Rape-Revenge Films

RAPE-REVENGE FILMS

A Critical study

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

RAPE-REVENGE FILMS

To Richard and Elizabeth

Table of Contents

Preface 1

Introduction 3

One: The Rape-Revenge Film Canon 21

Two: The Rape-Revenge Film Across Genres 60

Three: The Rape-Revenge Film Around the World 103

Four: The Contemporary Rape-Revenge Film 155

Afterword 188

Filmography 193

Notes 201

Bibliography 215

Index 223

Preface

In 2006, a number of factors collided that led me to seriously ponder the question: why do people rape? What justifications or explanations can possibly allow them to do such terrible things? While I am not naive enough to believe that a simple answer to this question is possible, one fact made itself clear from very early on. people who struct their idea of what sexual violence "is" or "is not," not only via personal experience or that of our peers, but through the stories and representations that circulate around us more broadly. While Carol J. Clover's Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992) and Jacinda Read's The New Avengers: Feminism, Femininity and the Rape-Revenge Cycle (2000) in particular have been invaluable as I sought to examine these questions with particular relation to the depiction of sexual violence in the rape-revenge film, my real breakthrough came via art historian Diane Wolfthal's examination of medieval and early modern art in her book Images of Rape: The "Heroic"' Tradition and Its Alternatives (1999). Although much attention has been paid to the so-called "heroic" rape imagery of the Italian Renaissance, Wolfthal has argued that when looking at other representations of rape produced elsewhere in Europe during this period, it becomes apparent that "diverse notions coexisted contemporaneously" (182). Even when reduced to the specific configuration of male-against-female rape, the more rape-revenge films I watched, the more it became clear to me there was no singular or unified treatment of rape across this category when surveyed as a whole. In the rape-revenge film, too, "diverse notions coexisted contemporaneously": 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.

This book would not have been possible without the support of Geoff Mayer, Rolando Captuo, Anna Dzenis and the Cinema Studies Department of La Trobe University. Feedback at different stages from Wendy Haslem (University of Melbourne), Dominique Russell (University of Western Ontario) and Adam Lowenstein (University of Pittsburgh) also warrants my appreciation. I would like to thank Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies and Screening the Past for granting me permission to include portions from previously published articles. In particular, I would like to give special thanks to Esther Milne (Swinburne University) and Angela Ndalianis (University of Melbourne), whose friendship and support both personally and professionally has been invaluable.

My endlessly patient and supportive friends and colleagues can never be thanked enough for the often bizarre conversations and favors I have asked of them during this project. This is no truer than for my three "brothers" Martyn Pedler, Matthew O'Callahan and Jan Napiorkowski. Craig Martin and Dean Brandum have gone above and beyond from the outset. I extend my gratitude to Mark Freeman, Tim O'Farrell, Ian Gouldstone, David Surman, Kaz Horsely, Johnboy Davidson, Alex Hammond, Catticut Palich, Martin Kingsley, Amber Moriarty and Anna Gardner for their invaluable feedback and assistance, and Stefan Mazarigle, Brenda Manning, Emah Fox, Saige Walton, Darshana Jayemanne, Max Calzini, Jarod Collard, Hannah Neurotica at Ax Wound and Fiona Drury for their support along the way. Ayman Kole and Mark Taylor introduced me to many movies I never would have discovered without them, and thanks also to the CG community for opening up a world of film much bigger than I ever initially imagined.

Most of all, I'd like to thank my family - Richard, Elizabeth and Lorraine Heller-Nicholas -whose kindness, love and support has always provided me the strength to keep going. Christian McCrea has been with me almost every day during this book's creation, and has seen me (and it) at our best and worst. His unceasing love, support, patience and unquestioning willingness to make tea is my foundation, and I look forward to a future of less harrowing film viewing with him in the years to come.

Introduction

Surely a definition of rape-revenge is simple: a rape-revenge film must most immediately feature both a rape (or many rapes, or an attempted rape) and an act of revenge. At its most basic level, a rape-revenge film is one whereby a rape that is central to the narrative is punished by an act of vengeance, either by the victim themselves or by an agent (a lawyer, policeman, or, most commonly, a loved one or family member). For Sarah Projansky, the distinction between these two categories in the female-centered rape-revenge film contains crucial ideological meaning:

In these films, sometimes the revenge is taken by a man who loses his wife or daughter to a rape/murder, and sometimes the revenge is taken by women who have faced rape themselves. The films in the first category depend on rape to motivate and justify a particularly violent version of masculinity, relegating women to minor "props" in the narrative. The films of the second category, however, can be understood as feminist narratives in which women face rape, recognize that the law will neither protect nor avenge them, and then take the law into their own hands.'

But this distinction regarding the gender of who it is that exacts vengeance is far from the only important difference. For example, in the case of Projansky's first designation - where a man takes revenge on behalf of a woman who has been raped -there are still substantial points of distinction that separate rape-revenge texts from others. The basic storyline of The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukallan, Ingmar Bergman, 1960) and The Crow (Alex Proyas, 1994) are perhaps surprisingly similar: a man systematically enacts revenge upon those who raped and murdered a female loved one. So how can one of these films be considered one of the most significant rape-revenge movies of all time, while the other barely rates a mention in discussions of the category? The issue of narrative focus thus becomes crucial. As shall be examined further in Chapter One, Karin's (Birgitta Petterson) rape and murder is shown at painful, intimate length in The Virgin Spring, and spectator engagement with the ensu ing revenge is a direct result of our emotional investment in that event. In The Crow, however, that part of the story is economically skipped over with as much speed as possible to provide the barest of motivation for the ensuing action: we have little exposure to or interest in the raped and murdered woman Shelly (Sofia Shinas) outside of her relationship to the film's protagonist, Eric Draven (Brandon Lee).

The power of the rape-revenge scenario is in the calculable intensity that sexual violence (or the threat of sexual violence) holds over the film as a whole. This does not necessarily mean the rape must be shown, and intensity and centrality do not automatically translate to visibility - in The Accused (Jonathan Kaplan, 1988) the rape is only shown at the end of the film, while in Shame (Steve Jodrell, 1988), the rape is not shown at all. The very words "rape" and "revenge" evoke associations between serious physical acts of violence with equally weighty moral and emotional responses. Regardless of how problematic the ideology or intent of a film, a rape-revenge movie tends to make it explicit that rape (or the threat of rape) has triggered the revenge act. It is often - but not always -how those rapes are depicted, as well as the contexts of those depictions, that propel the narratives and the filmic experiences of the spectator more generally. If we are to attempt a definition of raperevenge, then, it is a film scenario in which rape cannot be incidental-it must be the core action that provokes revenge.

But do the films themselves fit so neatly into such a tidy definition? Many of the female-centered rape-revenge films that will be addressed in this book are undeniably sensational attempts to profit from the ugly desire to watch sexual violence, while other examples have been critically beatified. This book argues that if there is a broader cultural confusion regarding how to tackle rape-revenge films, it is because the films themselves reflect a broader cultural confusion about rape more generally. This is exactly why these films have proven so difficult for critics to lump together: when the wide range of texts this book explores is considered, many rape-revenge films are united only through their ability to demonstrate that conflicting attitudes toward rape have and continue to co-exist. Because of this diversity, the rape-revenge film allows a broad range of ideological debates to be explored through areas such as gender, genre and cultural context. The survey of films that follows will not be a pleasant journey, and some of these examples have garnered great controversy. But at their most powerful, rape-revenge films can expose and collapse our simplistic assumptions about the ethics of rape and its representation onscreen, and remind us that what we are seeing is only a brief glance through a small, controlled window into the true horror of rape and sexual violence. No matter how harrowing some of these films may be, we know only too well that there are ethical complications to the fact that ultimately - as the famous tagline to the original The Last House on the Left (Wes Craven, 1972) taunted so mercilessly - what we are watching is "only a movie." Raperevenge films, then, are fluid and elastic. Despite its common association with the horror film in the United States during the 1970s in particular, it spans genres, time and national borders. This book journeys through this surprisingly diverse, often shocking and frequently bizarre terrain, offering material evidence of a complicated history of sexual violence and its representation in rape-revenge films.

The Politics of Inclusion

This book explores the intersection of rape and revenge in film, surveying both mainstream and exploitation examples across time, national boundaries and genre. It pays particular note to films situated outside of traditional debates surrounding sexual violence in the cinema, but there is no intent to rescue, liberate, or defend these films. Nor are they necessarily offered to suggest broader trends; as Philip Green suggests, rape-revenge "is far from being either stylistically or ideologically monolithic, and to say that a movie `belongs' to it is not necessarily to describe that movie's psychopolitics."2 From this perspective, the range of films examined in this book present a contemporary continuation in cinema of art historian Diane Wolfthal's observation that, in the case of depictions of rape in medieval and early modern art, "diverse notions coexisted contemporaneously."3 So central is this statement to the analyses that construct the bulk of this book that it can be considered its primary argument. Wolfthal's observations regarding the representation of rape in art from this period can be applied equally to the depiction of sexual violence in the rape-revenge film. In Images of Rape: The "Heroic" Tradition and Its Alternatives (1999), she states:

In addition to differences in style, function and patronage, rape imagery shows a broad range in tone and meaning. Some depictions represent rape symbolically, others explicitly; some clearly condemn rape, others blur the distinction between rape and seduction; some are comedic in tone, others tragic, celebratory, or horrific.'

Just as filmic rape is diverse, so too are the debates that circulate around rape more generally. This diversity impacts not only upon how rape films are watched, but also participates in the construction of rapists themselves. As Joanna Bourke has so rightly observed, rapists "choose from a pool of circulating meaning. Rapists are not born; they become."5 Much of the meaning that circulates in the public imagination about rape stems from films such as those examined here, and this alone renders an examination of their nuances, contradictions and tensions a necessary (although admittedly often distasteful) endeavor.

That is not to say that these films have nothing in common; at the very least, it is understood that the eponymous features of rape and revenge will rate high on the list of intersecting elements. These films share a fundamental aim to address the issue of sexual violence - whether shown, verbally described, or merely alluded to, actors pretend to rape or to be raped. This may provide little comfort to what is often a nasty viewing experience, but, as this book argues, our psyches are often cushioned in a more significant way from the brutality of watching onscreen rape. Described by Sabine Sielke as the "rhetoric of rape," sexual violence often is utilized as a narrative device with which to talk about much broader .6 The intensity of rape often underscores the seriousness of these other factors. Consequently, there is a tension between these wider concerns, and the reality of rape itself. As Wolfthal observes:

Images of rape often involve other issues - political concerns, sexual desire, or ethnic, class and gender difference - and this complexity enriches our understanding of such depictions. But ... despite other layers of meaning, these representations are also about `real rape.' 7

As this book will examine, sexual violence in rape-revenge films is sometimes used to emphasize these adjoining issues. But there is no singular or consistent system, method or approach that unifies every single rape-revenge example. Again, it becomes apparent that in rape-revenge films, "diverse notions" of rape have "coexisted contemporaneously."

Confusion about the relationship between rape and its artistic representation is historically entrenched, and existed long before the introduction of the movie camera. Wolfthal's argument is a response to the dominance in art historical criticism of the tradition of "heroic" rape imagery in art, where heroes and gods who are shown to rape do so to indicate power in both Ancient Roman and Greek legends, to be later immortalized in canonical artworks from Renaissance Italy, including Titian's The Rape of Europa (1562) and Botticelli's Primavera (1482). In her foundational book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975), Susan Brownmiller identifies more recent examples of "heroic" rape in broader contemporary outlaw mythology, citing examples such as Hunter S. Thompson's writings on the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang and the Rolling Stones. In these cases, she identifies a pattern where representations of rape show the perpetrators as "big men" at the expense of their female victims.' Both Wolfthal and Brownmiller emphasize that "heroic" rape imagery celebrates the rapist, with notably less attention paid to the victim.

These issues are, of course, not specific to the visual arts alone. As Trudy Govier has suggested, "human societies develop legal systems and seek to establish the rule of law"9 precisely to overcome the "exaggerated, unreliable and anarchic tendencies of personal revenge as a strategy of retribution."" That these systems are broadly considered so notoriously ill-equipped to deal with rape in part provides the premise for many rape-revenge films: a rape survivor (or her agent) often takes justice into her own hands when the law proves incapable or unwilling to punish the criminal responsible for her suffering. Arguably, revenge is rarely ever more complicated than when triggered by rape. Writing about rape - even fictional representations of it - is a formidable task, considering the ideological minefield and deeply subjective and emotional responses that the topic evokes. Past critics have approached the subject with more than the usual disclaimers that regularly accompany discussions about onscreen violence. As one of the only books dedicated to the rape-revenge film specifically, Jacinda Read's The New Avengers: Feminism, Femininity and the Rape-Revenge Cycle (2000) is essential reading on this subject. But her justification for examining only mainstream instances of the rape-revenge plot appears too readily dismissive of the broader issues at stake in the wider field of rape-revenge. Positioning her argument as an either/or response to the dependence of Carol J. Clover's Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992) on horror, Read aims to rescue mainstream film from the status of rejected Other to the horror and exploitation titles of interest to Clover. Projansky's Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture (2001) is one of the most exhaustive treatments of rape and its onscreen representation, and she identifies a "feminist paradox between a desire to end rape and a need to represent (and therefore perpetuate discursive) rape in order to challenge it."" In this sense, even the act of watching onscreen rape is ideologically loaded:

Graphic representations of rape, at least for the moment in the text during which the rape appears, can be understood to express hatred for and violence against women and thus can potentially increase anxiety and discomfort for many spectators.... Paradoxically, even texts that explicitly articulate an anti-rape perspective can also inadvertently contribute to these backlash representations.12

The instinctive desire to step away from the abyss where even the slightest suggestion that a woman's suffering is desirable or titillating is therefore both commendable and understandable. But at the same time, Tammy Oler's observation that "rape-revenge films are at once contributors to and reflections of real-world beliefs and attitudes about rape and violence"" presents a clear problem: if this is the case, then surely it is even more urgent that all images of rape (including the graphic ones) are placed under a critical microscope. The decision to not turn away from looking at the more vicious or exploitative examples of the rape-revenge category should not be taken lightly, and the legacy of Clover's work (which shall be discussed further shortly) provides strong precedence for the critical value of the nastier instances of the raperevenge film.

