Rape has been used as a device since the start of cinema. In most cases, the female victim is assaulted by one or more villains, and then either she or a male figure in her life seeks revenge for her violation. Think Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, Alfred Hitchcock’s Revenge, and Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left. Rape-revenge films are a source of spectacle and violence where women are brutalized, then they, or a male avenger, in turn, brutalize their rapists. They are shocking films often directed by men that are horrifying but at times empowering.
However, in this column, I will be shifting the focus onto rape-revenge films directed by women and how they interpret rape on screen. Each month I’ll be diving into films such as Revenge, American Mary, and M.F.A. to discuss how they use existing rape-revenge tropes to create new, potentially less exploitative ways of representing sexual violence against women in horror films. Before launching into how female directors are changing how rape-revenge narratives, however, it’s important to understand the history of rape-revenge films in horror, their tropes, and how they are viewed by wider audiences, especially women.
Early horror rape-revenge films rose to prominence in the 1970s and were immediately met with controversy. Their brutal portrayals of sexual violence earned them the title “Video Nasties,” which was bequeathed to these films by the British Board of Film Censors in 1984. They were too explicit to be sold in stores because they “glorified the act of rape and inspired ‘copycat’ crimes.” Films such as I Spit On Your Grave, Ms. 45, and The Last House on the Left earned cult followings and horrified large audiences.
These films have several key tropes. Most notably, a two-part narrative structure focuses on the woman’s rape and her subsequent revenge. These rapes usually involve multiple men who do not know the female protagonist. After the rape, the narrative shifts to focus on how the wronged woman will enact her revenge. In terms of iconography, rape-revenge films include sequences of screaming, dirt-covered women, sexually-repulsive men, and a transformation of said female victim into a sexual being. But most important to this project is how the rape-revenge genre utilizes the male gaze to objectify the female body during and after her rape, playing up the trope of transformation into a spectacle of violence and sex.
The male gaze, as theorized by Laura Mulvey, is connected to Freud’s view of scopophilia, or the pleasure derived from looking at an object. Mulvey says Freud, “associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze.” Mulvey uses this psychoanalytic framework to establish this key cinematic term and how the film camera’s “conscious aim [is] always to eliminate intrusive camera presence and prevent a distancing awareness in the audience.” The male gaze is used to eroticize the female body on screen and make her a spectacle to be watched and figuratively consumed. Female bodies become a place of male fantasy and a place to project their desires. This leads to viewing the female body in pieces, with the camera focusing on a hand, mouth, or leg, to make parts of the body eroticized objects. These moments attempt to recreate the act of looking at the female body, seemingly reinforcing the ways in which the female body should and is viewed by men. The male gaze is prevalent in the rape-revenge film to eroticize the survivor before, during, and after her assault, constantly subjecting her to the control of the male gaze.
This is seen in I Spit On Your Grave (1978) both before and after Jennifer Hills’ rape. At the film’s beginning, Jennifer’s body is the focus of a man pumping gas; as he looks up and down her body, the camera mimics his gaze as it slowly pans up from her feet to her butt to her chest, painting a picture of male desire. Dressed modestly, she talks to him politely about her stay as he gazes at her body, foreshadowing horrifying acts to come. After her rape, this modest outfit is replaced with a sheer white dress that clings to her body and reveals her nipples and legs; her body continues to be eroticized and is viewed as such even though she has just endured a horrific assault. Even in moments of violence, Jennifer is meant to be viewed as a sexual figure, which is underscored by her use of sexuality to enact her revenge. This can be seen in other rape-revenge films such as Ms. 45 and The Last House on the Left.
Importantly, there are readings of these films that find power within exploitation, especially in the female-centered rape-revenge narrative. Sarah Projansky’s Watching Rape argues “that feminist analyses of rape films can be potential sites for activism against sexual violence because they make a taboo issue visible, but that in order to end rape we must engage in debates about it.” I Spit On Your Grave is read by feminist film critics such as Alexandra Heller-Nicholas as a film that portrays rape as “brutal, unglamorous, and unrelentingly cruel.” These films, to film theorist Carol Clover, were seen as a way to process the modern debate between sexual violence and the law, though it presents us with contradictions. The rape-revenge film, not unlike the slasher, is a film usually made by and for men. But, unlike the slasher, the rape-revenge film articulates feminist politics as the woman takes revenge against the men who rape her; these films do portray female power and some kind of reclamation of agency.
Clover even goes as far to say that if a woman made these films, they would be seen as “male-bashing.” In Clover’s eyes, if a woman made a film about women’s pain and trauma, it would go too far in the eyes of the young male spectator. However, even with these films focused on female power in the face of trauma, which articulates a type of feminist politics and grapples with what it means to represent rape, they still depend on the torture and explicit exploitation of the female body to shape the narrative.
However, Clover was writing this in her 1992 book, Men, Women, and Chainsaws, when there were virtually no rape-revenge films directed by women. Now, films like Revenge, M.F.A. and Holiday utilize cinematic mechanics to investigate and address how rape is presented on film. It may adopt fantastical elements, such as Jen’s miraculous survival in Revenge, but these films still begin to address the reality of sexual assault, from PTSD to how in most cases, women are raped by someone close to them.
These films mark the beginning of a new cycle in horror that speaks to a current cultural moment that, in being dominated by #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, attempts to work more in believing and supporting sexual assault survivors; they work to reclaim pre-existing exploitative tropes to create a potentially more empowering narrative that doesn’t solely rely on the violation of the female body at the hands of strange men. Through their work, these directors, such as Coralie Fargeat and Natalie Leite, work to create a new kind of gaze that refutes the piercing male gaze and views their female subjects with care, nuance, and power.