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Misogynistic trash or feminist masterpiece? The dark, disturbing legacy of I Spit on Your Grave

Obscene: Camille Wheaton as the victim of I Spit on Your Grave
Obscene: Camille Wheaton as the victim of I Spit on Your Grave

In September 1983, filmmaker Meir Zarchi came to Britain for an appearance on the Tyne Tees Television show Friday Live. He was there to debate critics of his notorious rape-revenge movie I Spit on Your Grave. Zarchi came face-to-face with Joan Austin, whose 18-year-old son Martin had been found guilty of raping two women. The boy was supposedly triggered by watching "video nasties", including I Spit on Your Grave.

“I believe that videos like yours corrupted him and changed his behaviour,” said Austin to Zarchi. “He became addicted to them and they gave him urges that were never there before.”

Zarchi responded, undercutting the argument against video nasties: “I'm a father myself and I have two teenage children. They see all kinds of pictures. It doesn't mean they would go and do something wrong. I sympathise with you... But can you turn the blame away from your son and put it on my shoulders? Emotionally you're right to feel what you do. Rationally I can't make any judgment without knowing your son's character.”

At the time, Britain was in the grip of a moral panic over the so-called video nasties – exploitation films whose budgets were often as brutally low as their content was brutally violent. They slipped through the net, at first unregulated, with the emergence of home video. But soon enough, the films were outlawed or sliced up by censors.

I Spit on Your Grave – written, directed, and edited by Meir Zarchi in 1978 – tells the story of Jennifer (Camille Keaton), a writer from New York who rents a summer house in rural Connecticut and arouses the attention of four local hicks. The gang attack and repeatedly rape her across a 25-minute ordeal. Jennifer exacts violent revenge on her attackers one-by-one: death by hanging, axe, boat propeller, and – in true exploitation style – castration with a butcher’s knife. “I loved it,” Camille Keaton says about those scenes. “It was great to do the revenge part. I always tell people – watch the last half of the film.”

Originally, the film was called Day of the Woman. Zarchi, now 83, has always maintained its intentions are fiercely feminist: made to show the brutality of rape, and put the power back into the woman’s hands. Certainly, some critics have reclaimed the film as feminist. Others have condemned it off loathsome sleaze. The question lingers: is I Spit on You Grave a feminist masterpiece? Or misogynistic trash?

“I understand why this movie has a lot of talk around it,” says Terry Zarchi, son of Meir and director of the documentary Growing Up with I Spit on Your Grave (Terry and his sister had small roles in the film, playing the kids of the rapist ringleader). “It is ugly, it is nasty, it is brutal,” says Terry. “It’s easier to watch someone get their head blown off than get sexually assaulted. People get angry over the film, or filmmakers appreciate it. Everybody has their own take.”

David Maguire – writing in his 2018 book on the film – called I Spit on Your Grave the “poster girl” for video nasties. (Though the actual girl from the film’s notorious poster – a young woman holding a knife, her backside barely covered – is actually a pre-Hollywood Demi Moore.) I Spit on Your Grave was “banned” here. When I first saw it in the late Nineties, it was a US import – still a forbidden fruit of the clunky VHS format.

Zarchi himself called the film “the most vilified picture in cinema’s history”. Though he would. The controversy made I Spit on Your Grave a home video hit. “The more the film was attacked, the more money shot in my pocket,” Zarchi once said.

Best served cold: one of the revenge murders in I Spit on Your Grave
Best served cold: one of the revenge murders in I Spit on Your Grave

But it’s one of a handful of video nasties that has endured (regardless of how genuinely unpleasant it is) as a cultural artefact. It’s still the template for the rape-revenge film and was remade in 2010, spawning a mini franchise. Zarchi himself made a sequel in 2019, I Spit on Your Grave: Déjà Vu. The entire collection – the original, sequel, remakes, and Terry Zarchi’s documentary – is available in a new box set.

Meir Zarchi was inspired to write the film after an incident in October 1974, when he and a friend found a rape victim stumbling through a park in Jamaica Hills, New York. She was naked, and covered in mud and blood. “She looked like the living dead, like a zombie,” recalled Zarchi in 2010. Zarchi put the woman in the backseat of the car, next to his eight-year-old daughter, and took her to a police station. An apathetic cop bombarded the woman with questions. “I felt the raping of this girl had not stopped,” Zarchi later said.

