A Survivor's Catharsis or Exploitative Plot Device: Rape Revenge Films in Media

Rape revenge tales live an interesting place between catharsis and contention. In Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study, it’s an emerging genre, “whereby a rape is central to the narrative is punished by an act of vengeance, either by the victim themselves or by an agent (a lawyer, a policeman, or most commonly, a loved one or family members.” Unlike traditional horror films, the rape revenge genre isn’t widely received by general audiences because of the object of horror doesn’t fall under a fantastical realm of possibilities. Sexual violence actually exists and the trauma that plays out after is rooted in reality, thus contradicting the inherent goal of overcoming horror that feels divorced from ourselves. This departure from being able to imagine the ‘what if,’ instead presents the ‘what is.’ This unique dynamic rape revenge films presents though isn’t widely received by most audiences, mainly because of the type of vengeance it entails. In Roger Ebert’s review of I Spit On Your Grave (1977), Ebert said the movie was “a vile piece of garbage” and added that “the movie is so sick that so sick, reprehensible and contemptible that I can hardly believe it's playing in respectable theaters.”

Rape revenge stories across all genres tend to revel in the portrayal of exacting justice, but many portray it within the limitations of what’s considered “respectable justice” such as through law, a male family member, or a cop/detective. While it may be earnest portrayals, audiences lose sight of who is actually impacted: the victim. What sets horror apart from other genres like mystery, crime, or action is that it remains true to the victims perspective, not the prepetrator(s). It emits a sense of catharsis when the vengeance is claimed because the respectability of gaining the “right” type of justice is nullified. However, there is equal contention with rape revenge films that are inherently exploitative and can be eroticized when the brutal act is treated as a plot point with little to no gratifying revenge. Because of this dichotomy between catharsis and contention, it is worth questioning the intent of mainstream rape revenge films lingering on brutality and exhibiting depictions of sexual violence through the male gaze. But space must be made for interpretations that rape revenge media can offer catharsis for survivors as it symbolizes a tool of proclamation seeing lived experiences on screen be met with a historically notorious form of power and control: violence.

The History of Rape Revenge Tales

There’s a reflexive tendency to assess the current conditions of rape culture by comparing it to the past, or “what it used to be.” While it validates the progress and standards established by first and especially second-wave feminists, calling back to the past can be weaponized as a tool of erasure or disillusionment because it suggests that the absence of sexual violence that’s often the most visceral and heinous is enough. What gets lost in translation is that the severity of a oppressive structure doesn’t qualify progress, primarily because almost all of the frameworks that exist in rape culture evolved out of “what it used to be.”

Rape revenge tales initally spurred out of myths, however, the revenge piece wasn’t as prevalent nor for the victims benefit. Many Greco-Roman myths involving sexual violence were justified especially since gods like Zeus and Poseidon were continuously celebrated for being repeated perpetrators, hardly suffering the consequences of their actions unless it threatened familial structures like Zeus’ and Hera’s marriage. Thus, cultural products like myths communicated the normalization of rape culture and the belief system that violence against most women’s bodies were “divinely ordained.” Medusa, for numerous centuries, symbolizes this divine intervention of male aggression and violence while also being a site for vilification by historians, anthrologists, and scholars alike. It’s only until the works of second-wave feminist poet Anne Stanford that validated and clarified the violence Poesideon enacted on her was rape.

“He seized and raped me before Athena’s alter.

It is not a great thing to a god. For me it was anger -

no consent on my part, no wooing, all harsh

rough as a field hand. I didn’t like it.”

This departure from “history” to “herstory” allows us to dissect the significance of perspective and who’s gaze is centered. Medusa through a heteropatriachal lens paints her as a promiscuous sinner whose story acts as a cautionary tale told by men about female sexuality, which carries a victim-blaming narrative to justify sexual violence. Medusa’s story through a feminist lens counteracts the common beliefs that sexual violence is inherent and inevitable. In Standford’s revision, Medusa is the victim, not the men who are glorified for challenging or beheading her whose anger forces her hand to inflict the pain of not confronting her assailant. This identification with Medusa’s character signals a cultural disconnect prompted by patriarchal structures that memorialize power and privilege on behalf of the assailant in order to discredit the victim. It’s stories like Medusa that would foreshadow the discomfort with future rape revenge stories that empathsize with the victim’s anger, rather than the knee-jerk reaction to criminalize them.

