I Spit on Your Grave (1978)

★★★
The level of vitriol leveled at I Spit on Your Grave during its initial release in 1980 (after a smaller release in 1978 under the original title Day of the Woman) ensured not only its notoriety but also its longevity. While other grindhouse movies have come and gone, Meir Zarchi’s rape-and-revenge film refuses to go away, inspiring an awful remake with two sequels, as well as its own official sequel released in 2019. Contemporary reviews blasted it, while retrospective reviews have attempted to analyze the movie in a new light. This is a dark tale. There is no way to enjoy this experience, nor should there be. There is simply to watch and ask why. Don’t read into the subtext (there is little) or deconstruct the events or characters (they are too simplistic for that). The actors are the director’s props, on hand to give form to his own outrage following an up-close encounter with a rape victim.

That is really the only way to view I Spit on Your Grave. It was a deeply personal project. Writer/director Meir Zarchi found a rape victim in a park in New York City. Concerned about any delays in finding the criminals, he and his friend took the woman to a police station so that a) someone there would call an ambulance, and b) so she could provide any information on the perpetrators. I don’t know the details of the conversation, and Zarchi has only given a rough outline in interviews, but apparently the ordeal was slow and frustrating. In the aftermath, Zarchi wrote this movie as a response. His story is about a young writer, Jennifer Hills (Camille Keaton), who goes to a rented cabin in the countryside to write her first novel. The serene beauty of the lake and the quietness of the countryside give her the opportunity to focus, without the hectic city to distract her. When she stops for gas, the cretinous attendant and his friends notice her, and that starts the movie’s infamous second act, a series of graphic rape scenes that gave the movie its reputation.

A few days after Jennifer’s arrival, four men harass her and chase her to a spot where they pin her down. The gas station attendant rapes her, but they aren’t done. They let her get away but trap her in a clearing, where another man rapes her. They leave, and she stumbles back home. The four men are there, where the final two, one of them mentally impaired, take turns in the assault. After leaving, the leader, Johnny (Eron Tabor), directs the retarded man Matthew (Richard Pace) to go back inside to kill her. He only stains the knife with her blood and leaves her alive, remorseful for what he did to her. Two weeks later, she recovers enough to exact revenge, first by seducing them and then dispatching them one by one. As these events play out, there is no attempt to develop these individuals as characters, to enable them to take on a life of their own. They go through the motions, which gives the movie a minimalistic quality. We are given only the information we need, and the actions that take place are not there to give us a plot in any standard sense.

In between the rape and revenge sequences, there is a four-minute break that shows us Jennifer trying to come to grips with what happened to her. We get time to catch our breath after sustained scenes of rape, screaming, beatings and insults. Lest the more cynical of viewers try to identify with the rapists, Zarchi pivots us back to Jennifer as she pulls herself together. She’s suffering but also trying to get back to her routine. Jennifer quietly reassembles her identity (taping together the torn pages of her novel, in what is perhaps the only time we need to peel back any layers). This montage is presented to us with a documentary-like feel. It’s pretty powerful. It is also the reason why this movie is superior to its detestable remake. Where Zarchi’s film is about Jennifer and how the rape affected her, the 2010 film doesn’t care about her except as a horror movie antagonist (or protagonist, depending on your viewpoint).

Motivation matters, though it doesn’t excuse shoddy filmmaking. I know why Meir Zarchi made this movie. I listened to his D.V.D. audio commentary and watched an interview with him on the Millenium Edition release. He comes across as a likeable guy, which is a surprise given how, for a long time, his identity couldn’t be ascertained. (I even read speculation somewhere that Meir Zarchi was a woman.) If his intentions for making this movie shouldn’t be called into question, his abilities as a filmmaker should be. It’s a shame that he wrote some dialogue that, even for men as aimless as these, comes across as generic. Sound recording and editing are sometimes poor. Characters behave nonsensically in certain situations. I’m tap dancing around the third act (I’m not sure why; chances are you’ve seen this), so I’ll just say that, as an example, Jennifer manages to hang a noose around Matthew’s neck without him noticing in what must have been the most distracting ejaculation of all time.

While the four actors display limited acting chops, Camille Keaton comes across as the standout performer. To echo Zarchi, she was brave for taking on this role, not just because she is naked a lot, but because she remains strongly in character during the movie’s most intense scenes, and because she was willing to play this role with (I’m guessing here) the reaction to 1972’s Last House on the Left still fresh in everyone’s memory. Wes Craven’s debut feature was about two girls who run afoul of a group of convicts. They are abducted and taken into the woods where they are raped, humiliated and killed. Not only did that movie receive a harsh reception, but it was released just six years before this one. Nevertheless, Keaton believed in Zarchi’s vision and trusted him that he wasn’t making a disposable exploitation flick to make a quick buck, even if the distributor thought otherwise with its lurid posters and gnarly trailer that gives away the entire movie.

Zarchi’s intentions would not have been widely known in 1980, so there were few ways to approach I Spit on Your Grave. You could either see it as an exploitation flick and be repulsed or see it as a feminist film and view Jennifer’s actions as an example of female empowerment, as some schools of thought have done. The first is understandable, while the second is questionable because feminists were divided on the movie’s merits, with some even picketing screenings. To bolster the notion that this isn’t a feminist film, Jennifer is left undeveloped, leaving her choice to take matters into her own hands up to the male writer and director, rather than a natural progression for the character over the course of a narrative. She is an instrument. Compare this to Charles Bronson’s Paul Kersey, the architect who becomes a vigilante after the murder of his wife in Death Wish. Paul’s world is turned upside down. What does he do? He develops a plan, navigates obstacles, thinks his way past trouble spots and eventually arrives at resolution. He is also troubled by his first killing. It affects him. Now that’s a movie from which you can draw conclusions and formulate ideas. For a revenge movie that falls under the category of female empowerment in the face of a menacing male, Enough with Jennifer Lopez is a better example.

I Spit on Your Grave has a different agenda. We have the benefit of the director’s reemergence to add insight into the proceedings. In the same way musicians and painters use their respective artforms to convey their feelings and experiences, Zarchi used the medium of film to channel his feelings that night in the police station into this harrowing tale. The plot is simplistic, but it serves its purpose. In fact, judging by the response and trailer for his own 2019 sequel, I Spit on Your Grave: Deja Vu, extensive plotting is beyond Zarchi’s abilities. The trailer suggests an actual story with heavy dialogue and multiple sets and props. It doesn’t look promising. The techniques used for I Spit on Your Grave get the job done, and the result is impactful.

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