure you, I never recommended I Spit on Your Grave.

I’ve never even seen I Spit on Your Grave.

I remember so vividly being in Family Video (which shout out to FV for holding on through all the streaming services, honestly) and seeing the cover of I Spit on Your Grave and having a gut reaction to it. If you’re unfamiliar let me paint you a word picture: a woman stands with her back to the camera, wearing a ripped and dirty t-shirt that is falling off one shoulder. She is not wearing anything on her bottom half aside from underwear which expose half her butt cheeks. We see only a quarter of the bottom half of her profile, and she holds a butcher knife with blood dripping off the blade. (You can also Google it if my word picture isn’t clear enough)

Even if you needed to head to Google for a clear idea of what this poster looks like, I hope that you at least were able to understand the issues with just that poster. The woman’s face is not even part of it. The primary focal point of the photo is her ass. The bloody knife is only there to let you know that at some point she will get inflict a little bit of pain. However, compare that to the Revenge poster. Let me paint another word picture: a young woman pointing a gun directly at the camera. She’s dirty, yes, and looks like she’s been through a lot…but she is not an object. She is the powerhouse of the picture, demanding all the attention and sending a pretty clear message that she is here to mess you up.

I don’t want to sit here and pit two films against each other. There are many people who love I Spit on Your Grave and I’m sure would argue that it, too, is a feminist revenge saga…but is it?

I know you’re probably wondering how on earth I can sit here and talk about rape revenge if I’ve seen such a small amount of the content out there, but rape in horror isn’t exclusive to just rape revenge films. There is a lot of sexual assault used in horror films, particularly the slasher/killer genres.

I’ve never liked to watch any media where rape is a major factor. There are films where rape is a side factor, or a backstory, but either isn’t on screen at all, or is done in a way that doesn’t make you feel gross. I’ve read the full synopsis of many movies to decide whether I can stomach the assault…with movies like I Spit on Your Grave or The Last House on the Left I have decided that I don’t want to put myself through the anxiety and the stomach ache just for a movie.

Basically I just want to address the issue with women and horror.

I’ve volleyed back and forth between whether or not horror is actually a feminist overall, or if it really is a female hating genre. I’ve done research, written papers, and presented paper at the Pop Culture Association 2019 conference all about women and their place in horror. So let me do some breaking down of my findings, my thoughts, and how those are contributing to my struggle with the rape revenge sub-genre.

The Virgin, The Whore, and The Crone

If you’re less aware of the tropes and the terms assigned to horror in academic study then this is the best place to start. There are three molds that women in horror tend to be put into:

The Virgin: I think this goes without explanation. In movies like Halloween, The Nightmare on Elm Street, or Prom Night the young girl who becomes the target of the masked killer is the girl that would be considered the “good-two-shoes”. Usually an actual virgin with friends who spend a decent amount of time in the movie having sex with no discretion. This girl tends to be the “final girl” which is another concept that could get it’s own post.
Basically, these movies equate virginity to value.

The Whore: Again, probably goes without saying. This is the best friend in The Nightmare on Elm Street who just wants to have sex with her high school boyfriend but instead ends up on the ceiling, bleeding out from her belly. You can take everything I said about the virgin and just flip it on it’s head, and that applies to the idea of the whore. Now, can you be a whore and survive?
Well…maybe in 2019? In classic horror there’s really no chance. The film The Cabin in the Woods even plays off of this trope. The character who was set assigned as “the virgin” wasn’t exactly a virgin, but as Sigourney Weaver says they had to “take what we can get”. Whore or slut or whatever term you want to use here is equated to wrongness. The virgin deserves to live…but the whore?

The Crone: This is a little bit of a wider birth of women. This is a woman who is no longer in her “prime” who is probably single, haggard, and usually in line with the old school ideas of Disney stepmothers or ugly witches in the woods. Usually she is bitter, waiting for some sort of revenge for something that happened long ago. Sometimes the crone is pitted against the virgin.