Camille Keaton was one of a reported 4,000 young women who responded to a trade magazine casting call. She had already starred in a handful of Italian films. Zarchi apparently held back the full details of the script until he’d found the right actress. (And he certainly did: after production, Zarchi and Keaton married.) The working title was the Housatonic Revenge, written under the pseudonym of Linda Sommers.

Deranged: the violence in I Spit on Your Grave
Deranged: the violence in I Spit on Your Grave

 

The film was shot in Kent, Connecticut, along the Housatonic River, using a summer house belonging to the cinematographer Yuri Haviv. Speaking on the documentary, Zarchi recalled that production took approximately six weeks – three weeks of rape scenes, three weeks of revenge. Camille Keaton used to tell him was “50 per cent torture, 50 per cent joy.”

One notorious scene – charmingly dubbed the “rock rape” – took a physical toll. Eron Tabor (real name Ron Shelter), who played the ringleader Johnny, described the scene as being “very intense… we were all very concerned about Camille and if she was OK.” When Zarchi asked Keaton to roll off the rock and slam herself into a tree, Keaton stormed off set and screamed out her frustrations in the back of an equipment van. David Maguire’s book describes how two crew members also stormed off and never returned. Keaton – who spent the scenes almost completely nude – had to be treated for poison ivy and insect stings.

Looking back now, Keaton isn’t troubled by the memory of filming. “The rape scenes weren’t all that difficult to make,” she says. “It was watching them on film that was difficult. Even today, Meir Zarchi watches it and says, ‘I can’t believe that I did that.’ I can’t believe we did that either. And some of the guys in the film… it never occurred to me at the time that they might not have been comfortable doing those scenes.”

More than 40 years later, the protracted ordeal is an intensely difficult watch. As is often the case with exploitation films, the low budget production blurs its obvious fakery into snuff-like reality.

Filmed from Jennifer’s perspective, it’s not a rape fantasy. But whatever intentions Zarchi claims to have, it’s pure exploitation cinema: keenly aware of the context and pleasure of highly-sexualised, ultra-violent films. Zarchi also played into the exploitation market, showing the film in grindhouse cinemas, drive-ins, and midnight screenings. “Any noble intent was quickly buried,” wrote David Maguire.

No regrets: Camille Keaton
No regrets: Camille Keaton

At a time when second wave feminism was at its height, exploitation and low-budget horrors were finding increasingly grisly ways to punish women – including the emergence of slashers.

But it’s not without creative merit. The film’s most effective moment comes when Jennifer embarks on her mission of revenge. After castrating Johnny, she locks him in the bathroom to bleed to death. As he howls in agony, Jennifer retires to the living room, puts on a record, and goes back-and-forth in a rocking chair. There’s occasional sly humour too. Johnny’s wife (well, widow, but she doesn’t know that yet) calls him “a good father and a good husband”.

The role made Eron Tabor quit acting. Speaking on Terry Zarchi's documentary, he said: “I’m actually decently proud of my work but what it has become... I don’t want my kids to see it, really, to see me like that. So I do have some regrets for taking it on and that it became what it became... It pegged me as a character that I am so far removed from, I did not want to pursue [acting] anymore after that.”

Zarchi couldn’t find a US distributor for Day of the Woman, and almost went bankrupt distributing it himself. In 1980, the exploitation studio and distributor Jerry Gross Organization picked it up and renamed the film I Spit on Your Grave. Zarchi has always said he dislikes the title. One lobby card promoting the film features Camille Keaton, nude and bloodied, on all fours. It was give an X rating and lumped in with hardcore pornography.

American critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel hated the film so much that they protested outside cinemas in Chicago. Ebert called it a “vile bag of garbage” and Gene Siskell said it was “the most offensive film I have seen in my 11 years on the movie beat”.

“I was upset about what the reviewers said about the film,” recalls Camille Keaton. “Ebert really took the film down. I was at a friend’s house and I saw him on TV – I was really embarrassed.”

Ebert and Siskel succeeded in getting the film removed from Chicago cinemas after just a week. But it became a hit in the new videotape market.

