The early ‘80s were a hotbed of moral panic. Still feeling the hangover of obscenity charges leveled at the suddenly-mainstream porn industry during the 1970s, many media outlets and political groups were facing a new foe:the video nasty. The advent of home video entertainment brought about a period of largely ungoverned film distribution, with lawmakers struggling to catch up with the slew of unrated movies that had already been put out. The fear was that home viewing would not afford the same kind of regulation that cinemas did, meaning that innocent children could have their minds warped by films that were graphic in violent and sexual ways. And one movie, in particular, was caught in this censorship storm:Meir Zarchi’sDay of the Woman, a.k.a.I Spit On Your Grave.
At the same time,the slasher movie was in its prime. Pictures likeHalloweenandFriday the 13thhad incited a boom in violent horror movies that leaned more towards schlocky midnight entertainment for teenagers. This is not to say that up until the 1980s, cinema had been a clean and inoffensive affair. The horror genre had expanded greatly during the ‘60s and ‘70s, with interest in human-driven terrors becoming prevalent.The ‘70s were marked by many takes on horrorborn out of political fear and intrigue, with the atrocities of the Vietnam War still fresh in the minds of pacifistic young filmmakers likeFrancis Ford CoppolaandWes Craven. But at least during these times, if a movie caused outrage,it was essentially resigned to the annals of film historyonce its theatrical release was over.
‘I Spit On Your Grave’ Was Put on the Infamous Video Nasty List
The 1980s presented wholly different issues. With video distribution companies popping up easily and frequently, authorities were engaged in an incessant game of Whack-a-Mole in their efforts to police what people could watch at home. Such a labyrinthine network had evolved that often, filmmakers themselves weren’t sure where their work ended up and consequently struggled to get paid all they were entitled to. It was with this in mind that, in the UK, the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association joined forces with the Director of Public Prosecutions and conservative mouthpieceMary Whitehouse(who had vocally protested the boom of the pornography market in the 1970s) to compile a list of72 films they deemed to be in violation of obscenity laws, andanother 82 that could be legally confiscated. Among these titles wasI Spit On Your Grave.
This particular title found itself in a whirlwind of media attention. Whereas many of the titles listed by the DPP were older movies that had already been and gone through their theatrical releases,I Spit On Your Gravewas just staggering off the starting line when the Video Nasties moral panic commenced. With its release came the attention of none other thanRoger Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times critic. Indeed,his positive review ofLast House on the Leftin 1972 caused outrage and brought the film to wider attention almost overnight. By the timeI Spit On Your Gravefinally secured its US release nearly a decade later, however,Ebert was not happy with what he saw.
Around this time,Ebert and his partner-in-criticismGene Siskelwere forming a campaignto address what they perceived as gratuitous and excessive violence against women in movies. They consequently panned the likes ofFriday the 13thand many of its contemporaries, citing misogyny and an unethical focus on the suffering of women. Needless to say,I Spit On Your Gravefell so perfectly into this category that it seemed made for it.
What Is ‘I Spit On Your Grave’ About?
Jennifer Hills (Camille Keaton) is a writer from New York City who goes to spend the summer at a lake house to work on her first novel. Rolling into town, she stops at a gas station where she meets proprietor Johnny (Eron Tabor) and his two layabout friends Stanley (Anthony Nichols) and Andy (Gunther Kleeman), and later Matthew (Richard Pace), a mentally challenged delivery boy for the local grocery store. While Jennifer settles into her new accommodation and starts writing, the guys gather for a spot of night fishing, where they wax lyrical about how rich and unquestionably randy New York women are. Matthew naively brags about his infatuation with Jennifer and lies about her making advances towards him, apparently giving the other men all the reason they need to go on a crime spree.
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Horror movies are not often the turf of rational thinking, but the thought processes of the characters inI Spit On Your Gravelead a viewer to wonder what kind of world these people are living in. For starters, there is no explicit inciting event that leads the men from leering at Jennifer to lengthily pursuing her and eventually attacking.They just become aggressive rapists overnight. At the end of each separate attack - there are three of them, back to back - the men simply wander off, leaving Jennifer brutalized but still very much alive. They seem to have no regard for authorities catching up to them.
Most critics, including Ebert,agreed on two real issues withI Spit On Your Grave. Firstly, it was grizzly in its depiction of violence towards a woman, and secondly, it was just a plain bad movie. The leafy Connecticut location and general subject make it easy to draw comparisons toLast House on the Left, but the differences between the two are a basic lesson in competent filmmaking. Despite being an absolute beginner with no permits, barely any money, and formal training only in teaching and philosophy,Wes Craven clearly knew how to tell a story visually, and did a good job with his limited resources. Meir Zarchi on the other hand, seemed to set the camera down, roll it, shout “action,” and hope for the best.