Only certain women and young children were exceptions and if raped, could be punished by law. Not with rape or sexual assault on behalf of the victim, but on behalf of the family. This narrative would be especially pervasive in the earliest creations of rape revenge media, and subverting it wouldn’t come unil the infamous case of Artemisia Gentileschi. Gentileschi was a famous Italian painter dating back to the late 14th century and was known to be one of the greatest visionaries of the late-Renaissance art world. Like Medusa, her legacy would be reprised later on during 20th century as a feminist icon whose work, Slaying Holofernes, was long misunderstood by historians as her own fascination with imagining and inflicting violence irresponsibly, rather than justly.

Gentileschi redefined the confines that were imposed on female artists at that time who weren’t considered by the likes of Michelangelo or her own father, Orazio Gentileschi. But early in her career at the age of 19, Gentileschi was raped by her father’s apprentice, Agostino Tassi. After, her father tried to force Tassi to marry her in an attempt to reclaim her virginity under the pretenses of union. When Tassi refused due to being a married man, Gentileschi’s father charged with Tassi not with rape and sexual assault, but with property damage—Gentileschi’s rapist made her loose “bartering value.” The disturbing nature of the charges was felt through the seven month trial, and through 400 pages of Gentileschi’s testimony. Multiple forms of extreme, brutalizing legal procedures were weaponized against her to test her credibility, specifically “sibille”—a torture tactic that tied cords around her fingers, pulling tighter and tighter with question about her accounts against Tassi. Testifying under torture, Gentileschi cried out “E vero, e vero, e vero,” (It is true, It is true, It is true) which speaks to the courts penchant for victim-blaming and blind admiration for Tassi’s status as a Renaissance painter.

The extremely traumatic experience of recounting the sexual assault under and testifying against her rapist under torturous means still didn’t amount to absolute justice—Tassi was found guilty but was set free because of Pope Innocent X who stated, “Tassi is the only one of these artists who has never disappointed me.” Thus, Gentileschi created Slaying Holofernes, a piece depicting Biblical figure Judith and her handmaiden holding down general Holofernes to decapitate his head after seducing him. Like most of her earlier work, Judith is thought to be a self-portrait of Gentileschi which was created during the course of her trial. For years, especially since the #MeToo movement, Gentilieschi’s paintings post-trial have been re-discovered and interpreted as symbolic revenge against Tassi.

Bringing her rage to canvas would be one of the ultimate examples of centering “herstory” in subjects relating to rape-revenge tales. This largely due to the ways feminist scholars re-assessed famous stories of women whose stories weren’t of their own volition, but instead became appropriated to align with heteropatriarchal structures. However, shifting from a place of antagonizing female sexuality and anger to championing them unearths internalized anxieties of how rape revenge tales can be seen as either cathartic or exploitative. These two school’s of thought are common as they enrich our understanding of justice and the moralistic desires to attain justice through respectable and democratic means. Yet, when we look at cases like Artemisia Gentileschi and how it mirrors modern cases like People v Turner and countless others— it begs the question: Is an “Eye for an Eye” the ultimate form of justice?

Seeing the prevalence of rape-revenge tales through history and its nuances that without the emergence of the feminist movement and pespectives revisting female-led lores— their individual narratives would be swept up in simplistic readings without meaning. It’s why Ebert’s review of I Spit On Your Grave feels so hollow and one-dimensional because he applies more pressure on the brutal depictions of rape and women cheering on the revenge part in the audience, rather than the man sitting next to him cheering on the assailant. His critique of the film is built on a “higher than thou” approach that ignores the complexities in condemning ``I Spit On Your Grave despite the way the film echoes the reality of its time. Or as Carol J. Clover puts it in Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, the film symbolizes “a dramatization of the ‘castrate rapists’ slogan of the seventies.” Unlike others films of that decade depicting rape on screen, such as Straw Dogs (1971) and A Clockwork Orange (1971), I Spit On Your Grave shows rape as is from the victims perspective and isn’t sexualized to appease the anxieties of male viewers who are used to the guises of “boys will be boys.”

