vile bag of garbage”. This is the way Roger
Ebert infamously described Meir Zarchi’s I Spit
on Your Grave in the very first line of his 1980
review. The famous American critic goes on to describe
the more enthusiastic viewers at the screening he attended
as “vicarious sex criminals,” and the whole experience as
“one of the most depressing of [his] life.”
Though richer in declarative statements than in actual
analysis, Ebert’s review does a rather good job of explaining
the film’s simple plot. Jennifer (Camille Keaton, related to
Buster), an aspiring novelist from the city, goes on holiday
to an isolated house in Upstate New York. There, she is
taunted by a local group of men who one day decide to
attack her. They kidnap her, gang-rape her and leave her
for dead in her home. The shyest member of the group,
tasked with killing her, does not have the courage to do so
and, after Jennifer recovers, she lures the men one by one
to her home before violently killing them. The film follows
the classic three-act structure of the rape-revenge movie,
with assault followed by recovery and, finally, revenge.
Despite, or perhaps partly thanks to, Ebert’s negative“A
WORDS BY ELENA LAZIC ILLUSTRATION BY ALICE CARNEGIE TYPE BY SIMON HAYESHOW DO WE REACT TO
SCENES OF VIOLENCE
AGAINST WOMEN IN MOVIES?
LWLIES CONDUCTED
A TEST TO FIND OUT.
verdict, the film has since gained cult status and is
perceived as a classic of the rape-revenge sub-genre of
exploitation cinema. Yet this isn’t a simple case of a critic
missing the boat on a movie everyone else now adores. For
I Spit on Your Grave and other films like it (Wes Craven’s
The Last House on the Left, Ruggero Deodato’s The House
on the Edge of the Park, Abel Ferrara’s Ms 45, and more
recently Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge), it seems the discourse
never ends. Besides debate about how rape should be
depicted on film – if at all – the genre also divides viewers
on the issue of retribution and punishment: is murder too
harsh? What if the justice system fails a victim? And so on.
According to his review, the audience Ebert saw the
film with, at 11:20am on a Monday morning, had clear-cut
answers to all these dilemmas, with some men rating the
various rape scenes and a woman cheering on Jennifer’s
murders. It remains unknown how each party felt during
the moments in which they were silent, but we can be sure
that Ebert himself did not enjoy any part of the film, which
he described as, “an expression of the most diseased and
perverted darker human natures.”
To reproduce the circumstances of this screening today
would be impossible. There is no real contemporary
equivalent to the cheap and dirty exploitation cinema of
the 1970s and ’80s, where a screening of a very violent
movie could be packed on a Monday morning. The sense
of anonymity provided by a dark cinema undoubtedly
encouraged some viewers to disclose their most disturbing
comments, and it is worth wondering if the same would
happen today, were the film to be shown in a cinema at all.
Though I could not hire a screening room, I wanted to
see how an audience would physically react to the film’s028 The Promising Young Woman Issue