So, what am I saying by laying all this theory out?

Traditional rape revenge films usually position the woman as more innocent (*the virgin*), and we see her transform into a revenge seeking machine (*the crone*). To me, this all just demonizes sex and women’s sexuality. I mean it’s great to see a woman get revenge for what has happened to her, but typically there’s an hour of horrific torture the woman endures and then there’s 20-30 (or maybe less) of her getting her actual revenge. These movies tend to be written and directed by men…but you see a major shift when you look at a movie like Revenge or American Mary.

Revenge, which was directed by Coralie Fargeat, was the first rape revenge film I watched that didn’t leave me feeling sick and abysmal. Where movies like I Spit on Your Grave spend the majority of the movie torturing the woman, Revenge’s first 20-30 minutes is the set up, and the rape is only a short scene. Jenn’s, the woman who is raped, big conflict starts after the rape when her lover wants to pay her off so she won’t go to the police and turn in the man (a friend of his) who did the actual raping. There’s a chase through the gorgeous dessert where the film was shot where they try and take Jenn down, but that’s just the beginning.

The rest of the film is the saga of Jenn turning into, essentially, a superhero who survives being impaled on a rotting tree, the harsh dessert conditions, and various other physical traumas. Jenn’s fight isn’t just for revenge, but for survival.

American Mary is another rape revenge film that breaks the mold of the traditional framework. The film follows Mary, a medical student who is invited to a part by a surgeon she is doing her residency under where she is raped and the men film the horrible act. Before the entire party and rape even happens Mary tries to get a job stripped in order to help pay for her schooling, but when she is at the club the owner offers her $5,000 to sew up a man with a wound that clearly came from some sort of illegal activity. After that Mary is found by a stripper from the club and asked to perform an extreme body modification on a friend of hers.

After Mary is raped, she drops out of her surgical residency and starts doing illegal and extreme body modification surgeries. She kidnaps the man surgeon who raped her and keeps him alive in a storage unit where she practices her surgeries. The revenge part of this movie is less important to the story than Mary’s descent into crime and the brutal surgeries she performs. Mary doesn’t start doing the body modification surgeries because of the rape – she has that inside of her the whole time. The film is written and directed by sisters Jen and Sylvia Soska, showing that female led rape revenge tends to be less brutal towards the woman, and deeper than just brutalizing a poor defenseless woman.

The final film I want to talk about as an example of rape revenge done right is The Perfection. Now I just put up a whole post about this film, so I don’t want to spend too much time on it, but it does break the thread of female directed rape revenge. It was directed by Richard Shepherd, but one of the three writers that worked on the script was a woman (Nicole Snyder). There is no actual on-screen rape in The Perfection and the only actual on screen sex scene is between Allison Williams and Logan Browning who play Charlotte and Lizzie, respectively. It surrounds a school for young and promising cellists where the headmaster and teachers have, essentially, a sex cult. The elite students at the school are allowed to play in the acoustically perfect “chapel”…but if they make mistakes, they are raped or sexually abused as penance by the men of the school.

Charlotte wants to save Lizzie, and by the end of the film you realize the entire plot has been leading up to the torture of the headmaster. This film focuses so little on the actual rape, and yet is a rape revenge film. It’s a wild ride, but will leave you feeling much more empowered than sympathetic.

So what is my point in all of this?

Basically – be more critical of the rape revenge that is being put out. Look at it carefully and determine whether or not the purpose is to empower the female characters and show the women as warriors…or is it just a way for men to hide their objectification and their brutalization of women? Personally I think rape is the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to scaring people. Of course every woman is automatically scared when rape is involved because it is something we all have to worry about it our day-to-day life.

