Oh sure, there's no doubt that what's happening in this movie is horrifying. But a terrorist attack is also horrifying. And most movies about terrorist attacks are not considered horror movies.
I wouldn't have had any doubt at all -- if it looks like a horror movie, walks like a horror movie and talks like a horror movie, it's a horror movie -- except that I remembered seeing something on its Wikipedia page, or actually the Wikipedia page of the original, that made me think twice. The entry starts out "I Spit on Your Grave (originally titled Day of the Woman) is a rape and revenge film written by Meir Zarchi." No mention of it being a horror movie at all.
Of course, the words "rape and revenge" are hyperlinked. And if you click in there, you get the following:
"Rape and revenge, or rape-revenge, is a horror film subgenre characterized by an individual enacting revenge for rape or other sexual acts committed against them or others."
Whew. In the clear.
Certainly, I always thought of the original as a horror movie, but not all rape and revenge movies are, in fact, horror movies as I would define them. Do you consider Gaspar Noe's Irreversible a horror movie? No more than you consider every other of Noe's films horror movies, though an argument can be made that every movie he's ever made has actually functioned as a horror movie on some level.
I think the thing you have to recognize is that while many if not most horror movies are out to scare you, some are just out to disturb you. And I guess you can be scared -- about the world, about human nature -- by the things that disturb you.
And wouldn't you know it, I actually watched it on Halloween of 2009, further establishing its bonafides for this themed viewing month.
The thing that was most famous about the original I Spit on Your Grave, which drew me to watch it back in 2009, was what a lurid form of exploitation it was considered to be at the time of its release. How I knew about it was that I believe it was one of Roger Ebert's zero star reviews, along with Caligula and Mother's Day (1980) (which is on Kanopy right now so I should watch it). Here is a choice excerpt of what Ebert said about it:
This movie is an expression of the most diseased and perverted darker human natures. Because it is made artlessly, it flaunts its motives: There is no reason to see this movie except to be entertained by the sight of sadism and suffering.
Of course, when I saw it in 2009 I gave it three stars. It had to have some merit, right? Or else they wouldn't have remade the movie, and then made two more sequels to the remake?
I won't be watching those, but I did watch the original 2010 remake directed by Steven R. Munroe.
I couldn't quite get to three stars on this one, but I do think it has some merit.
It's been 16 years since I saw the original, but I have to think this was slightly less graphic than the original. It's also slightly more conventional in some of the revenge stuff.
If you don't know the story, it's a fairly simple one of a writer (Sarah Butler) who goes to a remote cabin to work, but not without having to stop in at the gas station to fill up, where she has a brief interaction with some of the locals. They don't forget her and they work themselves up to going to attack her, where things get worse and worse, including them forcing a mentally challenged man to lose his virginity by raping her. Each ultimately has their turn with her, after which she escapes into the woods, where they catch her again and have their way with her some more.
Yes, vile stuff, Roger, I agree. But not vile stuff with no purpose at all.
True to the second half of the "rape and revenge" subgenre, she makes them all pay in horrible ways. Which, I think, is the justification for subjecting her to such atrocities before that. Not everyone buys that justification, but it works for me well enough because it concludes in a morally upright way. (Ebert would actually wrestle with these same issues in his complicated review of the aforementioned Irreversible.)
There are a couple reasons why this remake didn't work for me quite as well -- if that's the right way to put it -- as the original:
1) There's something about the movements of the lead character, as she exacts her revenge, that gives her something in common with a serial killer in a slasher film. While I feel like Zarchi's film constrained itself more by a nominal sense of realism, the character Jennifer here starts operating in ways that defy natural description and verge on the supernatural. For one, she escapes their attempt to kill her by jumping into a river from a bridge and swimming off. Although the men look down from above, and it's not a very far distance down to the water, she never pokes her head back up for air, leading them to reluctantly conclude that she must have drowned, because otherwise they would have seen her emerge. Of course, she didn't drown, but we don't see any part of her journal to safety, so there's no plausible explanation for how she pulled it off. Neither is there a plausible explanation for the complicated kills she sets up for the rapists, which give her something in common with John "Jigsaw" Kramer. She dispatches each of the men in a way that mirrors the specific indignity they visited upon her, involving a gun in various orifices, a video camera, what have you. To set some of these up, though, she'd have to become something of an expert trap setter in the few weeks she took to rest and recover, and you just don't believe it. Like a serial killer, she shows up when she wants to, and disappears when she wants to, and then reemerges somewhere else really far away. I don't recall how the original handled this, but I like to think that, as a normal person, she was subject to imperfections in her vengeance tour that put her in danger, even as she exacted her sweet, sweet revenge.
2) Just because you can "like" one movie like this, doesn't mean that Roger Ebert is not essentially right on some level. The original I Spit on Your Grave is not a "good" or well made movie by most standards, but there's no doubt that it occupies a unique place in the history of exploitation cinema. It earns its reputation for poor taste and brazenness honestly, by being something of a watershed moment in the depiction of brutality and rape on screen. You can argue until you're blue in the face about whether this is a "good" thing to put into the world, but some people -- myself usually included -- think that one of the ideal roles of cinema is to shock us. An original I Spit on Your Grave can do this in a way that a remake cannot, and therefore, the original gets latitude that the remake does not. I'm mindful, also, that there are really awful versions of this sort of movie out there. One of my bottom five movies of all time is a terrible rape and revenge movie called Chaos, which is sort of a remake of Last House on the Left, which itself inspired I Spit on Your Grave. (And certainly got there ahead of Spit, I should add.)
Still, I felt that this movie -- even if a lesser experience overall for me -- may have been made more sensitively and with more nuance. For one, this Jennifer does not have to engage in actual sexual acts in her attempt to seek revenge on the men, which I think does happen with the version of Jennifer Hills (same name) from the original. That alone makes it a little less unclean, a little less problematic.
But one thing I found interesting, and I can't recall if there's an equivalent in the original, is how this film shows the home life of the dirty cop who appears to be helping the escaped Jennifer, but instead is just delivering her back into the lion's den. This character, who I don't believe exists in the original, is the most foul of the five, but they give him a twist you might not have seen coming. They break away from Jennifer's story to show this man at home with his wife, who seems perfectly lovely, and an even lovelier young daughter. That this man would live this dual life -- being possibly even a good family man, and also anally raping women in the woods -- reminds us that evil lurks even within men who appear normal, as banal as Hannah Arendt once said.
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