But must there be a decision to only speak of one "kind" of rape-revenge film, such as horror or Hollywood examples? The tendency to ignore the diversity across a broad range of texts that fall under the rape-revenge umbrella is typified by Peter Lehman's declaration that "female rape-revenge films are a licensed form of violence in which a woman acts out male desires for the erotic satisfaction of a predominately male mass As will be demonstrated throughout this book, this claim not only does not apply to many rape-revenge examples, it falsely assumes that only men watch and enjoy raperevenge movies. As Oler points out, this is far from the case: many women watch and enjoy rape-revenge films, and thus, despite the "conventional wisdom" that encourages the rejection of rape-revenge as "nothing but misogynistic schlock designed to titillate male audiences," we can now safely say that "feminists and film critics alike now grudgingly recognize that the films are doing more complicated cultural work.""

There is something fundamentally harrowing in any filmic depiction of rape that aims to "make visually palatable such a horrifying event that bears no beauty whatsoever."" These issues are in part what this book intends to address: are the pleasures found in watching these films - for both men and women - only able to be viewed as sadistic, misogynistic, or just "wrong"? More importantly, can we even collectively refer to them as "these films"? Are they really that unified a body of work? And if not, does diversity exist only between genre, era, budget or nationality, or is there a case for analysis to be splintered into a film-by-film basis? The problem with answering these questions in part lies in the very "unrepresentability" of the reality and trauma of rape itself- the inability to capture the magnitude of human suffering that results from sexual violence - that is the understandable source of so much critical discomfort. However, to ignore these questions avoids the problem that so many rape-revenge films seek to either consciously ignore or are so determined to address. As this book demonstrates, there is no singular, unified treatment of rape across the rape-revenge category. Rather, these diverse, broad and often contradictory films offer a multitude of representations ofand reactions to - sexual violence.

Approaching the Rape-Revenge Film

The rape-revenge film is a phenomenon popularly attributed to the United States of the 1970s, where they flourished. This was in large part due to an easing of censorship restrictions and a "mainstreaming" of public discussion about sexual politics that resulted from the high visibility of the anti-rape movement that formed a part of second-wave feminism's sweeping influence from the late 1960s. Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon in particular were the public faces of the antipornography movement (and feminism in general), and they vocally argued that the pornographic representation of women could be held directly responsible for sexual violence in the real world; as fellow radical feminist Robin Morgan so famously claimed, "Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice." Widely considered as both an exhaustive treatment on the subject and one of the first feminist texts to reach bestseller status, Brownmiller's Against Our Will.. Men, Women and Rape argues that "to simply learn the word `rape' is to take instruction in the power relationship between male and females."17 Her analysis explores the influence of historical treatments of rape upon the shaping of contemporary attitudes to sexual violence. Writing that rape only became illegal because it was historically deemed a property crime between men, she lays the foundations that view rape not only as an issue pertaining to women and femininity, but as equally significant to discourses about men and masculinity. There are, of course, other configurations of rape than male-against-female, but as Kimberly Peirce's devastating Boys Don't Cry (1999) portrays, the biological lines that separate "male" from "female" pale in comparison next to the intensity and viciousness of sexual violence itself. That so many of the most immediately recognizable instances of the rape-revenge film are predominantly (although obviously not always) structured around a male perpetrator and a female victim informs both this preliminary history and the book as a whole.

Representations of sexual violence at their core offer a rich source of investigation for feminism because, as Lynn Higgins and Brenda Silver suggest, "rape and rapability are central to the very construction of gender identity and that our subjectivity and sense of ourselves as sexual beings are inextricably enmeshed in representations."18 Tanya Horeck'9 and Projansky20 have noted that there is tension between the intimate, personal crime of rape and the intensive public scrutiny that is placed upon the act that make the role of how it is represented crucial. From this perspective, representations of rape suggest a complex range of meanings that are far more expansive than those immediately associated with the trauma of "real" rape itself. Sielke captures this succinctly, observing that when "transposed into discourse, rape turns into a rhetorical device, an insistent figure for other social, political, and economic concerns and conflicts."21 Projansky also identifies an allegorical aspect to onscreen rape, noting that it has become a method of invoking a broad range of discourses about other things: "Rape narratives are so common in cinema (and elsewhere) that they seem always to be available to address other social issues." 22

Mieke Bal has traced the structural and thematic utility of rape to the Book of Judges in the Bible, noting the ability of sexual violence to propel narrative.23 Projansky, Read and Rikke Schubart share this view, placing emphasis upon rape as a transformative act within onscreen rape narratives.24 Projansky observes in the case of horror and thriller films in particular that "rape or the threat of rape [acts] as a fulcrum for a narrative about the transformation of a meek woman into a powerful independent woman who protects herself and sometimes her friends and family."25 For Schubart, in the raperevenge film 'rape is the initiation rite that pushes women from being `soft' victims to becoming `hard' avengers."26 while for Read the "rape-revenge film and feminism itself are perhaps better understood not in terms of authentic moments but as narratives of transformations."27 Read argues that "the raperevenge cycle might usefully be read as one of the ways in which Hollywood has attempted to make sense of feminism and the changing face of heterosexuality in the post-1970 period."28 In short, "The rape-revenge film can be seen to be attempting to make sense of feminism."29 It does this, she claims, by opening and exposing the tensions and contradictions "between the (feminine) victim and the (feminist) avenger and the way in which films negotiate the transformation from one to the other."30

Read's analysis of rape-revenge launches from a preliminary rebuttal of Clover's influential Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Clover's understanding of rape-revenge as a sub-genre of horror allowed her examination of Meir Zarchi's original I Spit on Your Grave (1978) to add weight to her primary argument for cross-gender identification in the modern horror film. This argument contrasts with Laura Mulvey's notion of a sadistic and dominant male gaze, as established in her foundational essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1972).31 Clover states that in the case of I Spit on Your Grave, "The only way to account for the spectator's engagement in the revenge drive is to assume his engagement with the rapeavenging woman." 32 She concludes, "The center of gravity in these films lies more in the reaction (the revenge) than the act (the rape), but to the extent that the revenge fantasy derives its force from some degree of imaginary participation in the act itself, in victim position, these films are predicated on cross-gender identification of the most extreme, corporeal sort."33

While both the influence and impact of Clover's book is undeniable, Read is not the first to challenge aspects of her argument. Both Klaus Rieser34 and Tony Williams" question the "victory" of the female victim-heroes or "final girls"36 in the films Clover has selected, suggesting that just simply "not dying" can hardly be considered any cause for feminist celebration. The reliance of horror studies on psychoanalysis (of which Clover's work is a key example) is also a source of contention for many. In his critique of Clover's argument, Frank Burke suggests the dependence upon psychoanalysis "dehistoricize[s] by addressing films and their female characters in universalizing Freudian and post-Freudian terms, which makes representation only and always the reproduction of patriarchy/masculinity."37 Andrew Tudor has more broadly questioned the dominance of psychoanalytic approaches to horror, suggesting its deployment is more concerned with establishing itself as the dominant location for a singular, "genuine" film history that recapitulates the power of the critic (analyst) over actual meaning: "It is an inordinately reductive form of analysis, presupposing the overall credibility of a particular perspective and seeking to assimilate the widest possible range of cultural variation to those terms."38

I Spit on Your Grave (aka Day of the Woman, Meir Zarchi, 1978) [Cinemagic Pictures/Kobal Collection].

Read's issues with Clover's treatment of rape-revenge film hinges primarily on text selection, and she argues that rather than being a subgenre of horror, rape-revenge is "a historically specific but generically diverse cycle of films."39 For Read, the assumption that the rape-revenge is a subgenre of horror is not only inaccurate but ideologically loaded:

Clover's feminist analysis ... depends on drawing a distinction between underground and mainstream rape-revenge films, a distinction that also translates into an opposition between feminist and feminine and that, therefore, again necessitates the exclusion of the latter. Thus, while the low-brow rape-revenge film is elevated to the status of a politicized avant-garde (consumed by male audiences), the mainstream version is implicitly analyzed within a framework that condemns mass culture as a feminized and, therefore, depoliticized culture (consumed by "normal," that is, mixed audiences).4o

"Cultural texts tell several different stories," she continues, "in doing so it is not sufficient (as Clover does) to simply repress or disavow the presence of apparently contradictory or mutually exclusive stories, since it is in the very struggle between such stories that meaning is produced."41 While this is certainly true, the eagerness with which Read approaches the act of "debunking" Clover blinds her to some degree to the same weaknesses in her own argument. Firstly and most immediately, while Read has carefully chosen films that support her argument of a "historically specific" element to the rape-revenge films that construct the cycle as she chooses to define it, the rape-revenge film category is far more broad and diverse than I believe she gives credit. Read's view of rape-revenge as a narrative structure is solid and convincing, but her determination to prove Clover and her dedication to horror "wrong" render her own text selection equally problematic. While we can appreciate that Read needed to draw parameters around those examples she chose to examine (a task that I also must undertake in this book), both Yvonne Tasker42 and Karen Hollinger43 voice confusion as to why films such as Sleeping with the Enemy (Joseph Ruben, 1991), Batman Returns (Tim Burton, 1992) and The Last Seduction (John Dahl, 1994) are privileged in a book on rape-revenge cinema. This is especially the case when considering so many of the more immediately identifiable titles that fall outside of the horror category (such as Robert M. Young's 1986 film Extremities and Lamont Johnson's Lipstick from 1976) fail to gain more than the briefest of mentions in The New Avengers. Even the book's cover photograph appears incongruous. As I discuss in Chapter Two, Dirty Weekend (Michael Winner, 1992) is a particularly useful instance of a rape-revenge structure; but despite its privileged position on the cover of Read's book, it receives little concrete analysis.

Does The New Avengers solidly examine the intersection of second-wave feminism and contemporary Hollywood cinema? Certainly. Does it convincingly demonstrate how the broad and diverse category of the rape-revenge film is uniquely positioned to provide insight into this intersection? If the best examples to support this claim are Batman Returns, The Last Seduction and Sleeping with the Enemy (the last two Read herself admits only offer a "residual, rather than dominant deployment of the rape-revenge structure,"44 and they stand outside a vast number of more typical examples that Read either ignores or too readily dismisses), then perhaps not. As Read says, "We are living in a culture in which ideas about feminism and its history are as, if not more, likely to be gleaned from popular culture than from reading feminist theory."45 In this sense, Read's project was to look at the popular cinema of her present. As true as it may have been (and may still be) that we can learn "ideas about feminism and its history" from popular Hollywood films, we do not necessarily learn a great deal about the rape-revenge trope when so many non-Hollywood "dominant deployment[s]" are rejected in favor of her more "residual" examples.

While no this ever claim to examine every single rape-revenge film ever made, to base an argument on the necessary exclusion of a bulk of those films does not appear to fully appreciate the value of the category. The theoretical "heavy lifting" can only be adequately performed when its case studies are understood and identified for what they actually are, and how they fit into a bigger picture. This book surveys a sample of rape-revenge films that span genre and national and historical boundaries to emphasize that, in regard to the treatment of sexual violence in the category, "diverse notions coexisted contemperanously" and continue to do so today.

Cinema from Rape to Rape-Revenge

Film has a rich tradition of exploiting rape. As discussed at length in Chapter Three, the deployment of rape - and of rape-revenge - is an international phenomenon, as such famous instances as Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) and The Virgin Spring illustrate. As a brief introduction, Hollywood cinema provides a useful case study, as the deployment of rape motifs stretches back to its silent era. D.W. Griffith's Birth ofa Nation (1915) is celebrated for establishing many of the defining formal features of the "Hollywood style," such as continuity editing. These technical and industrial accomplishments, however, often pale next to what by today's standards is an extremist political agenda. The Ku Klux Klan are painted as victorious superheroes who save the Aryan damsel-in-distress and her fellow downtrodden whites from the supposed rising ranks of liberated southern African Americans. Possibly by accident, possibly as a suicide, the young, white Flora Cameron (Mae Marsh) flings herself off a cliff when threatened by the advances of the African American soldier Gus (Walter Long). This, combined with the attempted rape of Flora's sister Elsie (Lillian Gish) by the mulatto leader Silas Lynch (George Seigmann), demonstrates inherent white fears of miscegenation and equates interracial sexual activity with sexual violence.

Defilement, power and control are thematic motifs that occur elsewhere in Griffith's oeuvre, in films such as Broken Blossoms (1919). But by the early 1920s, rape and the cinema had also become inextricably linked in the popular imagination through the highly publicized trial of the comic Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle in the rape and murder of the young actress Virginia Rappe. Arbuckle was accused of a sexual assault so violent that it ruptured Rappe's bladder, leading to death. Despite facing three trials and being found innocent each time, Arbuckle's career was destroyed, and this scandal in part sparked the associations between Hollywood and questionable morality that made way for the rise of the censorship regulations implemented by Will Hays from the 1920s onwards. From then until the introduction of the Production Code in 1934 under the stern eye of Joseph Breen, this pre-Code Hollywood period still provided leeway for risque subject matter (including rape) to be included in films produced in this context. It was during this period that some of the most notable depictions of onscreen rape appeared before this mode of censorship began to collapse in the 1950s.

Because of the appearance of rape and revenge individually from the earliest days of Hollywood cinema, it is perhaps futile to attempt to locate the precise moment when it intersected and turned into "rape-revenge." Regardless, there are key moments in film before second-wave feminism that have been privileged at the beginnings of a loosely understood rape-revenge film history. For James M. Alexander, that moment was the Swedish film The Virgin Spring," while for Read it is Johnny Belinda (Jean Negulesco, 1948).47 There is, however, evidence that rape-revenge has more specific pre-Code origins, as demonstrated in William A. Wellman's Safe in Hell (1931). This film sympathetically tells the story of Gilda (Dorothy Mackaill), a secretary who is forced into prostitution after have being seduced (probably raped) by her ex-boss, Piet (Ralf Harolde). Discovering the "affair," Piet's wife makes it impossible for Gilda to keep any job outside of prostitution. The film opens as Gilda is tricked into visiting Piet, believing him to be a legitimate client. A fight ensues, and Gilda accidentally kills him. She awakens the next morning to find her sailor boyfriend Carl (Donald Cook) has returned from sea, and she informs him of her predicament. Deeply in love with Gilda, he hides her on a remote tropical island with no extradition laws. As the only white woman on an island filled with dangerous male criminals also in hiding, the film's title is explained: while Gilda may be safe from prosecution in the United States, as the island's executioner Bruno (Morgan Wallace) tells her, she is now "safe in hell." The degree that Wellman goes to emphasize the sexual threat Gilda faces on this island is remarkable: locked in her room (she keeps a chair under the doorknob for extra protection), at numerous times throughout the film the men in her hotel line their chairs up outside her door and stare at it for what is suggested to be hours. Like other rape-revenge protagonists, such as Thana in Ms. 45 (Abel Ferrara, 1980) and Carla in Naked Vengeance (Cirio H. Santiago, 1985), for Gilda, sexual threat is everywhere.