Negotiating the Revenge Exacted in Early Rape Revenge Film

What makes rape revenge films a subject of contention isn’t typically the vengeance piece, but the depictions of the rape scenes. They demand audiences to sit through brutal and visceral imagery in the first half of the film, only to have the rape avenged through an either an equal or more brutalizing fashion. This contention didn’t occur though until the onset on rape revenge films emerging between the 1970s/80s, reflecting the anti-rape and battered womens movements of that time. Rape revenge films prior to that were more palatable as rape scenes usually faded to black or alluded to it before changing scenes. Thus, the imagery was less visceral and more family-focused as the one who carried out the revenge was usually male family members, such as the father, uncle, or even an ambitious cop.

Rape motifs relating back to familial-based revenge were prominent during the silent era of films which preyed on depictions of raping white women. The center point of these films were to antagonize and employ racial caricatures on Black men who were often seen as the assailant in films such as The Birth of a Nation (1915). Films during this era utilized rape as a political objects to promote extremist agendas and as described in Heller-Nicholas’ Rape Revenge Films: Critical Study, “demonstrate inherent white fears of miscegenation and equates interracial sexual activity with sexual violence.” Other rape motifs propelled religious and spiritual convictions and overtones which was the case for The Vigin Spring (1960), a film based off a traditional medieval ballad called “Tore’s Daughter at Vange,” where a woman named Karin is raped and murdered on the way to church by a group of men and it’s up to her father, Tore, to avenge her daughters death. After much inner-turmoil and grief, Tore accepts the cruelness of Karin’s death as part of God’s plan proving that his faith is unshaken and declares to build a church over her grave. Symbolically, a pool of water miraculously appears when he lifts her body from the grave site.

The Virgin Spring is narratively centered on Tore’s spiritual journey and unwavering faith and devotion to God. Little to no focus is placed on Karin’s perspective whose story acts more like “a narrative trigger that provokes a battle between Tore and his metaphorical demons.” The impact of his daughter’s rape and murder is meant to be a thematic commentary on how God’s divine intervention calls in an opportunity for reckoning and self-discovery, even at the expense of others. Using Karin’s character as a site for other’s character development prompts discourse on utilizing rape depictions as turning points for male characters to exhibit savior-complexes. It also changes up the ways we consider the “right” kind of justice, and as The Virgin Spring communicates—revenge is valid when God is on your side. This would later be the pinnacle inspiration for The Last House On The Left (1972).

Depicting Rape: A Survivor-Based Narrative Vs Aligning With The Assailant

The impact of The Virgin Spring also pervaded over the visual aspects of what the actual rape was constructed on screen. It’s what stirs so much controversey in rape revenge films because it demands audiences to sit through discomforting images of someone’s trauma on screen. Rape revenge films at its height emerged during the second-wave movement that sought to bring awareness to and stop the sexual violence and domestic abuse against women. However, the zeitgeist of rape revenge film during the 1970s-80s brought ethical questions about the productional motives in depicting rape on screen—because they’re not all equal. Some argue that the films released during this time didn’t upend the patriarchal structures contributing to the silencing of victims—only three percent of women reported their assault during the 1980s.

Is it graphic and unsettling to watch? Absolutely. But the genre at its core corrosively stirred the minds of audiences to perceive rape and sexual violence as a social injustice. Rape stood as a mark of failure and a consequence of a social system that chalked it up to boys being boys doing boyish things, like violating and stealing a woman’s world right from under her and handing it back—critically altered and disrupted.

Rape revenge films are the dark horses of horror. A subsection where sexual violence and assault is the subject to be feared but unlike other tropes, the protagonist’s need for survival is also fulfilling their need for healing. Audiences witness the aftermath of the violent act and how the protagonist grapples with the trauma that can’t be exoercised or killed in an elaborate trap. Sexual violence actually exists and the trauma that plays out after is rooted in reality, thus contradicting the inherent goal of overcoming horror that feels divorced from ourselves. And when it comes to overcoming sexual trauma—it’s inherently complicated to do so in a legal system that compartmentalizes women as the modest, sexually-repressed gatekeepers of “no.”

