Horror flourished during the 70s. Two of the three films that constitute the “Unholy Trinity'' were released; shaping what would become England’s trademark folk horror. Italian Giallo had a resurgence, notably through Dario Argento’s Deep Red in 1975. Brian De Palma’s hazy 1976 adaptation of Carrie went on to receive two Oscar nominations. The foundation of slasher films for decades to come was cemented with John Carpenter’s classic Halloween in 1978. This same year Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave was released, becoming the most notorious film of the burgeoning rape-revenge subgenre, until Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge came along in 2017.
These films share a fair amount of similarities. They center a character named Jennifer; in Zarchi’s movie she goes by Jenny while in Fargeat’s she’s Jen, who is attacked by a group of men while on holiday, left for dead and later hunts her attackers down. Both were made by a writer-director as well, but this is where the coincidences end. I Spit on Your Grave underperformed in the box office and was generally bashed by critics. Roger Ebert said it was "a vile bag of garbage”, even going as far as calling it the worst movie ever made. Revenge found relative success at the box office under indie distribution in the US by NEON Rated, was well received by critics at festivals like Sundance and TIFF and has found a cult audience. The radical difference in its reception lies in how each filmmaker chose to portray their main character’s story.
Revenge opens with arid shots of a desert reflected onto her boyfriend Richard’s (Kevin Janssens), aviators while Jen (Matilda Lutz) cheekily sucks on a lollipop in the background as they descend from a helicopter to his luxurious vacation home. She prances to the house with bouncy blonde hair and dangly earrings. She's beautiful, bodacious, wearing pink nail polish and a skirt that barely covers her ass. Fargeat spoke in 2018 about her desire to create a character “...who would be seen at the beginning as very weak and empty because she presents herself in a certain way and would transform [into] some kind of superhero.” To Richard’s displeasure, who told his wife he’d be with his friends on a hunting trip, said friends arrive ahead of schedule and he’s forced to make introductions. The newcomers are Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède), who is mostly interested in food and lounging around and Stan (Vincent Colombe) who seems particularly awed by Jen. They drink, they talk about drugs and her dream of moving to L.A. and Jen dances with Stan while the others stare in amazement. Jen wakes up the next morning to find Richard gone, Dimitri lounging in a floatie and Stan even more fixated on her. He follows her to her room and after an interrogation on what it is about him she finds unattractive after the way they danced the night before, he pushes her against a window and rapes her. She waits for Richard to arrive, hoping he might help her. Instead, he offers to send her to Canada in exchange for her silence. She escapes into the desert followed by all three and when Richard realizes how complicit they are, he pushes Jen off the side of a cliff, where she’s impaled by a branch, but not killed.
In I Spit on Your Grave, Jenny (Camille Keaton) is a writer from New York who travels to a cottage in Connecticut to focus on writing her first novel. She meets gas station worker Johnny (Eron Tabor), as well as his friends Stanley (Anthony Nichols) and Andy (Gunter Kleemann). Once she’s settled in, her groceries are delivered by Matthew (Richard Pace) who unbeknownst to her is also friends with the men she previously met. They sit around a fire talking about their new acquaintance, how special and beautiful she is and how Matthew saw her tits. They take their boat to the river next to her cottage, sneaking glances at her while she writes. One day, they drag her boat to the shore, where they strip her naked and offer her to Matthew so he can lose his virginity. When he refuses, Johnny rapes her instead, followed by Andy, eventually Matthew and finally Stanley. They leave her unconscious, some time later sending Mathew to kill her with a knife. He’s unable to, and leaves her almost dead but not quite.
This is where Zarchi’s lack of tact on how to portray Jenny comes through. Her assault on screen lasts a staggering amount, during which we see her be horrifically debased by four different men, while she runs and screams fully naked through the woods and into her home. This sequence is filled with superfluous shots that linger on her naked frame. After she's been sexually assaulted twice already there's an unnecessarily crude shot, photographed in a wide angle from behind, where she's laid out over a rock, visible blood staining her inner thighs while the men catch their breath and slowly leave. This happens just 12 minutes in of a total 30 minute long sequence, almost a third of the movie's full run time.