Of course, it is up to each individual person to determine their feelings towards any given movie. Just because I think movies like I Spit on Your Grave or The Last House on the Left are exploitative and too brutal to be feminist doesn’t mean that everyone will or has to have that same opinion. It is just something I have taken the time to sit and think about. This is totally my thoughts and opinions coupled with the basic research I have done thus far. My goal is to do some farther academic research and see what is out there, but for now I’ll leave you with these thoughts and feelings.

What do you think about rape revenge as a sub genre?


B Calm Female Horror The Horrors of Life

The Art of Revenge

Revenge*Trigger Warning: Discussions of rape and sexual assault*

I’ve never been into rape revenge films.

Sexual violence has always been the one thing that I can’t stomach in movies. From a purely horror story standpoint, I’ve always thought of rape and sexual assault as the lowest hanging fruit that a writer/director can use to scare their audience. As women we already have to go about our daily lives with the very real understanding that, quite literally at any moment, we could be raped; therefore, I don’t like to spend time consuming media where that is the driving force behind the entire story.

But then Shudder added their exclusive film, Revenge, and I was intrigued.

The synopsis of the film was vague enough that, while I knew the implication was rape, it drew me in. Director Coralie Fargeat talked about the film in an interview with Mick Garris on his podcast Post Mortem. In the interview Fargeat and Garris both agreed that the traditional rape revenge formula of 90+ minutes of the female character being tortured with 10-20 minutes at the end of her getting payback is a lot to stomach. That’s where Revenge deviates from the beaten path.

The main character Jen, played by Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz, arrives in a remote and unnamed desert to spend a long weekend with her married lover, Richard who is played by Kevin Janssens. When her Richard’s friends arrive for their hunting trip early things take a turn for the worst. After one of the friends assaults Jen, a chase ensues through the dessert that will keep you on the edge of your seat the entire time.

The thing that I really admire about the way that Fargeat handles the assault and the subsequent chase does not make the viewer feel worse at the end. The amount of pure torture most women in rape revenge sagas go through is hard to stomach, and tend to just leave me feeling dirty and gross by the end.

In Revenge the audience is introduced to Jen as a stereotypical horror movie floozy. She’s sleeping with a married man, she wears risque clothing, she flits with her lover’s friends, and uses her sexuality to her benefit. However, the moment the viewer can tell the assault is coming, she is thrust into our sympathies. It’s one of those moments that you really don’t want to watch, but you can’t look away from. We get a brief couple of scenes in which Jen has to deal with the aftermath of the assault; we watch as she lays in bed, staring blankly ahead of herself, unable to wrap her head around what happens.

Our sympathy for Jen quickly turns into murderous rage for the three men whose mercy she is, seemingly, at. Her lover returns back to the house, and finds out what has happened, he rages at the man who has raped Jen but refuses to let her go home. Instead of truly taking action, he offers his mistress a large some of money. After Jen refuses and threatens to expose their affair, Richard slaps Jen and she runs away as the three men chase her.

That, in my opinion, is where Revenge truly begins.

The cat and mouse game in the dessert devolves into a bizarre and almost fantasy like sequence as Jen deals with bodily injuries, dehydration, exhaustion, and emotional trauma while trying to get back at the men. The social and gender commentary in this movie are beautifully incorporated into a nail biting epic as Jen becomes a proverbial superhero out to save herself.

One of the most poignant and stomach churning scenes is the conversation that leads up to Jen’s assault. The man who rapes her tells Jen that she was coming on to him earlier in the weekend, and that she clearly wants what is about to happen. This is an all too familiar excuse used in rape and sexual assault cases all the time. Everything from “If she didn’t want it she wouldn’t dress that way” to “If you hadn’t been drinking so much it wouldn’t have happened.” Women have always been blamed for their own rape and sexual abuse, and Fargeat does an incredible job of taking that horrible reality and flipping it onto the men who truly deserve what they get.

I highly recommend this film to those that are able to stomach a brief scene of sexual violence.


Revenge Wiki

Revenge IMDB 

Revenge Trailer