Carl and Gilda marry in an informal wedding ceremony on the island before he returns to sea, and she vows to remain true to him. Despite the pressure and loneliness, Gilda keeps her promise. To her surprise, Piet comes to the island and tells her that he had faked his death as an insurance scam (he, too, escapes to the island to avoid extradition). Observing Piet's lecherous intentions toward Gilda, Bruno slips her a gun and tells her that despite their illegality on the island, he wants her to be safe. It is with this gun that she shoots Piet after he attempts to rape her again. There is a public court hearing, and her once-threatening hotel mates now rush to her defense to clear her name. Bruno tells her that even if she is released on the murder charge, he will insist she is prosecuted for possessing the very firearm that he supplied her with - he has set her up so that she is forced to become his sex slave. Rejecting this possibility, Gilda rushes into the courtroom and declares the murder of Piet was premeditated; she expected is sentenced to death. The film ends as she says a brief farewell to Carl (not telling him of her upcoming execution) and then walks to the gallows defiantly as she stares victoriously at Bruno.

Gilda's world is one where rape, sexual threat and domination are everyday phenomena. Like Thelma and Louise discovered over fifty years later in the context of their experience, what is effectively suicide is for Gilda her only access to any kind of female agency. For Gilda, dying or killing is her only weapons against rape. While not quite a prototype of the rape-revenge films that became common in the 1970s, Safe in Hell complexifies the relationship between rape and revenge much more than more much rape films that feature elements of revenge, such as Outrage (Ida Lupino, 1950) and Johnny Belinda. More importantly, Safe in Hell also allows its story to be Gilda's and Gilda's alone; there is no man to save her (not even Carl), so she makes the only choice she feels she can in the circumstances. That her decision is so bleak not only underscores the futility of her entire experience, it also foreshadows the nihilism that permeates later rape-revenge titles like Craven's The Last House on the Left.

George Archainbaud's Thirteen Women (1932) is another pre-Code artifact of particular interest. While not explicitly focused upon rape in its construction of its female villain's search for revenge, she makes it clear in the film's climactic confrontation that rape - and the absence of protection from at the core of her vendetta. The film follows vampish, "half-Hindi" Ursula (Myrna Loy) as she systematically terrorizes a group of women, in many cases actively encouraging their death. One of these women, Laura (Irene Dunne), attempts to escape from Los Angeles to New York by train in order to protect her son Bobby (Wally Albright). Ursula is also on the train and confronts Laura, who asks, "What has anyone done to make you so inhuman?" Ursula replies bluntly:

Do I hear the very human white race asking that question? When I was twelve years old, white sailors ... (pauses). Do you know what it means to be a halfbreed? A half-caste in a world ruled by whites? If you're a male, you're a Coolie, and if you're a female, you're, well ... (pauses). The white half of me cried for the courtesy and protection that women like you get. The only way I could free myself was by becoming white, and it was almost in my hands, when you, you and your Kappa society stopped me.... Six years slaving to get money enough to put me through finishing school, to make the world accept me as white, but you and the others wouldn't let me cross the color line.

Although Ursula dies soon after this conversation, to a contemporary audience Laura's defense that "we were young" is more difficult to accept than it may have been at the time of the film's production. According to Ursula, her status as a racialized Other resulted in an implied long history of rape and sexual abuse. Understanding the crucial role of her racial status in her inability to protect herself from such violence, Ursula's attempts to feign whiteness are thwarted by racist fellow students. In this light, the "thirteen women" are (from a contemporary perspective, at least) not only far from innocent, they are to some degree complicit in the acts of violence that Ursula suffered by refusing her "the courtesy and protection" of women like themselves. Unlike Safe in Hell, rape survivor Ursula is denied the right to the privileged subjective this stage of the film, she is so two-dimensionally villainous that any justification she offers is, as Laura keeps insisting, "insane." But in terms of the later rape-revenge category, the fury and humiliation stemming from rape fosters a specific kind of vengeance. As continued in later films, ranging from Ms. 45 and Dirty Weekend to Positive I.D. (Andy Anderson, 1986) and Savage Streets (Danny Steinmann, 1984), this model of female agency is vampish and overtly sexualized.

From The Story of Temple Drake (Stephen Roberts, 1933) to Fritz Lang's The Blue Gardenia (1953), rape or attempted rape is not invisible in classical Hollywood cinema, and often has a key narrative function. There are films from this era that are significant for their particular articulation of rape trauma rather than their union of rape and revenge. Most famous of these is Johnny Belinda, a film that adopts the motif of the mute female protagonist from The Spiral Staircase (Robert Sidomak, 1945), thus establishing the rape-survivoras-mute motif that can be seen in films such as Thriller: A Cruel Picture (Thriller: En Grym Film, Bo Arne Vibenius, 1974), Ms. 45, Savage Streets, The Demoniacs (Les demoniaques, Jean Rollin, 1974) and Speak (Jessica Sharzer, 2004). Johnny Belinda follows the story of a young doctor (Lew Ayres) sent to a small village in Nova Scotia, where he meets the deaf-mute farm girl Belinda (Jane Wyman). Inspired by her intelligence, he teaches her sign language and lip reading, and they develop a strong relationship. She is raped by local Locky (Stephen McNally) and soon discovers she is pregnant. Locky decides he wants custody of the baby, and Belinda shoots him when he tries to take the child. During the subsequent murder trial, Locky's young wife Stella (Jan Sterling) admits that Locky raped Belinda and that he was there to take her child. The film ends with Belinda's release, and she is romantically united with the doctor. While renowned as a key rape text from this period, in terms of Classical Hollywood cause and effect logic, the rape is crucial only in that it leads to the birth of the child that propels the narrative tensions between the men in the last half of the film. The sequence where Belinda gives birth is much longer than the rape scene, and is a relatively joyous affair.

Less critically privileged is Ida Lupino's Outrage, identified by Pam Cook as "partly a rape-revenge story."48 For Molly Haskell, Lupino's gender granted her no unique insight into female experience, and she argues that Lupino's hypersexualized star persona and the "masculinity" of her films render her as nothing less than a gender traitor:

Lupino was tougher as an actress than as a director: the movies she made (Hard, Fast, and Beautiful, The Bigamist, The Hitchhiker) are conventional, even sexist; and in her interviews, like so many women who have nothing to complain about, she purrs like a contented kitten, arches her back at the mention of women's lib, and quotes Noel Coward to the effect that woman should be struck regularly like gongs.49

Although Outrage does not rate even a passing reference in this dismissal, the film suggests a very different Lupino to that described by Haskell. Like Johnny Belinda, Outrage, too, offers institutionalized male intervention (again by a time a priest) as the "solution" to rape and its traumatic repercussions. The film's concluding scenes, where Ann (Mala Powers) returns to her parents and fiance to lead a normal life, occur relatively suddenly and with a neatness that contrasts sharply with the film's earlier dedication to the nuance of Ann's experience. But it is the scenes in the film's first half that contain Outrage's most powerful moments; unlike with Johnny Belinda, rape is not confined to a distant, historical past-tense, but happens in its contemporary moment, in the suburbs, to able-bodied girls with charming fiances, nice parents and steady jobs. The emphasis placed on the randomness of the intense film noir sequence that highlights Ann's confusion, isolation and a lengthy analysis of the question "Why only by the spectator and Ann herself, but later by her parents and the police who investigate her case. The sequences when she is interviewed by doctors and the police, when she walks from her house to the bus stop for the first time after the attack, and when she returns to work all go to painstaking extremes to demonstrate Ann's trauma (and are arguably a precursor to similar scenes in films like The Accused). Ann's decision to run away to another town (where she meets the supportive the Rev. Bruce Ferguson, played by Tod Andrews) is therefore justified. Lupino and Powers' combined efforts sympathetically illustrate Ann's desperation but never patronize her. The film's sympathetic alignment with Ann's experience is demonstrated stylistically throughout the film, most dramatically when a local boy propositions her at a church dance. Shown through extreme close-ups and abstract, subjective POV shots, her violent response to his attempted seduction is only too understandable.

Mala Powers in Outrage (Ida Lupino, 1950) [RKO/Kobal Collection].

It is moments such as this that demonstrate the cinema's long, complex, and often contradictory treatment of rape. In this light, even Something Wild (Jack Garfein, bizarre and inescapably problematic love story about teenage rape survivor Mary Ann (Carroll Baker) and the man who holds her captive after he rescues her from a suicide attempt (Ralph its legacy in some later rape-revenge films. Although the plot of the film is undeniably outrageous, the scenes early in the film of her rape and immediate reaction afterwards are surprisingly sensitive. In particular, the scene where she sits on her bathroom floor and carefully cuts her ruined dress into tiny flushable pieces so her overbearing mother does not find out about the rape adds a depth to her experience that is still today both heartbreaking and poetic. The post-assault bathroom sequence is far from rare in contemporary rape-revenge films, but this small moment in Something Wild remains one of its most moving variations. Films such as Outrage, Something Wild and Safe in Hell despite yet powerful glimpses into rape trauma, and suggest that the later rape-revenge configuration may stem from historical roots more diverse than previous treatments have acknowledged. This diversity can be identified even in the most well-known examples of the rape-revenge film, and this "rape-revenge canon" will be the site of interest in the following chapter.

CHAPTER ONE

The Rape-Revenge Film Canon

To speak of a "rape-revenge film canon" may at first seem incongruous. Surely a phenomenon that writers such as Neil Fulwood have labeled as outright "seedy"' is not sophisticated or valuable enough to justify canonization. But in making an exception of Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971) with his praise, Fulwood implies there may be some rape-revenge films that have been elevated above others in the popular not for their enlightened outlook, then at least for their notoriety. Janet Staiger argues that film canons are formed with clear ideological intent regarding what films are privileged, and which ones fall beyond critical and popular scope.2 The raperevenge titles regarding male-against-female rape that have lodged themselves most firmly in the popular imagination certainly support this view; films as diverse and as seemingly contradictory as The Accused and Thriller: A Cruel Picture demonstrate even at a cursory glance how just broad the field is. The films that are discussed throughout this chapter have to some degree garnered attention primarily for their abilities to exemplify particular ideological treatments of sexual violence and its relationship to retribution. It is important to remember, however, that these films have been privileged above other why, for instance, is Ms. 45 still celebrated, while Positive I.D. is all but forgotten? As Jonathan Rosenbaum reminds us, it is vital to treat "canon formation as an active process of selection rather than a passive one of reportage." 3

The reasons these films have retained such a central positions in the cultural memory are broad and fascinating. While the word "canon" may imply a qualitative judgment, in this instance distinctions of taste have not been employed as a primary method of discernment. Rather, it is the ubiquity of these texts that have rendered them so commonplace in both critical and popular discourse concerning the rape-revenge film. With the mainstream and art-house examples, industry recognition in the form of awards and other accolades solidify the importance of some titles over others. The credible stamp of the auteur or the inclusion of identifiable acting dramatically against elevates some titles to a more memorable level. But even in the case of exploitation or trash film cultures (what Jeffrey Sconce has referred to more holistically as "paracinema"4), there is a distinction to be made between celebrated cult films (such as, in the case of rape-revenge films Ms. 45, Thriller: A Cruel Picture and the original versions of The Last House on the Left and I Spit on Your Grave) and what Matt Hills calls para-paracinematic texts5: titles that fall outside the revered territory of cult cinema fandom. Once Diane Wolfthal's observations that in medieval and early modern art "diverse notions [of rape] coexisted contemporaneously"-these films are intriguing not only for what they share, but also for where they deviate.

Mainstream Rape-Revenge Films

Despite its sleazy reputation, the rape-revenge film has a relatively auspicious heritage. Winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1961, Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukallan)6 was described by James R. Alexander as "the basic template" for the contemporary rape-revenge film7; and as Craven's The Last House on the Left and its many variants and remakes suggest, the plot has demonstrated remarkable longevity. Despite spawning a number of exploitation knock-offs (discussed at length in Chapter Two), The Virgin Spring is an art classic; and long-time Bergman collaborator Sven Nykvist's sumptuous black and white cinematography combined with a strong performance by leading actor Max von Sydow to earn the film Academy recognition.

The Virgin Spring is an adaptation of a traditional medieval ballad, "Yore's Daughter at Vange,"8 dating from somewhere between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries.' Scriptwriter Ulla Isaksson combined a number of different versions of the ballad into her screen version, creating the now-familiar plot: Karin (Birgitta Petterson) is the spoiled and vain daughter of Christian parents Mareta (Birgitta Valberg) and Tore (Max von Sydow). Along with her pregnant, pagan foster sister Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom), Karin embarks upon a journey to make a delivery to her church. After the two girls separate, Karin is raped and murdered by a group of goat herders. Unaware of Karin's relationship to Tore and Mareta, the goatherds arrive at Karin's family home in search of accommodation and employment. Mareta realizes that Karin has met with a nasty fate when one of the goatherds attempts to sell her a piece of Karin's clothing. Tore embarks upon his brutal revenge and murders the goatherds, and the next day Ingeri takes Tore and Mareta to Karin's body. Tore announces that despite his inability to understand God's actions, his faith remains unshaken and declares that he will build a church on the site of Karin's death. Symbolically, when he lifts her head, a spring of water miraculously "virgin spring" of the film's title.

The Virgin Spring is narratively focused on Tore's journey of spiritual redemption, even though the impact of that journey stems originally from the rape and murder of his daughter. This crime provides a logical motive for Tore's extreme and violent vengeance, and therefore underscores the thematic punch of God's response and Tore's final revelation. By no means is rape the subject of this film, but rather it acts as a narrative trigger that provokes a battle between Tore and his metaphorical demons. Crucially, however, this plot focus deviates substantially from the film's visceral impact: as the spectator witnesses her rape and murder in full, it is impossible to not be overwhelmed by Karin's suffering and the sheer brutality of the event, made even more poignant through Bergman's masterful direction. So while the final impact depends on the transferal of this compassion for Karin's suffering at the hands of her attackers to the turmoil experienced by her vengeance-hungry father, whether that narrative force supersedes the impact of Karin's rape and murder is open for debate. The violence and cruelty of Karin's rape and murder supposedly corresponds with the intensity of Tore's bloodlust. In turn, this facilitates the impact of his spiritual conversion at the film's conclusion at the discovery of the "virgin spring." Ultimately, the power of the film does not stem from its narrative (the story of Tore's spiritual journey) or affective elements (Karin's rape and murder) alone, but rather from the tension between them.

