Day of the Woman (better known by its re-release title, I Spit on Your Grave) is a controversial rape revenge film. The film was produced in 1978 and recevied a limited release, with a wider release in 1980. Prominent film critics condemned the film for its graphic violence and lengthy depictions of gang rape, and the picture remains controversial to this day. The film was named one of TIME's Top 10 Ridiculously Violent Movies in 2007.^[1]

Name

The film's original title was Day of the Woman. It was also shown under the title I Hate Your Guts and The Rape and Revenge of Jennifer Hill.^{[citation needed]} The title was changed to I Spit on Your Grave for the 1980 re-release.^[2] Zarchi dislikes this title.

Synopsis

New York short story writer Jennifer Hills (Camille Keaton) rents an isolated cottage by a lake in the countryside to write her first novel. The arrival in town of the attractive and independent young woman attracts the attention of Johnny (Eron Tabor), the gas station manager, and Stanley (Anthony Nichols) and Andy (Gunter Kleemann), two unemployed youths who hang around the gas station. Jennifer receives a grocery delivery from Matthew (Richard Pace), who is shy and apparently mildly mentally retarded, and befriends him. Matthew is friends with the other three men and reports back to them about the beautiful woman he met, claiming he saw her breasts.

Stanley and Andy start cruising by the cottage in their speedboat and apparently prowl around the house at night. One day, while Jennifer is relaxing in her canoe, they surprise her in their speedboat and tow her to shore. As she tries to escape, she's met by Johnny, while Matthew hides in bushes nearby. She realizes they planned her abduction so Matthew can lose his virginity. Jennifer fights but is chased by the men through the forest. Matthew refuses to have sex with her so Johnny rapes her. They allow her to escape but track her down shortly afterward and Andy brutally rapes her anally. After she crawls back to her house they attack her again. Matthew finally rapes her after drinking alcohol, but says that he can not reach orgasm with the other men watching. The other men ridicule her book and rip up the manuscript, and Stanley sexually assaults her. She passes out and the men leave. Johnny realizes she is a witness to their crimes and orders Matthew to stab her to death. Matthew cannot bring himself to do this, so dabs the knife in her blood and returns to the other men claiming he has killed her.

In the following days, a traumatized Jennifer pieces both herself and her manuscript back together. She goes to church and asks for forgiveness. The men learn Jennifer has survived and beat Matthew up for deceiving them. Jennifer calls in a grocery order knowing Matthew will deliver it. He takes the groceries, and a knife. At the cabin Jennifer entices him to have sex with her under a tree. As he becomes oblivious to his surroundings she strings a noose around his neck and hangs him. Jennifer cuts the rope and drops the body in the river.

Jennifer seductively collects Johnny from the gas station in her car. She stops halfway to her house and turns a gun on him and orders him to remove all his clothing. Johnny insists the rapes were her fault because she enticed the men by parading around in revealing clothing. She apparently believes this, lowers her gun, and invites him back to her cottage for a hot bath. Jennifer manually stimulates him in her bathtub. When Johnny says that Matthew has been reported missing, Jennifer says she killed Matthew. Johnny thinks she is joking. As he nears orgasm Jennifer takes the knife Matthew brought with him from its hiding place under the bathmat and severs Johnny's genitals. He screams in terror while bleeding to death. Jennifer calmly leaves the room and locks Johnny in from the outside. He dies from blood loss. Jennifer dumps the body in the basement and burns his clothes in the fireplace.

Stanley and Andy learn that Johnny is missing and take their boat to Jennifer's cabin. Andy goes ashore with an axe. Jennifer swims out to the boat and climbs aboard before Stanley realizes what she is doing. She pushes him overboard and Stanley has trouble staying afloat. Andy tries to attack her when she speeds past him in the boat, but she escapes with the axe. Andy swims out to rescue Stanley but Jennifer plunges the axe into Andy's back. She backs the boat up to Stanley who grabs hold of the motor to climb aboard, begging Jennifer not to kill him. She quotes what he said while assaulting her: "Suck it, Bitch!" and starts the engine, disemboweling him. Jennifer smiles slightly as she speeds away in the boat.