This is not to say sexual assault can’t ever be portrayed in film, though there are very few times it should be. It’s in the name itself; a rape-revenge movie entails the, usually, female heroine first fall victim to a violation, subsequently followed by her vengeance. It's not about puritanism or censoring this experience millions of women go through in real life. However it does stand to question if there is any need to portray a woman suffering through four assaults while also pointing the camera directly at her bare and muddy chest. There is certainly zero necessity for it to last anywhere near 30 minutes to have it carry enough significance in the story to make the lead character’s upcoming revenge arc feel earned.
This is what Fargeat does so well. You feel her empathy for Jen, even just in how she frames her assault. She understands that from the moment Stan begins to question her, Jen feels uncomfortable and intruded upon. We see Stan back her into a window and touch her while she recoils and her eyes well up. We hear her distressed sobs. Jen’s sexual assault is barely 3 minutes long on the screen, during which we also see Dimitri interrupt them, be asked by Stan to either join or leave and then proceed to walk out while Jen cries for help and he turns the TV on to drown her out. We see her framed off-center in the window where she slams her hand while Dimitri's reflection takes a dip in the pool. And then it’s over. This is a director that knows the bare suggestion of what is happening off screen is enough to make your heart bleed for Jen and justify her later actions. She is a filmmaker able to craft a striking visual language filled with metaphors and symbolism that creates a moment just as impactful, without having to subject her audience and her actress to such a graphic experience.
It wouldn’t be far-fetched to assume Revenge is a remake of I Spit on Your Grave. One that took that original 1978 story and gave it a fresh, feminist perspective. Fargeat, however, claims she merely wanted to make a revenge movie, and in the process considered what would be the worst scenario Jen could go through, so she could go on and break out of the box the other characters, and perhaps the viewer, has already put her in. Despite this, the movie isn’t about the assault itself, which is her representation of the many violences a woman can go through. Instead, she centers Jen’s fervent will to survive and eventual thirst to avenge herself. Rather than favoring scenes where her lead is in distress, feeling sorry for herself and sobbing, Fargeat opts to give her a hallucinogenic trip where she mends her wounds, quite literally branding herself with a phoenix, and confronts her aggressors in her hallucinations. She comes out the other side of this trip a proper final girl, armed with a hunting rifle and still wearing her pink, star-shaped earrings. Now more than merely survival, she wants vengeance.
It’s a testament to Fargeat’s ability both as a writer and director how she’s able to bring Jen to life on screen, who by this point is wearing only her sport’s bra and underwear as she runs barefoot through the desert, and never lets the camera veer into self indulgence. Jen is still beautiful, but she looks like someone that has clawed her way out of hell. Her once shiny, blonde hair now appears almost brunette, matted down and filthy. She has a split lip, clothes are torn, her symbolic scar adorns her midsection and she’s absolutely drenched in blood. She tracks her abusers down, fueled by her unbreakable will and instinct, never once during all of this is there a gratuitous shot of her. Notably, she also doesn’t speak a word of dialogue after the 26 minute mark. Richard, Stan and Dimitri convene to set out a plan and scuffle like kids; once they come face to face with Jen, they yell, they belittle her, they try to explain how all this happened because she put up a fight. Jen, however, doesn’t entertain them at all, carrying on with her objective each time.
This is much different from I Spit on Your Grave, where Zarchi emphasizes how Jenny is capable of exacting her revenge because she seduces her attackers so she can kill them. It goes as far as inviting Johnny to the cottage, where she runs him a bubble bath while he explains how she brought it on herself because she was tempting them with her dresses and bikinis before she castrates him. In contrast, Jen doesn’t wait for them to come to her, she is relentless in her pursuit, culminating in a truly exhilarating cat-and-mouse chase back at the house and what can only be described as a metric ton of blood. Both protagonists are successful in the end, but the how is equally important, if not more, as the what, especially when dealing with such sensitive subject matter.
Much of audiences and critics’ perceptions have evolved since the 70s. More and more each day, screenwriters and directors get slack for depicting women as objects to hurt for the sake of moving the plot along. Innately, this causes an interesting shift in rape-revenge movies, and Revenge is a perfect lesson that it’s possible to craft an exciting, bloody thriller without glorifying the violence done unto the lead character. While not many filmmakers can achieve what Coralie Fargeat did, it’s this type of film that should set the precedent for movies to come, proving that female characters can go through traumatic events, but that trauma is not their definitive trait. With Revenge at the forefront and new, exciting voices at the helm, it’s exciting to see what could become of this genre and of Fargeat’s growing filmography with The Substance, her sophomore film and first foray into body horror, premiering later this year.