While The Last House on the Left is The Virgin Spring's clearest progeny, its influence reaches far beyond its plot synopsis. Most notable is its religious legacy: just in the rape-revenge canon alone, both Thriller: A Cruel Picture and the original I Spit on Your Grave include important scenes where their protagonists go to church before embarking upon their revenge. Ms. 45, with Thana as the fetishized, suspender-belt-wearing nun, makes this influence just as explicit. Unlike The Virgin Spring, these are obviously not "religious" films, but even to a secular audience these are powerful ethical symbols: these are women who want God on their side and, in Thana's case, even suggest they are representing God. After The Virgin Spring, rape-revenge films become predominantly secular crusades. But, as more examples will continue to demonstrate, what they are crusading how those journeys are depicted - is a vast and diverse field.

The Virgin Spring is not the only rape-revenge film to receive Academy recognition. With her performance as gang rape victim Sarah in The Accused, actress Jodie Foster10 both won her first Oscar and permanently released herself from the shackles of the "child star" label. The Accused was as successful with the critics as it was at the box office, and it seamlessly combined many of the key plot elements of the less positively received Lipstick (1976) with a grittier tone. Taking the spectator on a relentless and often torturous tour of the legal humiliations rape survivors like Sarah must examinations, police interviews, the identification of suspects, and the often cruel disappointments of the judicial process Accused is not set in Lipstick's world of high fashion, or the medieval past of The Virgin Spring, but in an environment readily identifiable as the "real world." But it is its status as a courtroom drama that has caused some critics discomfort, hindering its unanimous acclaim.

The film opens with a lengthy shot of the Mill Bar, a run-down dive underneath a bridge in what appears to be a poor, industrial area. A woman (later identified as Sarah) runs out of the bar screaming and clutching her ripped clothes to her body. A clean-cut young man (later identified as Ken, played by Bernie Coulson) calls 911 for help, saying a woman has just been gang raped. Sarah is taken to the hospital where she is examined and interrogated, and is introduced to the lawyer who will be prosecuting her case, Assistant D.A. Kathryn Murphy (Kelly McGillis). Sarah returns to the Mill Bar with Kathryn and identifies her rapists, and Kathryn begins to build her case. Discussing it with male colleagues at an ice hockey game, and after negotiations with the defendant's attorneys, Kathryn agrees to a deal where they are charged with "reckless endangerment." Sarah, who suggests Kathryn only sees her as a "low-class bimbo," furiously interrupts Kathryn during a fancy dinner party and expresses her anger at having the charge of rape reduced to something as undefined as "reckless endangerment." Deeply traumatized, Sarah is pushed even further when she is harassed in the parking lot of a record store by one of the men who witnessed her assault. Snapping, she rams his car repeatedly. Kathryn visits her in the hospital and is affected by Sarah's accusation that "you did all my talking for me." An overnight research montage leads her to decide that she has a case to charge the spectators of the rape with criminal solicitation, and despite risking her own career in doing so, she proceeds with the case. Kathryn discovers the identity of Ken when she learns he recorded his name as winner of an arcade game at the time of the rape, and despite facing pressure from his friend Rob (now in jail as one of Sarah's rapists), he agrees to testify. Sarah tells her story in court, and when Ken appears the rape is shown as a flashback. The jury finds in favor of Kathryn and Sarah, and they euphorically leave the courtroom, where Sarah tells reporters, "I'm very pleased." In closing, statistics about rape and gang rape in the United States are listed onscreen."

Both Clover and Read agree that despite its reputation as a classic example of the rape-revenge film, TheAccusedis a relatively straightforward legal drama surrounding rape. For Clover, the "revenge" component exists solely as it pertains to the judicial system. Although there is the possibility that the guilty parties may escape punishment, the film demonstrates that the law (personified in part by Kathryn herself12) is capable of correcting its own mistakes: "There is a sense in which the third party, the legal system, becomes the hero of the piece; focus has in any case shifted from the victim to her lawyer, from questions of why men rape and how victims feel to questions of what constitutes evidence."" For Read, TheAccused employs a rhetoric that has less to do with feminism in particular than with a general sense of the dominant popular morality of the late 1980s in Britain and the United States. In her detailed analysis of the promotional material that accompanied the film's release, she observes that it "frequently worked to construct the representation of rape not as a specifically feminist issue, or even as an issue about gender, but as a matter of popular morality.""

Clover's observation that "with The Accused, the rape-revenge drama hits Oscar level"15 belies the influence of the film's greatest cinematic ancestor. Unlike the influence that The Virgin Spring has had upon a number of famous rape-revenge films, The Accused finds its most immediate heritage in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959). Although it did not win, Anatomy ofa Murder was certainly at "Oscar level," with its seven nominations (including Best Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Role and Best Cinematography). It is difficult to define Anatomy of a Murder as a rape-revenge film for similar reasons as to why The Accused fits so is legal drama that explores how the legal process responds to rape, rather than focusing on rape as such. Anatomy of a Murder tells the story of a small-town lawyer (James Stewart) who defends a moody soldier (Ben Gazzara) after he murders a man for raping his wife (Lee Remick). To prove his client acted justifiably, Stewart's character must establish that the rape occurred. Aside from clear references to Preminger's film in The Accused (such as the centrality of a pinball machine to both rapes), both hinge heavily upon the low-class status and suggested promiscuity of the rape survivors, and their dramas play out through predominantly verbal re-enactments of the night in question (although both films feature flashbacks at key points). In its updating of Anatomy ofa Murder, The Accused deliberately subverts its the earlier movie follows the trial from the perspective of the likeable (and male) defense attorney, The Accused invests its narrative heavily within the rape survivor herself.

A lesser-known but equally relevant ancestor also provides insight into Kaplan's movie. The title acknowledges its debt to William Dieterle's 1949 film The Accused, where Loretta Young plays a college professor who murders a student when he attempts to rape her. Both versions of The Accused deploy their title to emphasize the ambiguities that rape presents to clear-cut categories of guilt and innocence: who is the accused in cases such as these? The fact that Kaplan's The Accused is so sharply attuned to Sarah's trauma and her struggle for agency undermines its central formal conceit. Superficially at least, TheAccusedis constructed to make the audience a kind of "jury" themselves; by not seeing the rape until the end of the film, the audience is in part asked to sit in judgment and to make a call on the case (Kathryn's closing summation is even shown from the point of view of the jury box). Thus, when Sarah says to Kathryn, "You saw me at the hospital. You think I asked for that?" she is asking the audience the same question. It is, of course, only tentative in its formal suggestion that the audience is required to make any significant judgment call; it is difficult to not wholeheartedly believe Sarah's version of events, if only because it is her trauma that has been so closely documented. She is very much presented as the sympathetic "victim" in contrast to those on trial, including smug, rich college boy Bob (Steve Antin) and hostile Cliff (Leo Rossi). The catharsis this scenario allows hinges directly upon the guilty verdict that not only sends Cliff and the others who encouraged the rapists to jail, but converts the previous charges of reckless endangerment to rape. This release is palpable in the final moments of the film, with its upbeat soundtrack heralding Sarah and Kathryn's success as they victoriously leave the courtroom. The logic that allows the legal process to magically delete the serious long-term trauma of sexual violence upon its survivors is encapsulated in Clover's accusation of the film's intrinsic "Pollyannaism."16

Regardless of these criticisms, what The Accused accomplishes that no other film in this book quite achieves is its ability to so aggressively address the notion of spectatorship itself in regards to rape and revenge. By placing its emphasis upon the act of watching rape (suggesting that it is equal to rape), the film aligns itself explicitly with Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema." Mulvey claims that the gaze in classical Hollywood cinema is inherently male and sadistic, and that the act of looking is itself an act of violence. The Accused transfers this from the conceptual realm of film theory firmly into the domain of a legal melodrama, and it reiterates continually that the act of watching rape is just as criminal as rape itself. The Accused may not technically be a rape-revenge film in the same way that Ms. 45 or The Virgin Spring are, but at the very least it presents a watertight case for the ethical complications so inherent in the act of watching rape-revenge.

For Clover, it is erroneous to credit The Accused with "mainstreaming" rape-revenge: that honor lies with Lipstick, a film that firmly moved it away from the art film and exploitation circuit and into the domain of the popular.17 Promoted heavily as a vehicle to launch the acting career of supermodel Margaux Hemingway, the film bombed commercially and critically. Paradoxically, it brought attention to Hemingway's fifteen-year-old sister and co-star, Mariel, who played the character of Kathy. That Margaux and granddaughters of writer Ernest sisters onscreen brought a degree of verisimilitude to the film, a motive reiterated by the fact that Margaux's character, Chris McCormick, was also a famous fashion model. The association between Margaux's famous visage (one that had been displayed on magazines from Vogue to Time) and the thematic exploration into the commodification of women's bodies so central to the film was no accident.

Developing a rape-revenge scenario with a mainstream audience in mind, Lipstick supports Clover's claim that most mainstream variants are concerned first and foremost with issues of justice and the law." Even within the confines of what often boils down to a legal drama, however, there are still differing treatments of and responses to sexual violence. While Lipstick shares its status as a courtroom drama with a range of other mainstream rape-revenge instances, in many senses it can be viewed as the anti-Accused: while the supposedly white-trash Foster finally achieves courtroom justice, in Lipstick even a rich, successful supermodel like Chris McCormick has no choice but to get a gun and go vigilante in order to protect the (literal) sisterhood.

Lipstick is also significantly determined in its refusal to characterize its rapist as a two-dimensional villain. Peter Lehman has observed that "in some of these films nearly all the men are presented as sexually repulsive,"" but Chris Sarandon's performance as Kathy's music teacher proves a notable exception. As Gordon, he is presented before the rape as being utterly likeable: charming, funny and not difficult to look at. Great effort has been made to avoid Othering him as the villain before the assault; hugging his tape-recorder when he first meets his pupil's famous and beautiful sister, if anything, Gordon is valued no differently from anyone else in the film before the rape.20 To emphasize the fact that rapists can be people who seem otherwise ordinarya notable distinction from the majority of rape-revenge films where the rapist is presented as an often cartoonish Lamont Johnson makes the point of dividing the film's time relatively democratically between showing the intimate details of the lives of both the rapist and his victim before the assault.

This refusal to demonize Gordon beforehand means his moral status after the rape is based solely upon his violence towards Chris. Visiting her at home in order to play her a tape of his music, Gordon reacts with a sudden violent outburst when he suspects she is disinterested and patronizing. Kathy accidentally walks in on them during the rape and, confused, leaves quietly. With the support of her priest brother Martin (John Bennet Perry), Chris decides to press charges, and seeks the assistance of prosecutor Carla Bondi (Anne Bancroft). Despite presenting a strong argument, Carla's case collapses when the defense insists that Kathy's failure to call the police when she interrupted Chris and Gordon meant that it was, in fact, mutually consensual rough sex. Returning to modeling, Chris finds it difficult to readjust after the trial, and decides to take Kathy on a trip after one final photo shoot. Exploring the building where the studio is located, Kathy finds Gordon working on a musical performance; and after an ominous discussion, he chases Kathy and rapes her also. Badly beaten and with ripped clothes, Kathy returns to Chris and tells her what has occurred. Wasting no time, Chris chases Gordon out of the building, grabs a rifle and shoots him repeatedly until he dies in a parking lot. A brief voice-over at the end of the film announces that Carla wins Chris a "Not Guilty" verdict in the subsequent murder trial.

Lipstick balances two opposing explanations for Gordon's vicious attack. Firstly, it deliberately places it in the context of Chris' profession: the fashion shoot opening of the film alone establishes a link between using her to sell products and the implication of sexual availability. More specifically, her lipstick-stained mouth is formally disembodied and objectified. The courtroom scene in particular allows this issue to be explicitly debated, giving Chris the opportunity in her own words to define how she sees her job: "I'm supposed to be what every woman wants to look like." Much of the film hinges upon the link Gordon's defense makes between Chris' job as a model, consumerism and sexuality: they argue Gordon cannot be held accountable for viewing her as a sexual commodity to be consumed because that is precisely the reading she encourages. Professionally, he argues, Chris was "asking for it." This justification is the one Gordon himself appears to embrace, even during the rape itself. While attacking Chris, he forces her to put on bright red lipstick in an attempt to make the rape as much about her (and her sexuality) as possible. He deliberately tries to sexualize the rape, despite the fact that it is an encounter fuelled only by his rage and sense of rejection.

Margaux Hemingway in Lipstick (Lamont Johnson, 1976) [Paramount/Kobal Collection].

It is this fury that defines the alternate (and true) motive for Gordon's attack. In Lipstick, rape is used as an attempt by Gordon to establish himself in a position of power. His defense that it is about the sexual status of the victim is merely a distraction from the real motivations for his crime. When he first arrives at Chris' house, Gordon observes a photograph of her with the avant-garde musician Sean Gage. Gordon fixates upon this photo, visibly shaken by Chris' association as he explains how Gage rejected his earlier attempts at contact. The ambitious Gordon therefore had viewed Chris as another possible stepping stone to assist in his career, but when she wanders out of the room while his tape plays to talk on the telephone, his rejection (compounded by the earlier rejection of his idol, Gage) turns to violence.

Gordon's music is intrinsic to his motivation, and to demonstrate the point he even places his tape recorder at Chris' head while he rapes her. Carla identifies the importance of Gordon's music, and in her prosecution strategy she applies a moral value to it; playing his composition to the courtroom, she alludes that the experimental, "deviant" nature of the music itself can only reflect upon the ethical consistency of the man who composed it. But Carla's strategy fails for the same reason that arguments about Chris' modeling career also cannot provide an adequate motive. Neither Gordon's music nor Chris' photographs are the issue: the responsibility for Gordon's violent attack lies not in art, but in him and him alone. It is in this spirit that the film's memorable Chris runs through the parking lot in a floor-length red evening gown toting a that, in turn, no one else can be more responsible for a woman's right to safety than women themselves. The court does finally grant some justice for Chris, but without the victorious fanfare of the similar sequence in The Accused. By this stage of the film, to celebrate the court victory seems pointless.