“When they picketed moviegoers and theatre owners, it was pulled off the screens,” says Terry Zarchi. “The critics thought it was a victory until six months later. The video industry and all these mom-and-pop video stores opened up. It became a hot seller. People were curious about what these critics were trying to step on and destroy.”

I Spit on Your Grave was in the top 40 for 14 weeks. It won a Billboard Number One Award for being in the best-selling 100 tapes, beating mainstream titles that included Grease and Godfather II. Zarchi called Ebert one of the “best promoters ever for this movie”.

“I remember walking down Broadway in New York City and I came across a video rental store,” says Terry. “There was a ton of I Spit on Your Graves in the front window, selling for $79.99 or something ridiculously high. The window was covered in them. That’s when I said to myself, 'Wow, what did my father make? What’s going on here?!'”

In the UK it went straight to video and became one of several films prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act. The distributor was made to destroy its master copy and promo materials, and police removed 234 copies from the office. It was a crime just to own a copy of the film. The video nasties controversy that led to the Video Recordings Act 1984.

Speaking on the 2014 documentary Video Nasties: Draconian Days, Queen's University lecturer Dr Sian Barber explains that the BBFC's examining team would periodically watch I Spit on Your Grave and used it as a training tool for new examiners. The film wasn’t granted a release here until 2002, when it was passed with over seven minutes of cuts. Even the latest DVD version has 1.42 minutes cut.

Meir Zarchi and Camille Wheaton in 2019
Meir Zarchi and Camille Wheaton in 2019

Though inspired itself by Wes Craven's Last House on the Left, I Spit on Your Grave had many imitators, including an unofficial sequel Savage Vengeance, with Camille Keaton playing a bootleg Jennifer. A more recent homage was seen in the well-received 2017 film Revenge.

I Spit on Your Grave seemed an unlikely film for rebooting, but was one of several ultra-violent flicks to get the glossy teen-baiting remake treatment. The remake – executive produced by Zarchi and directed by Steven R. Monroe – was released in 2010. It perfectly fit the age of torture porn horror, with gimmicky revenge deaths: a lye bath; a shotgun up the backside; and eyeballs fed to crows. For anyone who’d seen the original, the mere glimpse of garden shears brings a tear to the eye.

At the time of the remake, feminist writer Julie Bindel said that she'd changed her mind about I Spit on Your Grave. In the Eighties Bindel had picketed screenings of video nasties. “The worst of which, we feminists argued, was I Spit on Your Grave,” she wrote. But she compared the brutal vengeance to the 1988 film The Accused, in which Jodie Foster gets Hollywood-style (i.e. fabricated) justice in a supposedly true story.

“On reflection I was wrong about ISOYG being harmful,” wrote Bindel. “It was and still is exploitative, but at least it does not present the criminal justice system as a friend to women.”

Grotesque torture: the I Spit on Your Grave remake - Alamy
Grotesque torture: the I Spit on Your Grave remake - Alamy

Two more sequels followed but Zarchi turned down a third sequel and made his direct sequel, I Spit on Your Grave: Déjà Vu. Keaton plays Jennifer again, but this time it’s her daughter Christy (Jamie Bernadette) who suffers a re-run of the harrowing ordeal, as the family of the original villain seek revenge. It’s hard to see the point of the sequel. In a post Me Too world, it doesn't have any more to say; but it’s most brutal scenes are no less shocking.

For Camille Keaton, I Spit on Your Grave is “both exploitation and a feminist movie”. She embraced the film after rape survivors began reclaiming the film.

“A girl that came up to me at a convention and told me what it meant to her,” says Keaton. “She had been in a real situation similar. She was crying and said, ‘You have no idea what that film did for me. That’s when I began to appreciate the movie.”

“This is not an entertaining movie," says Terry Zarchi. "This movie was never made for you to sit down with some popcorn and a date by your side. This movie is meant to trigger emotions. It’s meant to make you think and show you how ugly rape is. I personally believe this is a feminist movie. But if people think this is the worst movie they’ve ever seen, they’re entitled to. And they're probably right in their own way. As long as they have an opinion.”

I Spit on Your Grave the Complete Collection is on DVD and Blu-ray now