‘I Spin On Your Grave’ Is a Badly-Made Horror Movie
There is no doubt about it,I Spit On Your Graveis not a well-made movie. Zarchi once compared filmmaking to the use of a thesaurus: where in writing, any word could have a dozen synonyms to try on for size, movie making was a matter of capturing the action from every angle, taking it all to the editing room, and seeing what worked. The problem is that this allowed for no creative camera work or pacing. Almost the entire movie involves the camera just sitting there, static but for the unsteadiness of the handheld cameraman, and watching for uncomfortably long stretches, to the point that the odd panning or tracking shot is visually exciting by comparison. Shots and sequences just go on forever. Zarchi claimed that his editing machine would “tell” him how to cut the film — perhaps it was having him on.
In its simplicity and lack of polish,I Spit On Your Graveseems almost amateurish. Indeed, Zarchi was not an experienced director, and all but one of the actors never made a movie before or since. Much of the dialogue is stilted, and the acting is television-standard at best; paired with underzealous editing, it makes for a movie that is too long and at times sort of laughable. The standout is, of all scenes, one in which Jennifer castrates gang leader Johnny in the bathtub. There are a few moments of sickly incomprehension: Jennifer calmly gets out of the tub, walks out, and locks the door behind her, while Johnny is only just coming to realize what has been done to him.
Then panic sets in; he starts screaming, horrified that he can’t stop the bleeding, banging helplessly on the door. We hear his terror as he slowly bleeds to death, while Jennifer goes downstairs, puts on a Puccini record, and sits patiently waiting for him to die. Of all the awkwardly long shots in the movie, this one actually works. Notably, it is the only use of music in the film, and it too heightens the effect of the sequence. It is almost a shame that such a strong scene would end up in the movie, because it hints at a knack for creative storytelling that the rest of the picture is utterly devoid of. It makes the rest of it look lazy and tactless by comparison.
For all the long, silent shots the movie offers, none of them communicate very much. Music and more adventurous camera work might have indicated a moment in which these characters experience a shift, and sometimes a shot hints at a basic level of artistic flare trying to emerge. Jennifer visits a white church decked out with white pews while wearing all black; a bag of groceries Matthew has to deliver to the house where he supposedly killed her looms in the foreground as he hesitates over his assignment. There are even dashes of social struggle added, à la Craven. Like inLast House on the Left, the villains have a scene in which they express their disdain for those more privileged than themselves, and a lack of understanding of the wider world around them. Their lowly positions in life are their sources of frustration and aggression, just waiting for a justified outlet.
What Was the Director’s Motivation for ‘I Spin On Your Grave’?
Zarchi’s intent with the film is a story in itself. As he tells on the Blu-Ray’s audio commentary, in the mid-’70s, he happened toencounter a woman in a park who had been beaten and raped, and he helped get her medical and police attention. Of course, the decade was rampant with social and political strife, and the women’s liberation movement was in full swing. When Zarchi conceived the movie, it was under the titleDay of the Woman. Whether it shows in the final product, the time and circumstances of the movie’s production — not to mention the narrative itself — seem to suggest an allegiance with women, while the men are presented as mindless, carnal beings. Jennifer is, for all intents and purposes, the fairer sex. Even the title implies that the story is told from the perspective of the wronged female, cursing her aggressors, although such a lurid moniker was not what Zarchi wished for his picture.
When the remake came out in 2010, Roger Ebert hated that too, and it performed poorly at the box office. So the steady stream of low-budget sequels that followed was quite unexpected. The most recent,I Spit On Your Grave: Deja Vu,saw the return of Meir Zarchi and Camille Keaton, marking the former’s first directorial effort since 1985. His children, Tammy and Terry, even made small cameos like they did as children in the original. The Video Nasties list, andSiskel and Ebert’s “women in danger” campaign, inadvertently caused a Streisand effect back in the day: if these people were so insistent that nobody watch such movies, there must be something worth seeing in them. Against all odds, this old, sloppy rape-and-revenge movie not onlybecame a cult sensationpassed down through generations of horror fans, but it also expanded into its own grimy little empire that could well carry on for decades to come.
I Spit On Your Graveis available to stream on Tubi in the U.S.