Despite the negative reception Lipstick received, another star vehicle a few years later won its leading actress much more acclaim than Margaux Hemingway. Based upon William Mastrosimone's stage play of the same name, Extremities surprised audiences and critics alike with its powerful lead performance by Farrah Fawcett. Although the film was far from a box-office hit, Fawcett herself was widely praised (as she had been for her performance as an abused wife in Robert Greenwald's 1984 telemovie The Burning Bed), and she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Drama. As Marjorie, the film opens as Fawcett's character endures a frightening attempted rape in her car on her way home from work. After escaping, she receives little assistance or support from the police, and when she realizes her attacker, Joe (James Russo), has stolen her wallet with all of her personal information in it, she goes into lockdown at home. One week later Joe invades her home after her two female flatmates have left for work. Desperate and frightened as he physically and psychologically tortures her, Marjorie fights back during another attempted rape and sprays insect repellent in his eyes. Tying him up with cords from household appliances, she crafts a makeshift cell in her fireplace with an old bed frame. Convinced from her earlier experience that the police will not believe her version of events, Marjorie digs a grave in her garden and decides that her only choice is to bury Joe alive. Her housemates return home before she can act, however, and the women debate the ethics of their situation in the film's remaining time. Joe attempts to turn the women against each other, but when he is finally forced by Marjorie to confess, the women agree to get the police.

Despite this social-issue drama's lack of stylistic bravery, Extremities still has remarkable impact. The film explores issues of justice and the failures of the judicial process to deal with sexual assault. "What should a woman do when the police let her down?" is not a rhetorical question, but a defining thematic concern, and a great deal of time is spent exploring the issues inherent in a variety of answers. The screenplay, also written by Mastrosimone, offered him the opportunity to plug some of the narrative holes in the original stage version. Embracing the ability to move the film outside of the housebound constraints of the stage, the attempted rape in Marjorie's car at the beginning of the film is a new addition that provides tangible evidence of her later suspicion that the police will not assist her. What in the play is merely a suspicion, in the film becomes an experience-based likelihood.

For audiences at the time of the film's release, Fawcett was a familiar face through her performance as Jill Munroe in the hit TV series Charlie's Angels. This tough-girl legacy is effectively employed in Extremities. Initially, it makes Marjorie's escape from Joe after his attempted rape in her car plausible for intertextual reasons alone, but it also demonstrates that even the threat of sexual violence has devastating consequences for a strong and successful female "superhero." The film is structured neatly into two almost perfectly equal sections, the first allowing Fawcett to deliver her performance as the tortured, traumatized and terrified victim. Raw but never sensationalized, intense but never tacky, despite the democratic exchange of point-of-view camera angles between Marjorie and Joe, the sympathies of the spectator lie firmly with the former, and Fawcett deserves the praise she received for the role. But even before the broader ethical debates of the film's second half begin, it is clear that the scope of the film expands far outside the domain of rape alone. As an example of Joe's increasing cruelty, he mockingly demands that Marjorie cook for him. Sitting at her kitchen table and drinking beer, he jokes viciously, "I come home and you've got nothing to fucking eat?" This chilling reconstruction of this typical scene of domestic violence expands the scope of the film's thematic intent from rape specifically to a more general domain of the abuse of women (as well as providing an intertextual link to Fawcett's earlier performance in The Burning Bed).

The final half of the film begins suddenly, marked by Marjorie's successful counter-attack as she symbolically sprays pest repellent in Joe's eyes. Despite her appearing to be in control, however, Joe still considers himself to be in a position of power, belittling Marjorie and convincing her that the police will let him go because it is her word against his. After she locks him in his "cell," her housemate Terry (Diana Scarwid) returns home and is deeply shocked by what she sees. Close to denial, she sits at a table drinking and smoking while Marjorie digs a grave. When the third housemate, Patricia (Alfre Woodard), returns from her job as a social worker, the film shifts dramatically from its Joe/Villain vs. Marjorie/Victim binary and focuses instead upon the splintering of the three women (the "sisterhood"). It is here that Extremities packs its most explicit thematic clout, as it demonstrates that rape is not simply a "us vs. them" scenario. The film from this point hinges upon the assumption that there is no singular contingency plan in how to respond to violence against women.

It is here where the "extremes" of the film's title come to the fore. On one side is Patricia, the "bleeding-heart" liberal who represents a softly-softly approach. She is contrasted sharply against Marjorie's newfound militant vigilantism. Even in their appearance (African American Patricia, blonde-haired and blue-eyed Marjorie), these two women symbolize the polarized "extremes" offered within the ranks of feminism itself. The exclusion of Terry from this duality is of no small importance. Angrily exploding at Marjorie, Terry confesses that she herself was raped as a young girl, but was not so fortunate as to escape. She furiously describes her inability to do anything about it, and her rage is directed at Marjorie as she tells her, "I'm not going to prison for you." The film contrasts these three vigilante, the liberal and the rape survivor it reaches its resolution.

This conclusion is far from unproblematic. That Marjorie's liberation and her ability to reunite with her female peers hinges so inherently upon Joe's confession means that he still maintains a position of power. Despite being physically restrained, Joe remains the primary agent of her liberation: if he chose not to confess, the three women would never have agreed to contact the police. The film emphasizes that it was Joe's choice (not Marjorie's) that determined the final outcome. This issue of male power transcends the film's diegesis. If the film feels conflicted, it is because the two primary male figures who created Young and writer in direct opposition to each other regarding the ethical nature of revenge. While promoting the film, Young mentioned on numerous occasions the rape of his daughter when she was sixteen, and openly acknowledged this event as his primary motivation for making Extremities.21 For him, it was absolutely not a rape-revenge story because Marjorie did not kill her assailant:

That would make this a revenge film, a Death Wish. Is that all we have to say about human relations: that I hurt you and you then go and hurt me and we don't go any place beyond that? I didn't want to bring Marjorie down to the rapist's level.

As Edward Guthmann points out in the San Francisco Chronicle, however, this contradicts Mastrosimone, who noted in the film's press kit that he was "glad that I allowed Marjorie to act out a woman's intense feeling for revenge," and then cites an anecdote where a rape survivor who saw his play told him, "It's better to act and be killed ... than to live with oneself as a coward." When Guthmann presented this information to Young, the director's response was clear:

Oh, I think that's a terrible statement: that's dangerous. I didn't know that was in the press kit. I don't think that's the right thing to promulgate. I wouldn't want my daughter to read that. I wouldn't want to encourage anyone to act out of those kinds of reasons.22

At stake in this discord is not only the ethics of revenge; even more arresting is how the foundations of the film's thematic core are reduced to debates between men about what the rape of women does and does not mean. In this light, Extremities can be seen to function as a discrete attack upon feminism as a whole, its conclusion firmly establishing that the issues the women raised were not ones able to be resolved by the women on their own terms. Consequently, the fracture within the sisterhood that the film so effectively exposed was never adequately healed. An exploration of feminism itself, as much as it is anything else, Extremities is therefore far from the clear-cut examples of the rape-revenge plot it is so often assumed to be. Its attack upon the factionalization of feminist discourse, and final reminder that it is men who hold the power (both diegetically and extradigetically), render it just as as ideologically many of the more notorious examples in this book.

If The Accused is the flipside of Lipstick, then Thelma & Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991) can perhaps be considered the anti-Extremities. Where dramatic tension in the latter is as predicated in part on friction within female ranks, in Thelma & Louise even such small details as their shared accent and similar hair color places the emphasis firmly upon female solidarity. While popularly recognized as one of the most iconic of all contemporary rape-revenge films, that it deviates so substantially from what a rape-revenge film is more broadly considered to be seems little more than a passing observation next to its hefty cultural significance. Whether it is a rape-revenge film per se or not pales next to the way that this feminist fantasy captured not only the public imagination at the time of its release, but a slew of accolades for many of its key players, including an Oscar and Golden Globe for screenwriter Callie Khouri, and nominations for its director Ridley Scott and lead actresses Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon.

As the title indicates, Thelma d' Louise follows the story of two female friends. Thelma (Davis) is a downtrodden housewife, naive to a near infantile degree, who flees her oppressive domestic situation to spend a weekend away at a cabin with her assertive yet jaded friend Louise (Sarandon). Stopping at a bar on their way, Thelma is sexually assaulted in a parking lot by a man named Harlan (Timothy Carhart) whom she met during an evening of margaritas and line dancing. Louise rescues Thelma by pulling a gun, and when Harlan verbally abuses her, she kills him. Fleeing the scene on the assumption that the police will not believe their story, they are soon pursued by sympathetic yet vigilant policeman Hal Slocum (Harvey Keitel). Led by the dominant figure of Louise, the women aim to escape to Mexico, although Louise insists that they do so by bypassing Texas. Surprised and angry that his wife left him, Thelma's husband, Daryl (Christopher McDonald), assists the police and lets them tap his phone so they can trace her when she calls. Louise's boyfriend Jimmy meets the two women in Oklahoma, and, after delivering Louise's life savings as per her request, proposes to her. Refusing, she emotionally bids farewell to him in a cafe and is met by a bed-headed Thelma, who confesses to a sexually charged evening with young cowboy hitchhiker JD (Brad Pitt). When Louise discovers that JD has stolen their money, she crumbles both physically and emotionally, leaving Thelma to take control of the situation. Thelma robs a store to get them money, and their journey leads them to the Grand Canyon. A phone call to the police at Daryl's house enables the women's location to be traced, and they are pursued to the edge of a large cliff. In the film's famous closing scene, the women agree that they cannot return to their old lives, and holding drive off the cliff in a final act of solidarity and defiance.

Much critical discussion surrounding Thelma & Louise appears unable to agree on whether Thelma's assault was a rape or an attempted rape. The film itself certainly provides enough evidence to support the former claim, if only through Thelma's own words when she tells Louise, "He was rapin' me!" The attack itself is far more explicit than the attempted rape in Extremities: Harlan hits Thelma hard, and as she struggles, both of their pants are pulled down as she lies face down and he forces himself against her. If there isn't penetration, then it is certainly close." Perhaps more important, however, is the misconception that Louise kills Harlan for raping (or attempting to rape) Thelma. While she pulls a gun on him and threatens him, it is not until he verbally abuses the women as they walk away that she responds with violence:

HARLAN: Bitch! I should have gone ahead and fucked her!

LoUISE (turning around): What did you say?

HARLAN: Suck my cock!

(Louise shoots, then walks up to his dead body)

LoUISE: You watch your mouth, buddy.

This, of course, does not mean that Louise was not prepared to respond to Thelma's assault with violence, but it demonstrates that she seeks liberation from a far broader notion of oppression and abuse than just this one act.

It is this broader threat that frames the film's central enigma: what happened to Louise in Texas? This "Texas Question" (if it is a question at Louise's demeanor alone suggests that it is related in some way to the events in the parking lot) emphasizes the importance of the temporal divide between past, present and future. As the women embark upon their journey, there is a distinctive 1950s aspect to the mise-en-scene: both women are dressed in purity-defining white, Louise with a headscarf and cats-eye sunglasses, and Thelma in a cotton dress with a sweetheart neckline. Even Louise's retro convertible refers to this era, the car itself functioning at this early stage as a kind of "time machine" capable of taking the women back to a time before their respective confinements in unsatisfying marriages and unfulfilling jobs. Throughout the film their appearance becomes increasingly tomboyish: first to go are the white clothes, then the lipstick, and finally the bras. In this spirit, Thelma d Louise is undeniably a feminist fantasy. This is defined no more clearly than when they blow up the truck of a man who had been harassing them throughout their journey. The film is careful to steer clear of the construction of an "us vs. them" binary between men and women, as indicated by the significant presence of Harvey Keitel's intelligent and compassionate Hal Slocum, who asks rhetorically at one point how many times Louise and Thelma are going to be "fucked over." And while there are many more grotesque and stereotyped images of regressive the truck-driver, Harlan, even the policeman in Daryl's house who looks at pornography while he waits for Thelma to the women themselves adopt a more masculine appearance acknowledges from within the diegesis that gender is far more fluid than these stereotypes suggest.

Thelma &Louise rejects the vision of feminism in the face of sexual violence as the splintered, fractured war depicted in Extremities. Rather, as they fly in slow-motion off the cliff and into the Grand Canyon, their story becomes an allegory for a very human desire for unity, friendship, respect and love, even if liberation comes at the expense of their own lives. Thelma and Louise are literally women pushed to the edge, not only by rape but also by the broader cultural tendency towards the oppression of women's bodies, voices and spirits. Thelma & Louise has earned its place in the rape-revenge canon if only for demonstrating that revenge is not the only option available in the pursuit of liberation.

The Exploitation Rape-Revenge Film

It would be unhelpful to divide rape-revenge films along a mainstreamprogressive/exploitation-regressive divide, as to do so ignores the complexity of films that at first may appear almost crassly simplistic. This is demonstrated nowhere more powerfully than in the original I Spit on Your Grave, a film whose impact is still difficult to deny over thirty years since its original release (the 2010 remake will be explored in Chapter Four). While some other notorious examples of the British "Video Nasties" controversy24 now seem dated by their crude and excessive special effects, the power of I Spit on Your Grave stems from its steadfast depiction of rape as ugly and terrifyingly brutal. In the United States, critic Roger Ebert famously decried the film as "sick, reprehensible and contemptible," citing it as singular proof of the victory of gutter-minded perverts.25 The attention Ebert's scathing attack brought to his film at the time of its release has not been lost on Zarchi, however, who has recently joked that Ebert was one of "the best promoters ever for this I wonder whether they don't ask for royalties now. One day I'll give Roger Ebert a hug and then tell him who I am afterwards."26 Central to Ebert's attack was his contention that spectators are formally and thematically encouraged to identify with the rapists, exposing the film's fundamental misogyny. But for many contemporary them Joe Bob Briggs, Carol J. Clover, Philip Green, Marco Starr and Gary Crowdus27-ISpit on Your Grave is instead an unflinching, powerful, and, for some, even subversive meditation upon the reality of sexual violence. So while Ebert claims the film glorifies the rapists, Clover argues that what it shows is very much "Jennifer's story. Most of the action is registered from her vantage, and there is no doubt whatsoever that its sympathies lie with her."28

Released initially as Day ofthe Woman, the film is known more generally as I Spit on Your Grave, a riff on Boris Vian's revenge novel I Shall Spit on Your Grave (Jirai cracher sur vos tombes, 1946) and the Michael Gast 1959 film adaptation of the same name.29 Inspired by Zarchi's discovery of a badly beaten, naked rape victim on the street, the film's plot itself is simple. Jennifer (Camille Keaton) is a young woman who leaves the city to spend time alone in the country to work on a writing project. What begins as ominous harassment by four local hooligans soon turns into an extremely graphic, violent and drawn-out gang rape. Jennifer recuperates enough from the initial physical trauma to go to church and pray for forgiveness for the course of action she has decided upon. One by one, she hunts down her rapists and kills them in a variety of gruesome and creative ways, including hanging, slicing up with a boat's propeller blade castration of one of the men. Reducing the rape-revenge equation to its barest terms, the film ends the instant she has killed her final victim. That critical positions on the film have conflicted so dramatically suggests, at the very least, that director Zarchi managed to hit a sensitive nerve.

