Rape revenge, now with # metoo look

‘Promising Young Woman needs more murder ‘, headlined the American feminist website Jezebel recently over her review of the black comedy thriller in which Cassie in his thirties gets revenge for the rape of her best friend several years earlier in college.

So while feminists in the 1980s chanted at screenings of rape-revenge films that “rape is not entertainment,” 40 years later, they argue for more blood in rape-revenge. And true critic Roger Ebert in 1978 suggested that viewers agree with the violence I Spit on Your Grave mentally have something in common with sex offenders, his website described action thriller Revenge in 2018 as “feel-good”. In the film, the blood and guts of macho men splash around after a rape.

Not only realistic quality dramas about a resurrection after a rape are nowadays praised for their emancipating power, but also revenge fantasies such as Promising Young Woman (2020) of a slasher movie like Black Christmas (2019), in which a group of female students raises campus rape. It’s a remarkable renaissance for a genre once seen as entertainment for the perverted.

Exploitation reputation

If you look at Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’ extensive inventory of the genre from 2011, you will notice that from the beginning of film history, revenge has been taken for sexual abuse of women and men. Quality films can also handle the subject: think of Ingmar Bergmans The Virgin Spring from 1960, in which a father avenges his daughter’s rape and murder.

But in the 1970s, the combination of rape and retaliation gained the reputation of malicious exploitation thanks to countless B-movies that would eroticize rape of women with enormously long, very explicit scenes of abuse and violence.

In The Last House on the Left (1972) by horror king Wes Craven – inspired by Bergman’s film – two young friends end up in the hands of psychopaths during a night out who humiliate, rape and horrifically kill them. When, due to an absurd twist of fate, the group’s car breaks down in front of the house of one of the girls’ parents, they discover what has happened and attack their guests with their teeth and a chainsaw.

The success of another 1970s ‘rape-revenge classic’, I Spit on Your Grave (1978), according to director Meir Zarchi, was due to disapproving reviews. Zarchi’s low-budget film consists of the gruesome gang rape of a writer, Jennifer, after which she takes no less gruesome revenge on the four perpetrators, also with the almost compulsory castration in this genre. The film ended up on the list of ‘video nasties’, banned films in England. Feminists argued in front of cinemas.

In the nineties, Carol J. Clover, among others, argued with her book Men, women, and chain saws: Gender in the modern horror film (1992) for a more nuanced look at the genre. She argued that male spectators also sympathize with the victim, not the perpetrators: according to Clover, horror also allows men to feel how women experience sexual violence.

Around that time, women also appeared in mainstream films who themselves retaliated against for rape – this had been common in B films for much longer. That’s how Jodie Foster played The Accused (1988) a ‘low class bimbo’ who, together with her lawyer, ensures that the screaming bystanders of her gang rape were convicted. In 1991, Thelma and Louise themselves dealt with machos and rapists in the eponymous film hit. The good friends, fathers or police officers, who went after perpetrators for this, had it checked.

Modern rape revenge movies like Promising Young Woman of Revenge do not revert to the latter type of films, but rather parody and combine elements from exploitation films. What’s the difference with 1970s movies? That they were made by women? According to Clover I Spit on Your Grave at the time also labeled as feminist if the maker had been a woman. Or is the balance between female and male nude now more balanced? In Revenge Jen even wears more clothes than her naked former lover when she chases him with a shotgun.

What also makes the new batch of rape-revenge easier to digest for a broad and feminist audience: the rape itself is barely featured anymore, so it is difficult to interpret it as ‘entertainment’ or ‘tasty’. So found that in both Promising Young Woman when Black Christmas place in the past, in Revenge you hear more than you see.

Also, these films emphasize very explicitly – and echoing the Oscar-winning one The Accused – that victims of rape are in no way responsible, even if they flirted extensively or were drunk with the perpetrator before.