Cast

• Camille Keaton as Jennifer Hills
• Eron Tabor as Johnny
• Richard Pace as Matthew Lucas
• Anthony Nichols as Stanley
• Gunter Kleemann as Andy
• Alexis Magnotti as Attendant's Wife
• Tammy Zarchi as The Children
• Terry Zarchi as The Children
• Traci Ferrante as Waitress
• William Tasgal as Porter
• Isaac Agami as Butcher
• Ronit Haviv as Supermarket Girl

Production

The house that Jennifer rents and its grounds, the river and the gas station, were all located in Kent, Connecticut. The waterway is a section of the Housatonic River. The house in real life was owned by Zarchi's friend Nouri Haviv, who photographed this film. Most of the house interior scenes were also shot inside this house.

Zarchi first visited the house while developing the script and its ambience and location influenced the development of the story.

Release

Camille Keaton (the grand-niece of Buster Keaton) won a Best Actress award for her role in this film at the 1978 Catalonian International Film Festival in Spain.^[3]

Zarchi submitted the film to the Motion Picture Association of America several times before they passed it. They rejected the film due to its violence, suggesting the violence should be toned down but refusing to specify which footage should be removed. Zarchi re-edited the film and submitted it a second time and it was again rejected. The MPAA finally passed the film after all footage depicting the anal rape was removed.

Zarchi was unable to find a distributor so distributed the film himself. It played a number of engagements in rural drive-in theaters, but only for brief runs each time, and the film barely broke even. In 1980 it was picked up for distribution by the Jerry Gross Organization. A condition of this re-release was that they could change the title to anything they wished. It was at this time the film was retitled I Spit on Your Grave.

Censorship and film bans

Many nations, such as the Republic of Ireland, Norway, Iceland, and West Germany, banned the film altogether, claiming that it "glorified violence against women". Canada initially banned the film, but in the 1990s decided to allow its individual provinces to decide whether to permit its release. Since 1998, some provinces (such as Manitoba, Nova Scotia, and Quebec) have released the film, with a rating that reflects its content.

The censored American version of the film was released in Australia in 1982 with an R 18+ rating. In 1987 the film survived an appeal to ban it. It continued to be sold until 1997, when another reclassification caused its ban in Australia. In 2004 the full uncut version was awarded an R 18+, lifting the seven-year ban. The Office of Film and Literature Classification justified this decision by reasoning that castration is not sexual violence (Australian censorship law forbids the release of films that depict scenes of sexual violence as acceptable or justified).^[4]

In the United Kingdom, the film was branded a "video nasty". It appeared on the Director of Public Prosecutions's list of prosecutable films until 2001, when a heavily-cut version of was released with an 18 certificate. This British cut version was released on DVD in New Zealand in 2001, with an R18 rating.

Criticisms

Movie critic Roger Ebert gave the film no stars, referring to it as "a vile bag of garbage...without a shred of artistic distinction," adding that "Attending it was one of the most depressing experiences of my life."^[5] In his review, Roger Ebert mentioned a female member of the audience (one of many people who randomly talked aloud) who had "feminist solidarity for the movie's heroine", and did not share her feelings. He wrote "I wanted to ask if she'd been appalled by the movie's hour of rape scenes". Ebert was also one of many to cite the movie's poor production quality as a weakness in addition to the scenes he found offensive, stating "The story of 'I Spit on Your Grave' is told with moronic simplicity. These horrible events are shown with an absolute minimum of dialogue, which is so poorly recorded that it often cannot be heard. There is no attempt to develop the personalities of the characters - they are, simply, a girl and four men, one of them mentally retarded. The movie is nothing more or less than a series of attacks on the girl and then her attacks on the men, interrupted only by an unbelievably grotesque and inappropriate scene in which she enters a church and asks forgiveness for the murders she plans to commit". ^[6]

Encyclopedia of Horror notes that the film attracted much debate for and against, frequently involving people who clearly had not actually seen the film. "The men are so grossly unattractive and the rapes so harrowing, long-drawn-out and starkly presented it is hard to imagine most male spectators identifying with the perpretrators, especially as the film's narrative structure and mise-en-scene force the spectator to view the action from Keaton's point of view. Further, there is no suggestion that she 'asked for it' or enjoyed it, except, of course, in the rapists' own perceptions, from which the film is careful to distance itself." The book continues that the scenes of revenge were "grotesquely misread by some critics" as Jennifer only "pretends to have enjoyed the rape so as to lure the men to their destruction", and that in these scenes the film is critiquing "familiar male arguments about women 'bringing it on themselves'" as "simply sexist, self-excusing rhetoric and are quite clearly presented as such". ^[7]