With its gritty 25-minute rape scene, it is perhaps unsurprising the film has been released in a variety of different versions. In her assessment of the censored rape scene in the 2002 UK DVD release, British critic Linda Ruth Williams observes, "The less seen of Jennifer's rape the better, one might think; but this may have the curious effect of making the revenge less defensible, since less of the rape is evident."30 At the same time, any censoring of the revenge component (such as the notorious castration scene) simultaneously risks letting the rapists off the hook to some degree. The censoring of I Spit on Your Grave raises an important question: which is more upsetting to watch, the rape or the revenge? And who has the right to answer this? On whose behalf do they speak? In its uncensored version, the answers become no clearer, but here at least the film's raw central thematic conceit is at its most explicit: rape is brutal, unglamorous and unrelentingly cruel. The total absence of filmic allusion, of metaphor, of any kind of formal grinds our sophisticated emotional distancing skills to a raw, disoriented dust.

Claiming that it was the first rape-revenge film that featured a woman avenging her own rape (rather than having an agent act on her behalf), Zarchi identified the influence of I Spit on Your Grave on movies including The Accused, Thelma &Louise and, more recently, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Man som hatar kvinnor, Niels Arden Oplev, 2009).31 But cinema history has granted no contingency plan regarding how to correctly respond to a film quite like this one. Ebert attacked the audiences at his screening for laughing, but it can be argued in their defense confused and totally out of their film-viewing experiential simply did not know what else to do. Even today, the blatant (and yes, sensationalized) depiction of human suffering in I Spit on Your Grave emphasizes how sensitized we are to glossy depictions of rape. However, somewhere in those grueling 25 minutes is a lightning flash of empathy where we realize we are trapped, leaving the cinema or turning off the DVD can't take back what we've already seen. Jennifer's rape therefore leaves us powerless. I Spit on Your Grave moves the onus of trying to comprehend the brutal incomprehensibility of rape firmly onto the spectator.

Another title caught up in the British "Video Nasties" scandal, the original The Last House on the Left, was described by its lead actor David Hess as "a quantum leap into an unknown area of screen violence."32 The film launched the horror careers of two of the genre's biggest names, Wes Craven (who would go on to direct such infamous horror franchises as the Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream films) and Sean S. Cunningham (who directed the first of the Friday the 13th films and is still producing the recent additions to the continuing franchise). Having worked successfully on the Marilyn Chambers-fronted adult film Together (1971), Craven and Cunningham were given the opportunity to make a horror film, and The Last House on the Left project was born.33

John Kenneth Muir considers The Last House on the Left a "loose interpretation"34 of The Virgin Spring; while for Michael Brashinsky, Craven's film was an attack on the very ideals upon which the earlier movie was based.35 Teenager Mari Collingwood (Sandra Cassel) heads to the city to see a band with her friend Phyllis (Lucy Grantham) to celebrate her seventeenth birthday, taking with her a peace sign necklace that was a gift from her parents. During their search for marijuana, they meet Krug Stillo (David Hess), his son junior (Marc Sheffler), Sadie (Jeramie Rain) and Weasel (Fred J. Lincoln). The group decides to smuggle the girls to Canada in the trunk of their car after they beat and rape Phyllis. Coincidentally, their car breaks down in front of the Collingwoods' house, where Marl's parents had been planning a surprise party for their daughter. While the police half-heartedly interview the Collingwoods about Mari's disappearance, Krug and his gang drag the girls into the woods where Mari is raped, and both girls are beaten, humiliated and eventually murdered. Pretending to be traveling salesmen, the gang seeks accommodation with the Collingwoods, unaware of their relationship to Mari. Mrs. Collingwood (Cynthia Carr) discovers Junior has the peace sign necklace they had given their daughter, leading her and Dr. Collingwood (Richard Towers) to the discovery of Marl's body. Crazed and grief stricken, the Collingwoods exact their revenge: Mrs. Collingwood seduces Weasel and orally castrates him. After Junior commits suicide, Dr. Collingwood attacks Krug with a chain saw, and Mrs. Collingwood slits Sadie's throat in their swimming pool. The film ends as the blood-covered Collingwoods grimly reunite while the dumbfounded police assess the carnage.

Though the basic plot is similar to The Virgin Spring, significant details are altered in The Last House on the Left. Aside from the increase in explicit violence, the most notable difference is the absence of any equivalent to Bergman's eponymous spring that signifies the redemption of the victim's father and provides his catharsis. Craven's film is therefore much darker, supporting Muir's observation that "the two plotlines differ most ... not in specific details or characters, but in religious convictions and overtones."36 The updated location of The Last House on the Left to the contemporary United States of the film's production is even more pivotal. With the increasing realities of the Vietnam War encroaching upon daily life, for Brashinsky, Craven's film is "one of the first reactions to the defeat of the 1960s, coming from inside the generation that lost."37 According to Adam Lowenstein's book Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film (2005), The Last House on the Left articulates the looming reality of the death of the progressive ideals of the 1960s. With the hippie dream well and truly over, the film is set in a nihilistic world where there is little place for romantic idealism. While the graphic and drawn-out rape scene is essential in justifying the later revenge component of the narrative, it functions only as a narrative device with which to enter a wider examination of the issues affecting America at the unique time of the film's production.

The Virgin Spring and The Last House on the Left diverge not over the treatment of sexual assault as much as they do in regards to the morality of the revenge act by the victim's agents. While the 1972 film, unlike The Virgin Spring, may appear at first to have "no moral center,"38 Craven's rejection of a happily-ever-after universe is an ethical statement in its own right. The message of The Last House on the Left may be bleaker than Bergman's, but it says much of the film's ideological zeitgeist: in this world, revenge is futile, and can only be rewarded with chaos and despair. In The Last House on the Left, violence begets more violence, and an assumption that "good" will triumph over "evil" has been exposed as naive in the world in which it is set. This is nowhere more apparent than in the film's climactic chain saw decapitation of the primary villain, Krug Stillo, which occurs off-screen and is almost immediately replaced by the image of the shocked, bloodied Mr. and Mrs. Collingwood. This is where the melodramatic "payoff" would traditionally be situated, but any sense of victory is denied by the speed and impact with which it collides with the harsh realization that the Collingwoods are now killers themselves. The Last House on the Left demonstrates how rape revenge narratives may actively collapse assumed ethical structures concerning right/wrong and heroes/villains from within. The brutal efficiency with which Craven and Cunningham depict this kind of ideological disillusionment is no doubt one of the primary reasons for the film's success, both at the time of its release and in regards to its longevity with cult audiences almost forty years later.

As The Virgin Spring and Last House on the Left demonstrate, rape-revenge films run the gamut of cinematic artistry. This is nowhere clearer than in Thriller: A Cruel Picture, a fascinating example that demonstrates simultaneous levels of both aesthetic exquisiteness and an unflinching poverty of craftsmanship. Banned twice even in its liberal homeland of Sweden, Thriller shot into the public imagination when its protagonist's iconic eye-patch was referenced by Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill (2004). The more beautiful moments of the the film does contain instances of genuinely breathtaking that the time director Bo Arne Vibenius spent working with Ingmar Bergman on Hour of the Wolf(1968) and Persona (1966) was not wasted.39 But at the same time, Thriller: A Cruel Picture also exhibits moments of exploitation filmmaking at its most aesthetically, morally and intellectually bankrupt. This glaring paradox makes viewing the film an even more strange and confusing task than that entailed by almost all other rape-revenge films in this book.

The film begins with the carefree frolicking of a little girl playing in autumn leaves. Spun around in the air by an elderly man, the scene turns from idyllic to ugly when interrupted by a close up of his contorted, grotesque face combined with a shot of her crumpled, discarded implies that the child has been raped. The police capture the unnamed man but the film cuts to Madeleine (Christina Lindberg) as a young woman, while two elderly female neighbors discuss how the assault resulted in Madeleine's muteness and that the perpetrator went unpunished. Dedicated to her parents and her life on their farm, Madeleine is encouraged by her father to take some time off and go into town. The fashionable young Tony (Heinz Hopf) picks her up after she misses her bus, and he takes her to a fancy restaurant. He invites her back to his apartment and drugs her. While she is unconscious, he announces in a telephone call that she is the fifth girl he has captured in this manner that year. When she wakes up, Madeleine is informed that she is now addicted to heroin and must work as a prostitute for him to keep receiving drugs. Pretending to be Madeleine, Tony writes unkind letters to her parents who, grief stricken, soon commit suicide. Tony's clients begin to arrive, and Madeleine scratches the eyes of the first one when he approaches her for sex. Famously, Tony retaliates by cutting out one of her eyes, requiring the addition of her famous eye-patch. After the discovery of her parent's death, Madeleine goes to church to pray and uses extra money she gains from raising her prostitution rates to learn karate, how to shoot and how to drive. Her abuse and drug use continues, but when her "colleague" Sally (Solveig Andersson) is murdered, Madeleine begins her revenge by tracking down her clients and killing them. Challenging Tony to a duel, she enacts an elaborate murder, and the film ends when he dies and she drives away from his corpse.

Thriller: A Cruel Picture's extreme reputation stems primarily from its graphic eye-gouging scene. The rumor that Vibenius used an actual corpse and that what the film showed was a real human eye being punctured with a scalpel became an integral part of the film's notoriety. While inarguably disturbing to a spectator with undeveloped gore literacy skills, for those familiar with eyeball-heavy film violence (spanning from Luis Bunuel's 1929 film Un Chien Andalou to the work of Italian director Lucio Fulci) the scene is not particularly exceptional. Far harder to dismiss, however, is the hardcore pornographic inserts that feature in the uncensored version of the film. Thriller: A Cruel Picture is, of course, not the only film to fall under a broader "adult" rubric to incorporate rape-revenge elements. While it would be a major task that falls well outside of the parameters of this book to assess the wider application of rape in adult film, some of the more notorious rape-revenge examples from this era also include Emanuelle's Revenge (Joe D'Amato, 1975), The Taking of Christina (Armand Weston, 1976), Terri 's Revenge (Zebedy Colt, 1976), Forced Entry (Shaun Costello, 1973) and Ann Perry's Teenage Sex Kitten (1975).

Even to spectators unfazed by non-violent pornography, films like Thriller: A Cruel Picture still prove to be an extremely difficult viewing experience. Although Thriller's brief pornographic close-ups featuring explicit vaginal (and, at one point, anal) penetration are on their own non-violent, the context of their placement within the telling of Madeleine's story renders them profoundly violent indeed. In an interview with Cinema Sewer's Jan Bruun, Vibenius is open about doing the film to make money, stating that he needed to recuperate financial losses from an earlier project and thus "decided to make the most commercial film ever made." On the inclusion of these hardcore inserts, he notes that they were only included to profit on the increasing "liberalization of porn in Denmark and Sweden"40 at the time. Due to the inclusion of these hardcore inserts, Thriller far transcends the violent nastiness of the original versions of I Spit on Your Grave or The Last House on the Left by making it impossible to deny the directorial intent of making rape sexually titillating. In this sense, the pornographic inserts allow a significant conclusion to be made: their inclusion in such a bleak story is evidence that the filmmakers at least assumed there was a viable demographic who would watch a rape-revenge film for no other reason than the promise of the violent sexual degradation of women.

While it is impossible to transcend an analysis of Thriller: A Cruel Picture beyond the nasty commercial reality that its hardcore inserts belie, the crushing ugliness of these moments make the film's strengths even more conspicuous by comparison. As Vibenius himself puts it, "Looking back on it, it's a shitty film, but with interesting aspects to it."41 Not the least of these is the performance of Christina Lindberg. Although in her mid-20s at the time Thriller: A Cruel Picture was made, Lindberg was making softcore films around this period that emphasized her youth, such as Joseph W. Sarno's Swedish Wildcats and Walter Boos' The Swinging Co-Eds in 1972, and Torgny Wickman's Swedish Nymphet and Ernst Hofbauer's Secrets of Sweet Sixteen in 1973. Part of the decision to include these hardcore inserts no doubt stemmed from the fact that her fans at the time may have assumed an erotic aspect to her performance. But as the mute Madeleine (also called Frigga in the film), her ability to communicate her character's experiences without words is flawless. When her clumsy, pink-painted fingernails fumble with syringes and tourniquets, Madeleine's innocence is suffocating, and paralleled onscreen only by Natja Brunckhorst's performance as the title character of Uli Edel's Christiane F (1981). As Madeleine embarks upon her revenge, her silence becomes a weapon as she transforms into an enigmatic, determined vigilante. Far from disabled by her optical and vocal handicap and twice-a-day heroin habit, Lindberg makes it feasible that Madeleine is the kind of woman capable of sawing off her own shotgun (a powerful metaphor for castration). Dressed similarly to Meiko Kaji's rape-avenging protagonist in Female Prisoner #701. Scorpion (Shunya Ito, 1972, which shall be discussed further in Chapter Three), Lindberg's performance as rampaging Madeleine is as nuanced, desperate and sympathetic as that of her Japanese counterpart.

Bookended by the immaculate formal symmetry of an approaching and departing police car, the film's stylistic strengths make it a cohesive whole even more than Lindberg's remarkable performance. The use of slow motion in the scenes where Madeleine attacks her victims, combined with its strange, delay-heavy soundtrack, grant the sequences an almost ethereal quality. As her hair, trench coat and the blood of her victims float through the air, this depiction of Madeleine evokes references to the work of Pre-Raphaelite painters such as John Waterhouse. These painterly comparisons do not end here: the use of color is strategically deployed as a moral indicator throughout the film. Madeleine's yellow-orange dress as a child in the film's opening moments is the same hue as Tony's lounge suit and the shirt of the first client she kills; this simple visual clue poetically reiterates the unrelenting grip of those childhood events upon her adult life. The film's concluding moments where Madeleine murders Tony in a significantly medieval manner is a sumptuous visual experience that marks a tonal and aesthetic chasm between scenes like these and the hardcore pornographic inserts in the first half of the film. No matter how beautiful, well-constructed or intelligently performed other aspects of the film may be, these few strategically placed porn shots make the nasty intent of the movie inescapable. With its motives so explicitly embossed upon its sleeve, Thriller: A Cruel Picture is far more sadistic than even its nofrills title suggests.

