As well as being difficult to endure simply for their length, it is the grubby extremity of these sequences that makes them incredibly hard to watch. All told, though there are moments between them, the film’s three rape sequences take up about 25 minutes of screen time. This peeling back of the layers of distance is most effective in the film’s astonishingly brutal second act. It might seem artless, but even if it’s accidental what Zarchi does here serves to focus us entirely on the world of the film, he strips us of the usual veneer of being removed from what’s unfolding on screen. This means practically the entire film unfolds in an eerie silence punctured, from roughly the 20 minute mark, largely by screaming. There is no score, and while there is some music used, to a similar purpose as score, it is all diegetic. The use of sound is artful in its restraint. Look at how the camera first watches from behind a bush, then from the opposite side of a river as Jennifer skinny dips when she first arrives at the house, already Zarchi’s implicating us. Early on he establishes a sense of the isolated nature of the place Jennifer has rented, but he also suggests the voyeurism not only of the people around her but of us as an audience. However, Zarchi’s choices are much more purposeful and effective than they are often given credit for. On its face, I Spit On Your Grave is very basic stylistically. A few weeks later, somewhat recovered, she sets out to take revenge. After spotting her sunbathing out in a boat, the men grab Jennifer, take her out to the woods and repeatedly sexually assault her.
When she arrives she catches the eye of Matthew (Richard Pace), the mentally handicapped local delivery man, who tells his friends about her. Jennifer Hills (Camille Keaton) is writing a novel and so that she can focus on it she has rented an isolated cabin by a river. The story of I Spit On Your Grave is skeletal. It hasn’t lost an ounce of its power, it remains one of the list’s most shocking, appalling and disturbing films. I Spit On Your Grave is not one of those films. It’s hard to believe anyone was shocked by Don’t Go In The Woods… Alone or The Funhouse. With most of them now past or approaching their 40th birthdays, many of the films on the DPP list look quaint now. I think it’s important to understand this context to see where Zarchi is coming from with this film. On taking her to the Police station, Zarchi was apparently appalled by the lack of sympathy from officers who insisted on questioning the woman immediately, even though her jaw was broken. It turned out that she had been raped and beaten. One day he was driving with his daughter and a friend when they saw a woman, bloodied and naked, crawl out of the bushes. I Spit On Your Grave was, Meir Zarchi says, prompted by a real life experience. On the second I think Ebert is simply, demonstrably, wrong. Ebert calls I Spit On Your Grave “a vile bag of garbage” and says it is “without a shred of artistic distinction”.
I, having written criticism for twenty years, know that when I hand a total drubbing to a film much of the feedback ends up being ‘well, now I have to see it’, and I suspect this effect happened here thanks to Ebert’s words. Prices vary but can top £100 for the original Astra tape.Īnother of the major reasons this film made any sort of impact may have been Roger Ebert’s scathing 1978 review (his co-presenter Gene Siskel also hated it, but Ebert’s written review finds him disgusted and enraged by the film). The title alone would have drawn the eye of the people compiling the DPP list, but it’s no surprise that once they saw anything beyond the first act it landed squarely on the list, and remained there through every iteration, making the original VHS highly collectable. I Spit On Your Grave was released in the UK in January 1982 by Wizard Video (later relabelled Astra, Wizard’s UK distributors). Titles matter, and the phrase I Spit On Your Grave has such a visceral charge that it can’t help but make an impression, whether it repels you or send the film to the top of your to see list, it’s not a title you’ll forget in a hurry. I wonder whether, without the striking poster image, its lurid tagline “This woman has just cut, chopped, broken and burned five men beyond recognition… But no jury in America would convict her!” and with writer/director Meir Zarchi’s preferred title, Day Of The Woman enough people would have taken note of this film for us still to be talking about it forty years on.
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