The initial criticism was followed reappraisals of the film. Michael Kaminski's 2007 article for the website "Obsessed with Film", titled "Is 'I Spit on Your Grave' Really a Misunderstood Feminist Film?" argues that, when understood within the context in which director Zarchi was inspired to make it, the movie may be equally appropriate to analyze as "feminist wish-fulfillment" and a vehicle of personal expression reacting to violence against women.^[8]

A reappraisal was made by Carol J. Clover in the third chapter of her 1992 book Men, Women, and Chainsaws. Clover notes that she and others like her "appreciate, however grudgingly, the way in which [the movie's] brutal simplicity exposes a mainspring of popular culture." Clover further argues that the film's sympathies are entirely with Jennifer, that the male audience is meant to identify with her, and not with the attackers, and that the point of the film is a masochistic identification with pain used to justify the bloody catharsis of revenge. Clover wrote that in her opinion the film owes a debt to Deliverance.

These reappraisals have in turn been answered. Critic Luke Y. Thompson of the New Times stated "Defenders of the film have argued that it's actually pro-woman, due to the fact that the female lead wins in the end, which is sort of like saying that cockfights are pro-rooster because there's always one left standing".^[9]

Zarchi's inspiration and responses to criticism

In the commentary for the Millennium Edition, Zarchi said he was inspired to produce the film after helping a young woman who had been raped in New York. He tells of how a friend of his and his daughter were driving by a park when they witnessed a young woman crawling out of the bushes bloodied and naked (he later learned the young woman was taking a common shortcut to her boyfriend's house when she was attacked). They collected the traumatized girl, returned the daughter home, and quickly decided it was best to take the girl to the police rather than a hospital, lest the attackers escape and find further victims.

They quickly decided that they made the wrong decision — the officer, whom Zarchi described as "not fit to wear the uniform", delayed taking her to the hospital and instead insisted that she follow formalities such as giving her full name (and the spelling), even though her jaw had been broken and she could hardly speak. Zarchi insisted the officer take her to the hospital and he eventually complied. Soon afterwards the woman's father wrote both Zarchi and his friend a letter of thanks for helping his daughter. The father offered a reward, which Zarchi refused.^[10]

In the same commentary, Zarchi denied that the film was exploitative, and that the violent nature of the film was necessary to tell the story. He described actress Camille Keaton as "brave" for taking on the role.^[11]

Sequel and Remakes

The film was followed by unofficial sequel Savage Vengeance (1993) in which Camille Keaton reprises the role of Jennifer.

The film was unofficially remade in 1985 as Naked Vengeance. CineTel Films has acquired rights to remake I Spit on Your Grave 2010 and has planned a Halloween 2010 worldwide theatrical release. The remake is being produced by CineTel president and CEO Paul Hertzberg and Lisa Hansen, with Jeff Klein, Alan Ostroff, Gary Needle and Zarchi as executive producers.^[12] Filming began on November 2, 2009, with Steven R. Monroe directing and starring new-comer Sarah Butler.^[13]

Cultural references

The film was referenced in the name of 1980s Australian band I Spit on Your Gravy.

In "Lisa the Vegetarian", a seventh season episode of The Simpsons the marquee of the Springfield drive-in advertises a double feature of I Spit On Your Grave and I Thumb Through Your Magazines.

In a 1980 feature of Bloom County, while on a date, Steve Dallas and Bobbi Harlow, were discussing in his jeep about what movie to go and see. Bobbi suggested Ordinary People, but Steve decide to go for I Spit On Your Grave. Bobbi, disgusted with Steve's decision tried to get out of the jeep, but Steve changed his mind and suggested instead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

In Supernatural (TV series) episode 4.13 "After School Special" a young Dean Winchester mentions a midnight showing of "I Spit on Your Grave" while making out with Amanda Heckerling in the Janitor's closet.

In horror movie Scream just before Rose McGowan's character is killed, she jokingly asks the killer if he is making a movie called "I Spit On Your Garage", obviously refrencing, 'I Spit On Your Grave'.

See also

• 1978 in film

References

External links

• Day of the Woman at the Internet Movie Database
• I Spit on Your Grave at Allmovie
• I Spit on Your Grave at Rotten Tomatoes
• [Women In Danger movies 1980] at Siskel & Ebert Gene and Roger comment on I Spit On Your Grave, plus other slasher movies, on Sneak Previews (1980)}