Not all paracinematic rape-revenge films in the rape-revenge canon have met with critical hostility. Abel Ferrara's Ms. 45 stands out from many of its fellow titles because despite the panning it received upon its initial release, on the whole it has both fans and critics united in their view of it as one of the more ideologically sound offerings. Feminist film critic Barbara Creed, for example, praises Ferrara, as "the film carefully avoids the sensational; the attacks on Thana are not filmed in order to encourage the audience to identify with the rapist; nor are her acts of vengeance filmed so as to invite audience pleasure in scenes of blood and gore."42 Much of the reputation of Ms. 45 hinges upon the remarkable performance of Zoe Tamerlis, whose intelligent and compassionate regeneration of the mute "angel of vengeance" motif from Thriller: A Cruel Picture gives the film the gravitas absent in its predecessor due to its problematic inclusion of hardcore inserts.

Set in Ferrara's signature New York City locale, Ms. 45 opens in the fashion world, but unlike Lipstick, the glamour is almost instantly stripped away and the gritty industrial realities are exposed. Thana (Tamerlis), a young, mute textile worker, is shown standing behind sewing machines and ironing boards. Haunted by male in the workplace and on the is raped by a masked stranger (played by Abel Ferrara himself) on her way home from work, and then once again by a burglar when she arrives home to her apartment. Desperate, she fights her second assailant and kills him with an iron. Panicked and hallucinating more attacks, she cuts his body up, puts the pieces in her fridge and deposits in public rubbish bins one small garbage bag at a time. A young man who has been harassing women on the street notices Thana leaving a bag by a roadside. When he chases her down a dark alley to return it to her, she panics and shoots him. Deeply shaken, she returns home and vomits, but after the continuing harassment by her boss and strangers on the street, Thana becomes a self-defined vigilante, who roams the streets shooting men that seek to harass women. Her murder spree climaxes at her office Halloween party, where, dressed as a nun, she shoots the boss whose constant attentions have caused her such trauma, and then shoots every man at the party she can see. Finally, a female colleague stabs her from behind at the same time the police and her landlady discover her crimes.

Ms. 45 owes its success to its seamless application of its grander mythic and symbolic elements to its gritty, urban locale. For example, much has been made of Thana's psychoanalysis, "Thanatos" is the term describing the death instinct or drive toward destruction.43 Her muteness also compounds the mythic quality of her makes literal the taboo unspeakability of rape and personifies the inability to articulate the sheer scope of female oppression. But more specific to her own story, the texture of her silence structures the two "types" of Thana that dominates the film's action. For Thana the downtrodden, frightened victim, her silence represents her literal inability to speak up for herself. As femme fatale, however, Thana takes control, and her silence becomes a of a weakness, it enigmatically emphasizes the force of her physical presence.

The switch to these film noir aspects marks a distinct thematic as well as stylistic turn in Ms. 45. The night of Thana's rampage is dominated by Ferrara's hardboiled New York cityscape that perfectly suits her makeover (as well as providing a female counterpart to the New York City of Death Wish's Paul Kersey, as will be discussed in the next section). Costume becomes even more significant in the film's final scene, with the images of Thana as the iconic, gun-toting nun. Preparing herself for her final showdown with her lecherous boss (played by Albert Sinkys), Thana's subversion of Taxi Driver's (Martin Scorsese, 1976) famous "Are you looking at me?" sequence in front of her bedroom mirror before she leaves her house perfectly captures her psychological state. Her shooting spree (shot in slow another reference to Thriller: A Cruel Picture) falters slightly when she sees a man dressed in a wedding dress. Taken off guard, it is here that her friend and coworker Laurie (Darlene Stuto) is able to stab Thana from behind. Genuinely stunned that violence is not so clearly demarcated along gendered lines (in terms of both victims and perpetrators), Thana dies in shock. It is no coincidence that it is a man in drag and a woman wielding a crotch-level, phallic knife that cause her downfall: Thana's assumption of an "us vs. them" scenario collapses with tragic results at these ambiguous sexual identities.

Zoe Tamerlis in Ms. 45 (aka Angel of Vengeance, Abel Ferarra, 1980) [Navaron Films/Kobal Collection].

Or does it? The famous coda seems little more than a cute, tacked-on afterthought to raise the tone of the bleak action that has preceded it. Although it appeared that Thana had shot her landlady's little dog for being too nosy, not so: the final shot of the film shows him returned to his owner's door. But why name him Phil? Why not Spot? Rover? Fido? That the dog is given a human male name carries a powerful yet subtle suggestion that Thana's fears that men will return if they are not stopped may hold some merit. While Thana had successfully eradicated some dangerous men, the film implies in these final moments that even those that appear to have vanished have a way of returning. The return of Phil therefore marks Thana's failure while simultaneously justifying her fears. As the next section will discuss further, male aggression is not a solely female concern.

Masculinity and the Rape-Revenge Film

Straw Dogs, Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972), Sudden Impact (Clint Eastwood, 1983) and Death Wish (Michael Winner, 1974) in particular rate high on the list of well-known revenge films that feature sexual violence as a crucial element of their narrative. These films are best understood as exposing a specific subset of thematic concerns regarding the function and depiction of masculinity and male identity. While most rape-revenge films with male characters (be they victims or perpetrators) can be understood in some sense as engaging with ideas surrounding masculinity, some films obviously locate this as a greater source of fascination than others. For instance, while the original I Spit on Your Grave suggests a complex and competitive relationship between the group of men who gang rape Jennifer, it is her experience (of the horror and trauma of rape, and of the cathartic satisfaction of her revenge) that consistently remains the core of the film's interest. Straw Dogs also includes a group of men who attack a main female character, but it focuses primarily less on the relationship between the woman and her rapists than it does upon the relationship between these men and her husband. Put simply, in the female-centered rape-revenge films that are the primary source of interest to this book, the plight of a woman-in-a-man's-world is examined. But in this section, particular attention is paid to how rape-revenge articulates the experience of a man-in-a-man's world. These canonical rape-revenge films demonstrate that the narrative and thematic intersection of rape and revenge in these instances is just as complex as it is in female-centered rape-revenge.

As Clover explores in Men, Women, and Chain Saws, the city/country binary provides the thematic foundations for a number of rape-revenge films 44 Whether set in rural or urban spaces, films such as Straw Dogs, Deliverance and Death Wish are in large part about the tensions between these spaces and what they represent, and the way that this tension can effect the construction of masculinity. Straw Dogs is renowned as one of "Bloody Sam" Peckinpah's most notorious, violent and confronting films. Critical responses have generally agreed upon its supposed "caveman ethic of dominance by the strong."45 and identify in it "reactionary sexual politics" that contribute to "a masculinist backlash against an emergent feminism."46 For Clover, films such as Ms. 45 and the original I Spit on Your Grave mark a distinct shift away from Straw Dogs' misogyny.47 In his 2003 review of the DVD re-release of the film, Christopher Sharrett is scathing in his attack: "It is an unremittingly ugly work, a vision of a human zoo minus any of the sympathetic interest Peckinpah develops for the cruelest of characters in his major films."48 He continues: "Straw Dogs seems the least questioning of Peckinpah's films precisely due to its intellectualized approach to very simple, tawdry subject matter."49 Renowned for his personal leanings towards macho rebelliousness, Peckinpah himself espoused contradictory reflections on the film that at their worst did not help garner critical favor. Citing a remarkable interview in Playboy magazine, Stephen Prince quotes Peckinpah's notorious statement that "there are women and there are pussy.... [Amy] is pussy under the veneer of being a woman." In this same interview, Peckinpah goes so far as to state outright that Amy "asked for the rape."" But the film itself (and, notably, the experience of its lead actress) suggests that while there is certainly room to claim Straw Dogs as "tawdry," in no way whatsoever can it be considered "simple."

Filmed in St. Buryan on the Cornish peninsula, Straw Dogs is based on Gordon M. Williams' novel The Siege of Trencher's Farm (1969). As David Weddle has noted, the basic plot of the weakling-who-fights-back is hardly unique, and its filmic origins can be traced to ancestors as incongruous as Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd." Straw Dogs' adaptation of the trope is grimly serious, as American university academic David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) receives research funding and moves to a house on the Cornish coast left to his British wife Amy (Susan George) by her father. A group of local roughs dominate the town and intimidate David from the outset. David is particularly sensitive, as one of the men, Charlie Venner (Del Henny), is Amy's ex-boyfriend; although David teases her about it early in the film, it is clear that he sees it as a genuine threat to their relationship. Regardless, David hires the men to repair the roof of the garage. It is here that their behavior becomes increasingly threatening. Beginning with the theft of Amy's underwear, it rapidly grows in seriousness to the hanging of her cat in their bedroom wardrobe, then to Amy's brutal rape by Charlie and Norman Scutt (Ken Hutchison). Desperate to avoid conflict, David attempts to immerse himself in his research and ignores the increasingly violent reality that surrounds him. At the film's climax he is finally forced into action and decides to protect village idiot and suspected pedophile Henry Niles (David Warner) from the drunken vigilantism of the gang after Niles is involved in the disappearance of local girl Janice (Sally Thomsett). David vows to take a stand and protect his home and Niles against the men, revealing Amy's conflicted loyalties between Charlie and David, and exposing her to a violent outburst by Niles. Defeating the gang in a lengthy bloodbath, David leaves Amy and drives smiling into the night with Niles by his side.

While the film maintains a high level of violent tension throughout, it is unsurprising that the brutal rape scene has been the source of much critical concern. What begins as a clear-cut sexual assault by Amy's ex-lover morphs into something far different, as Amy's precarious relationship with both Charlie and David explodes onscreen in this strange and inescapably problematic sequence. David Andrews observes in Soft in the Middle: The Contemporary Softcore Feature in Its Contexts (2006) that semi-consensual rape in the cinema has a long history, stemming back to the 1920s, but it manifests most famously in this sequence. Semi-consensual rape on screen is far from the ideologically cut-and-dried scenario that he suggests some feminist views have dismissed as "patriarchal" and "inauthentic." Rather, "though such scenes do have ... regressive implications, they represent a salient idea of female desire and a significant (if ironic) phase in sexploitation's feminization."52 While there is certainly nothing "ironic" about Amy's holds Amy down to be sodomized by Scutt in a sequence whose brutality contains none of the ambiguity of her interaction with suggests Amy's assault by Charlie (for it is, at the beginning at least, undeniably a rape) functions on a plane far more complex than the simple pleasure/displeasure or consent/refusal binaries that often dominates discussion of the scene. Unlike the notable area of child sexual abuse in movies, it is significant that few female-centered raperevenge films function beyond the stranger-as-rapist paradigm, despite the fact that there is statistical evidence that victims commonly know their rapists.53 Amy's past sexual relationship with Charlie surely means that the politics of this encounter (as rape: non-consensual) is going to be heavily influenced by their past sexual contact (as lovers: consensual). It is both deplorable and deeply offensive to suggest that this by default results in semiconsensual rape: Charlie and Scutt are both rapists. But is there the possibility that by turning a rape into something she looks like she is enjoying, Amy is somehow attempting to reclaim some degree of power in the situation, or at least may be trying to protect herself from further violence (i.e., not just rape, but also from being hit and dragged along the ground by her hair)?

This opens up a hornet's nest of further ethical complication, but this question exposes the ease with which so many critics (and, as mentioned above, the director himself) so smoothly sought to blame Amy for her own rape. Claims that she was "asking for it"-Christopher Sharrett even goes so far as to call her "slurry""- ignores the differing relationships she has with the two men who rape her. Again, this is far from staking an uncomplicated or progressive claim for the sequence. As Linda Ruth Williams succinctly captures, the "scene is dense with outrageous implication," as the ultimate consequences of these distinctions are themselves of great concern. "The second scene is incredibly disturbing, not only because of what it is in itself, but also because what it implies about the earlier act," she observes. "If this is `bad' rape, then the first rape must have been `good.' In the Straw Dogs discourse, rape is not necessarily all depends on who's doing it to

Susan George's own experiences of filming Straw Dogs are vital in terms of Peckinpah's control over her body as an actress. As Sharrett observed, Straw Dogs was the film on which Peckinpah received the greatest creative freedom,56 and the film is almost unanimously discussed in terms of his (masculine) control (the rapes were added to the film and did not appear in the original novel). Weddle provides an enlightening version of the film's production background from George's perspective. In her own words, she admitted that she was frightened of shooting the rape scene because she was unclear what it would physically demand of her. According to Weddle, she told Peckinpah she had previously lied about being happy to do the rape scene "because I wanted to get the role and the rape scene was in the picture, and now I'm not sure if I can do it." Using language that reflects unsettling parallels with the power relations in the scene in question, Peckinpah replied, "Well, you'll have to do it! I'm gonna make you do it!"57 On the basis of this conversation, George quit the film but agreed to come back to the project after she convinced Peckinpah to shoot the scene on her terms. The implications of George's next comment to Peckinpah suggest that the astonishing level of violence retained in the final version was originally intended to be far more explicit:

I propose to do it [show the violence of the scene] through my eyes. If I'm the kind of actress that you think I am, and the kind of person that you think I am, I think I can tell you everything with my eyes. If you focus on my eyes and my body movements, I promise you I will lead you down the road you wish to be lead down. I will make you believe every bloody moment of it."

Peckinpah agreed to try it her way, and the scene took a week to shoot. From this perspective, George paradoxically gained control of a scene where she loses all rights to her own body as Amy, but reclaims some aspect as to how her body as an actress could be depicted in a rape scene. This anecdote does not neutralize any of the deeply embedded ideological difficulties within this sequence. It suggests, however, that if Amy lost something here, then Susan George's victory over Peckinpah's masculine control of her body as an actress may have reclaimed some slight ground in terms of how women are represented in the film.

At the intersection of Susan George and Amy's experience in Straw Dogs lies the fact that their very bodies become a site for masculine in the case of the rape sequence (a battle between Charlie and David for "possession") and with Peckinpah over how that rape scene should be shot. This is nowhere more explicit than in the film's promotional poster shown here: both beheaded and cut off from the waist down, an objectified Amy literally becomes the space where male-dominated conflict is enacted. The image of Amy's chest is the first shot of her in the film, and as Linda Ruth Williams notes, "so textbook an example of fragmented femininity ... seems almost parodic."59 This both the film and the Amy's function, stripping away her agency not only as rape survivor but also as abused wife (which, in the face of David's psychological cruelty, she most certainly is). That function is simple: Amy exposes the failings of the men in the film. This is less an establishing shot of a subject than it is of both the central object and terrain over which the masculine tensions of the film will be fought.