What rape-revenge films do is move the goal-post for those who are normally accustomed to living vicariously through characters in traditional horror, because now the goal isn’t to overcome, but to reflect. Inversely, rape revenge films also move the goal post for those who resonate with the protagonist as the vengeance symbolizes a form of catharsis. But in the same vein, rape revenge tales can subvert the norms of a survivor-based narrative by placing women in positions of power, reclaiming control and autonomy—things that their rapist(s) took from them. It's an imaginary space where the “eye for an eye” yields more gratifying results than the limbo of coming forward to a legal system with no guarantee of actual justice.

Clover tackles the negative critiques I Spit On Your Grave received noting that the film “reduces the genre down to its essence.” Unlike other rape-revenge films before it, Grave forces the audience to see the sexual violence without fading to black or deviating from the victim’s perspective—which is the source of the critique. Throughout the entire film, we are cinematically and narratively aligned with Jennifer as everything that occurs in seen through close-ups of her assailants face crafting a visceral effect of seeing, “a man's face bearing down on us as we lie supine.” What this creates is an overwhelming effect that can be very traumatizing especially for survivors, however, it enhances what a survivor-perspective looks like in visual practice and how changing a camera can generate a different impact. This first-person point of view is often loss in films that attempt to depict rape without skipping ahead to scene, such as Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange, who utilize rape and sexual assault as a plot-point and “surely qualify as sensationalist exploitation.” Throughout both films, there was a suggestive nature about the rape scenes that occurred, almost titilating to male viewers who feel more at ease with framing a female character as “asking for it.” Often, the camera angles are zoomed in shots of the woman’s face with her body’s erogenous zones as the focal point from the rapist’s perspective. Underwhelmingly, both films employ these exploitative techniques to blur the lines between sex for pleasure and consent so male-viewers can align themselves closer with a voyeuristic perversion that “no’s” can turn into “yes’s,” divorcing themselves from accountability when the men on screen fall in a grey area.

To revisit Ebert’s review, it’s important to note that I Spit On Your Grave disrupted the subgenre’s format. Ebert’s disgust for the film lacks an assessment of the feminist undertones inherent in rape revenge films that marry the “Final Girl” trope with the “victim-hero” archetype. The senseless chaos in Grave and films like it can seemingly lack structure and plot direction which may be conflated with exploitation if it deviates from the survivor-based narrative. However, senselessness is the point. A rape revenge film will have influences of its predeccessors but unlike slasher films, crime dramas, and action movies—it’s uniquely its own entity. As Heller-Nicholas states,“there was no singualar or unified treatment of rape across this category when surveyed as a whole [...] if people are confused about what sexual violence ‘means,’ then these films offer a notable contemporary example of why contradictory and often hypocritical attitudes can coexist more generally.”

To categorize rape revenge films individually through a heirarchy is ignoring the cathartic ability this genre can offer. Ebert’s scathing review of I Spit On Your Grave speaks to the misogynistic nature of criticism towards women in film who are expected to adhere to an archetype that is palatable and doesn’t employ anger. Other critics of the time thought that the actual revenge pieces were unwarranted and misplaced, despite the film forcing the audience to be narratively and cinematically aligned with her. Her anger has to be secularized and confined within the bounds of the screen. To have it any other way would destroy the movie-going experience of watching violence at a leisurable distance.

Rape Revenge Films in the Era of #MeToo

Rape revenge films have always existed in this paradoxical space of being a product of exploitation that weaponizes the male gaze to trivialize sexual assault/rape or a pro-feminist outlet that advances rape as a serious social issue, plus providing catharsis for survivors. Because of how broad and varied the rape revenge genre is in and outside of horror/thrillers, theres no singular definitive answer to describe its status. Primarily because it does both. I Spit On Your Grave was written and directed by male creator who, despite intention and reason, has scenes that linger on the brutality against Jennifer excessively and intensely. The only make or break factor that separates it from others with brutal rape scenes like A Clockwork Orange and Straw Dogs is its alliance with the survivors-perspective. This, however, does not detract from the problematic element of seeing trauma so closely and with the risk of triggering someone with the same or similar lived experience.

