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DAY OF THE WOMAN
aka
I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE
Rating: 
USA. 1978.
Director/Screenplay – Meir Zachi, Producers – Meir Zachi & Joseph Zbeda, Photography – Yuni Haviv. Production Company – Cinemagic Pictures.
Cast:
Camille Keaton (Jenny Hills), Eron Tabor (Johnny), Richard Pace (Matthew), Gunter Kleeman (Andy), Anthony Nichols (Stanley)
Plot: Jenny Hills rents a country farmhouse in Connecticut for the summer where she intends to spend the time writing a novel. But four local men take to harassing her and one day drag her away and take turns raping her. They leave one of their number, a gawky idiot, with a knife to kill her, but he is unable to. Dragging herself back home, Jenny methodically sets out to take revenge and kill all of them.
Day of the Woman/I Spit on Your Grave was one of a variety of films made in the 1970s that seemed to offer brutal shock therapy wake up calls to middle-class ennui. In these films city slickers would usually stray off the beaten path and encounter forms of brutalization from backwoods hicks. The first films in this genre were Straw Dogs (1971), Deliverance (1972) and Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972) and the genre progressed through the disturbing likes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Forced Entry (1975) (which prefigured I Spit on Your Grave in terms of its themes), Death Weekend/The House by the Lake (1976) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977).
I Spit on Your Grave was originally made under the title Day of the Woman and played some theatre chains and horror festivals in 1978 under that title but didn’t attract much attention until it was picked up for distribution by The Joseph Gross Organization in 1980 and given a luridly exploitative new name I Spit On Your Grave. There it developed a reputation as one of the most notorious films ever made. It was promptly banned in countries such as Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and labeled a Video Nasty in the UK. In the US where it was distributed it achieved new levels of notoriety with critics like Roger Ebert leading a vehement attack against it and many feminist groups targeting it in their backlash against the exploitative portrait of women in early 80s slasher films. I Spit on Your Grave has achieved such a level of notoriety that it is usually tossed in raw and bleeding as Exhibit A whenever a morality group wishes to nail the horror/exploitation film to a cross.
I Spit on Your Grave is a genuinely disturbing film. Despite a number of crudities in the technical department – the poor acting (lead actress and rapee Camille Keaton is incidentally Buster Keaton’s granddaughter), the relative crudity of sound quality and the complete absence of any musical score – the film evinces a raw and raggedly horrifying effect. In fact the absence of a musical score actually works in the film’s favour – it leaves it without any traditional dramatic cues, just the sense that what is happening is raw and real.
It is a film that pins one down and confronts one with having to watch not one rape sequence, but rather three in a row – a sequence that is drawn out for some forty minutes. If the success of a film is to be measured in terms of the strength of the reaction it elicits from its audience then I Spit on Your Grave could be the most effective film ever made. This author has never seen another film quite have the same effect. I first saw I Spit on Your Grave in New Zealand when its ban was lifted by new censor Arthur Everard and it released in 1984 – where its banning had of course only served to heighten its reputation. The screening was filled with hardened biker types among others and afterwards everybody left the theatre in a stunned silence, some walking out with white faces. It is this that makes one query the exploitation label the film is usually hit with. It is not, for example, a film that one could say exactly portrays the acts of rape in any way that would engender empathy with the rapists or that asks the audience to cheer them along. Indeed if the feminist cause ever wanted to make a film to convey the horror of rape, then it is doubtful they could ever envision something as shocking as this.
If anything what I Spit on Your Grave does seem to serve as is a refresher course for feminist vigilantes where it seems to be openly endorsing the dubious politics of personal revenge – interestingly though this was one of the points that was never attacked by the film’s moral critics. I Spit on Your Grave makes interesting comparison to Abel Ferrara’s Ms 45/Angel of Vengeance (1980), which told a similar story but had the heroine’s vengeance trail less morally certain.
In the late 1980s plans were made to launch a sequel, which is surely something that would have without question been exploitative. The only other film that director Meir Zarchi ever made was the little seen revenge film Don’t Mess with My Sister/Family and Honor (1985).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1990
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