Over the years since Grave, rape revenge films in horror and thriller spaces have be negotiated and expanded upon through contemporary understandings of sexual violence, either to avoid re-triggering survivors or to have them be created by survivors themselves. This is partly due to the organizing that #MeToo emboldens all to a safe space for survivors to reclaim their stories with power and control. I May Destory You, created by, directed, and starring Michaela Coel, perfectly exemplifies thiw evolution of rape revenge media from the especially heinous to the especially healing. It’s one that second-wave feminists had been yearning for as it touches on all aspects of transcribing justice through the legal system and structures supporting it, but it’s also one that third-wave feminists relate to closely because of its genuine depiction of catharsis intersecting with grief.

I May Destroy You follows Arabella (Coel), a young writer in the public eye who is trying to continue her life after being brutally raped at a bar with little to no recollection of what happened. The HBO show is inspired by Coel’s own sexual assault that occurred during her run in Chewing Gum. Her experiences informed Arabella’s journey with grappling the reality of her assault in all its glory, whether it be healing, destructive, or complex. The revenge portion comes at the end of the series where Arabella imagines the ways she wishes she could move on. In one scenario, she kills him and stuffs him under her bed symbolizing where all her “forgotten stuff” has gone. In another, she calls the police after getting him to confess. A third scenario shows her rapist crying after realizing the weight of his actions and going through a therapy-esque session with her as she hugs him, reassuring that he is forgiven. The last scenario, and probably the most complex, is one where she seduces him and has sex with him with her in power. Unlike prior rape revenge pieces that communicate an “eye for an eye,” I May Destroy You bends the genre’s expectations into a subject that doesn’t call for a “perfect victim.” Arabella is flawed and by many would be considered incredulous for doing drugs, having casual sex, and being selfish at times. Yet, none of those things invalidate the pain she feels until it comes to the unfortunate practices in the justice system or slut-shaming entitled characters. The show is meant to not just be contradicting but a visual representation of how most victims finding justice is so much more daunting when the anger fueling your vengeance runs out and is replaced with grief.

Coel states in an interview with BBC News that showing these complex, yet genuine depictions of healing through sexual trauma is meant to invoke the “moment where consent was stolen from you and you lost the moment where you had agency to make a decision.” Feminist critics of rape revenge films and media often use their odds to lay the groundwork for discourse to occur, one that validates how it can be exploitative and another, that validates how it can be cathartic. The pendulum never stays in one place especially when there is equal acknowledgement that legal structures often don’t support victims. After all, that the reason why rape revenge films changed during the 1970/80s. A great deal of the anti-rape movements were set on legal reforms that could support victims across every state, until it became onesided and the odds for even getting a case won were slim to none. Thus, making many second-wave feminists shift gears for more community-based support structures such as hotlines, establishing rape-crisis centers, and organizing public speak outs about domestic violence. Yet, when rape-revenge films outside the horror context appear like The Accused (1988) portraying a successful court case where the rape survivor gets justice—it ignores the movement’s “narrative of decline” of co-opting with states and institutional-led structures that fails to upend the odds victims face in the justice system. The Accused and films like it act as a more repressed version of I Spit On Your Grave, thus presenting another binary of utopic realism and catharsis as an escape.

Conclusion

Like the second and third-wave feminist scholars that re-discovered the stories of Medusa and Artemisia, many are turning towards media with the intention of centering survivors and “herstory’s” especially in lieu of the #MeToo movement. Born out of silencing countless women in male-dominated fields, the #MeToo movement has notably brought more awareness to sexual violence beyond the physical and mental impact, but rather the societal and institutional capacities that perpetuate the cycles of rape culture. With more films that are reflective of lived experiences, journey’s, and survivor-led discussions, we can revisit historical staples of rape revenge films that are better viewed with the sum of its parts. As a survivor myself, rape revenge films are an interesting outlet that does exist within a cartharsis and exploitative realm but, placing anger unfiltered and bountiful in moments where we wish to express it is not an opportunity many women are able to have. Whether it’s policed heavily by critics who will praise Clockwork Orange more than I Spit On Your Grave or by patriarchal structures where women are expected to ignore anger in grieving post-trauma, media that can display it unapologetically and rightfully so as a necessary outlet.