From this perspective, the film's status as rape-revenge is further complicated. As Xavier Mendik views it, the neatness of the trope makes its thematic intent clear: "The film's theme of a meek college professor reacting violently to the rape of his wife reveals an underlying ambivalence to female sexual liberation."60 But Amy never tells David about the rape; although it is perhaps obvious what has happened, his refusal to acknowledge it simply adds to the list of factors he is in denial about. The red herring is that Amy fires the last shot in the film, and the image of her with a gun aimed at Chris Cawsey (Jim Norton) instantly evokes rape-revenge traditions. Cawsey undoubtedly caused Amy extreme trauma throughout the film, as the first violation against her was when he stole her underpants, and his sadistic, high pitched laugh remains one of the movie's most chilling features. But her actual rapists were Charlie and Scutt; did David seek to avenge her rape against these two men? Amy never explicitly tells David she was raped, and he never acknowledges it (he, too, seems to suspect she was "asking for it"). It is therefore of note that it is Charlie who kills Scutt: bizarrely, one rapist avenges the rape by killing the other rapist. By this point, Amy has attempted to leave with Charlie, a factor that David (and many critics) consider proof of her lack of character and betrayal. But that David responds by pulling her hair in exactly the same way Charlie had during the rape sequence exposes that both men are Amy's perspective, Charlie may simply be the "best of a bad lot," and that this "best" has previously raped her exposes just how diabolically low her opinion of David is (not to mention how grim her plight in the world of Straw Dogs is more generally).

Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971) [ABC Pictures Corp./Cinerama Releasing/ Kobal Collection].

These rape-revenge elements are complicated even further. Firstly, the whole reason Scutt, Cawsey, Charlie and their gang go out to David and Amy's farm that fateful night is to get Henry Niles whom they believe has raped Janice. Again, we have rapists enacting vengeance against another suspected sexual offender. This paradox is made even more explicit in the film's final moments when David, after Amy's desertion of him when she tries to leave with Charlie, leaves her alone in a house full of corpses and instead drives almost romantically into the night with man whom, even leaving aside his accidental killing of Janice and the rumors of his pedophilia throughout the film, David sees attack Amy during the siege. This is David's terrifying victory, as the discovery of his masculinity frees him from the supposed shackles of women like Amy forever. After all of his repetitive accusations of Amy's childishness, he smiles as he is ultimately able to replace her with a manchild. The rape of a woman is not avenged in Straw Dogs, it is instead eradicated completely as an issue when David locks down into the safety of his newfound masculinity and an all-male world.

While Straw Dogs symbolically plays out its masculine dramas upon the site of femininity and "femaleness," Deliverance expands this gender relationship to a more metaphorical plane. The dominance of feminine bodies by masculine ones in this film deletes the necessity of central female characters altogether by gendering the site of the film's fictional Cahulawassee river in the American female. While Amy's body becomes a symbolic plane for Straw Dogs' masculine tensions to unfold, in Deliverance the metaphor is reversed: the setting itself becomes the violated "female" in question (the river is often referred to in the film as "she"). In this sense, one of the movie's most significant features is that there is, in fact, two feminized "victims" in the film, despite it having no main female characters whatsoever.' Without an "actual" woman to expose the binary distinctions between male and female, director John Boorman instead relies on a hierarchy of masculinity defined by the men it is "chubby," soft Bobby who is sodomized by the hillbilly mountain men is no coincidence. As Clover observes, "From such a man to an actual Bobby in Deliverance to Jennifer in I Spit on Your Grave-is but a short step."6Z In lieu of the absence of female bodies, new systems of gendered Others appear to rapidly take their place. "Rape is about inscribing macho-masculinity," notes Rikke Schubart on the film. "When women are not available, this is done on male bodies."63

Both Clover64 and Schubart65 acknowledge the influence of Deliverance upon the cycle of rape-revenge films of the 1970s and 1980s. While effectively an action film, the scope of its influence ranges well beyond generic boundaries. Despite being based on screenwriter James Dickey's 1970 novel of the same name, the film and book diverge in their treatments of violence and masculinity. In an interview with Michel Ciment, Boorman said:

Philosophically, we had little in common. Dickey's beliefs are not unlike Hemingway's, especially the idea that one attains manhood through some initiatory act of violence. For me, the contrary is true: violence doesn't make you a better person fact, it degrades you.66

Despite rejecting the very myth of masculinity that the book celebrates, Boorman confidently applied his authorial signature to the work, focusing as it does upon an individual's journey of self-discovery that - like many other Boorman in what is more often than not an equally isolating discovery.17

Deliverance tells the story of a disastrous canoe trip down one of the last untouched rivers in northern Georgia by four middle-class Atlanta businessmen before the area is flooded to become a dam. The men present different depictions of urban masculinity: Bobby (Ned Beatty) and Drew (Ronny Cox) are the least experienced outdoorsmen of the group, manifesting initially in Bobby's brashness and Drew's naivety. Lewis (Burt Reynolds) is the skilled veteran camper of the group, a man described by Ciment as "fascinated to a near-fascist degree of notions of survival and courage and physical culture."68 The film's central protagonist, Ed (Jon Voight), is somewhere between these having gone on trips with Lewis in the past, he finds it difficult at one point to shoot a deer, and struggles to accept Lewis' nihilistic view of urban living. After an initial tense meeting with "redneck" locals in the infamous "Dueling Banjos" sequence, the men begin their journey. Their adventure holiday takes a turn when Ed and Bobby step off their canoe to land to get their bearings, and they are confronted by two "mountain men" who sodomize Bobby at gunpoint. Before Ed is assaulted, Lewis and Drew arrive, and Lewis shoots Bobby's rapist with an arrow. The other man flees, and the four men debate their next step: Drew insists they go to the police and confess, but the others outvote him and they bury the corpse. Returning to the river, Drew mysteriously falls out of the canoe (the others assume he has been shot by the second, escaped mountain man as vengeance). In the confusion, both canoes overturn, and the men are thrown around the violent rapids. With Lewis badly injured, Ed takes control, and seeks and kills the man he believes has murdered Drew. The men sink both Drew's and the mountain man's corpses to the bottom of the river. After they return to civilization, the Sheriff (played by Dickey himself) is suspicious of their story but without further evidence he releases Bobby and Ed, while Lewis remains in the hospital. After what appears to be a permanent goodbye from Bobby, Ed returns home to Atlanta to his family but has a nightmare about a corpse rising from the bottom of the Cahulawassee River.

Bobby's rape is both one of Deliverance's most memorable scenes and one of the most iconic moments of American cinema from the 1970s in general. The scene itself features little sound outside of the hooting rapists, the rustling of leaves and twigs, and Bobby's tortured cries and forced "piggy" squeals; but in the popular memory it is inescapably haunted by the earlier "Dueling Banjos" musical motif. Establishing the tune as the informal hillbilly horror anthem from that point onwards, its positioning at the beginning of the film (and the remarkable sequence where Drew and the unnamed local play the song together) emphasizes the importance of class in the movie. The rape scene itself is difficult to comprehend outside of the distinction between urban/rich and country/poor. As Schubart observes, "It's poor men's power over rich men's bodies."69 For Clover, "City man may be rich, but he is also soft; and he is soft because he is rich. So soft that he is rapable."70 The rape of Bobby is therefore only one skirmish in an ongoing class war. The rapists are not named at all in the film, but in Dicky's script are called "Bearded Man" and "Tall Man," as their identities are located firmly within the masculinity that they wield so mercilessly over Bobby, and with which they threaten Ed. This distinction between Ed and Bobby's experience is crucial to the film's thematic deployment of rape: like the book and script, the film privileges Ed's witnessing of Bobby's rape (through point of view and reaction shots) much more than it does Bobby's subjective experience. James F. Beaton describes the shots of Bobby themselves as contrasting sharply with the film's overall realist tone, calling it "a melodrama of disembodied eyes, mouths, and faces, a grotesque abstraction of the event."71 This abstraction formally stems from how it appears not to Bobby or the rapists, but to Ed. He struggles not to look, yet he cannot keep his eyes away, and Bobby's rape is constructed from his perspective as a horrific blur. It is of note that after Drew's death, little (if any) time is spent on Bobby's trauma. Sally Robinson indicates that trauma after this point appears to manifest more in Lewis' body more than anyone else's: confronted with the violent feminization of a male body through the rape of Bobby (a possibility that goes directly against his dearly held beliefs about masculinity), Lewis' body appears to almost explode from the psychological trauma.72

Consequently, despite the narrative importance of the rape of Bobby to the film's action, it is not thematically central. In fact, the rape itself is one of the things that the men actively seek to hide. "The larger crisis the film explores has little to do with the rape," Robinson notes, as it "must be buried along with the male bodies that keep piling up in its wake."73 It does not appear to be the rape of Bobby that Ed consciously seeks to avenge; rather, his goal is simply one of survival. But even this is ambiguous: was the man Ed killed on the top of the cliff really the second assailant? Was Ed really shot? That these two questions are left open does allow the possibility that the vengeance is Ed's motive, albeit subconsciously-he wants to hit back and needs a reason. Even placing these ambiguities to the side, Deliverance still remains at its heart a rape-revenge film, one that merges the figurative with the literal. From this perspective, the rape of Bobby is considered an act of vengeance by the mountain men. As Clover suggests, "The chain does not begin with the mountain men's rape of Bobby in the forest; it begins with the city men's `rape' of the landscape, the visible destruction of the physical habitat of the mountain people."74 That this paradox lies at the heart of one of the most famous rape-revenge films of all times is as significant as it is shocking, and, as shall be discussed further in the final chapter of this book in particular, this is not the only instance where rape is deployed to avenge a rape. It is, however, one of the examples that expose the problematic mechanics of masculinity that seeks to privilege urban, middle-class white men by Othering women and the lower class through a language of sexual violence.

A similar binary between city/country lies at the heart of Death Wish. This distinction is again ideological. The tensions between these two spaces mirrors the tensions that define masculinity under threat, a threat that manifests through the rape of feminine (if not female) bodies. For reasons not wholly disconnected to director Michael Winner's own widely known rightleaning political beliefs, many contemporary considerations of Death Wish still share a view typified by Vincent Canby upon the film's release as "a birdbrained movie to cheer the hearts of the far right-wing." For Canby, it "takes a very dim view of New York City, particularly of its muggers who, according to this film, could be easily eliminated if every upright, middle-class, middle-aged citizen got himself a gun and used it at least three times a week."75 Like many rape-revenge films, much of these sorts of interpretations hinge upon notions of identification: whose story is this, and what does it being told from their perspective mean to the film's ideological position? These debates therefore center on how the main character, Paul Kersey, is constructed. So closely is actor Charles Bronson associated with the role of Kersey that even in academic treatments of the film, such as Travis Dumsday's "On Cheering Charles Bronson: The Ethics of Vigilantism" (2009), the character is referred to not only as "Charles Bronson's character," but also often at times just as "Charles Bronson."76 Bronson had what Charles Laughton once described as "the strongest face in the business,"77 and this hypermasculine image established a star persona of a tough man capable of violence only when pushed. Bronson had displayed these features earlier in Chato's Land (1972), another film Bronson and Winner worked on together that shared an interest in rape and revenge. It is Death Wish and its numerous sequels, however, that firmly established this image of Bronson in the contemporary popular consciousness.

Adapted from Brian Garfield's 1972 novel of the same name, Death Wish centers on liberal architect Kersey, whose worldview changes dramatically after his wife Joanne (Hope Lange) is murdered, and his daughter Carol (Kathleen Tolan) is raped and left catatonic after a home invasion by a group of muggers. Sent by his employer to Arizona for a change of scene after Joanne's funeral, Kersey befriends Ames (Stuart Margolin), who reminds him of the legacy of the American Western traditions so different to those of Kersey's New York, and buys him a gun as a gift. Kersey returns home, where an attempted mugging pushes him too far, and he establishes himself as the anonymous avenger the media dubs "The New York Vigilante." Deliberately baiting thugs solely to annihilate them, Kersey becomes a popular sensation that inspires others to fight back. Officials, however, are disturbed by the Vigilante's success in reducing the number of crimes because it appears to validate his tactics, and urge Detective Frank Ochoa (Vincent Gardenia) to eradicate the mysterious figure without martyring him. Ochoa discovers Kersey's identity and quietly relocates him to Chicago. The film's final shot suggests that Kersey's vigilante days may be far from over, and hints at the longevity of a franchise that would see another four installments between 1982 and 1994.

Death Wish was shot on location in New York City in the winter of 1974, and the bleakness of the primary urban location contrasts dramatically with the film's two idyllic, non-urban spaces (the tropical Hawaii at the film's opening, where Kersey and Joanne holiday, and rural Arizona). This tension speaks of a return to another kind of America for New Yorker Kersey, one that dominant readings of the film suggest is overtly regressive. For Canby, Death Wish "raises complex questions in order to offer bigoted, frivolous, oversimplified answers. "78 In Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Films (1988), Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner suggest the film predicted the shift in America from the liberalism of the 1960s to the conservatism defined by the reign of Ronald Reagan. They pay particular attention to the function of Ames, noting, "The vehicle of his [Kersey's] conversion is a Sunbelt rightist, the social type that would indeed take over from the liberals in the eighties as the dominant social policy voice in the country.79 As Xavier Mendik notes, from positions such as these, "Death Wish appeared to strike a cord with an increasingly militant and reactionary white, middle-class seventies America."80 In his article "Urban Legend: The 1970s Films of Michael Winner" (2002), Mendik emphasizes the importance of economics and class tensions to the film: one of the muggers tells Joanne before she is murdered that he "hates rich cunts," and Kersey's first attack is symbolically not with a gun, but with a sock full of coins. From this perspective, Mendik argues that the ambiguous ethical space that is supposed to distinguish Kersey from the street criminals he rallies distinction that right-wing readings of the film view as deliberately framed by economics and class. In this light, Death Wish may suggest that the only thing that makes Kersey a "hero" and not one of the thugs against whom he rallies is the fact that they are poor and he is rich. For Mendik, that Kersey is alienated from his social only at parties, but ultimately forced to leave his life in New York is the film's internal way of problematizing the ethical status of a protagonist whom most critics tend to read as an intended hero.

Winner himself has argued that the identification of Kersey as a hero is crucial to what he saw as misreadings of the film. Citing the mood at the time of the film's production as one heavily dominated by the disillusionment that accompanied Watergate and the Vietnam as he described it, "Camelot had changed into a Hieronymus Bosch maintained that the rules of identification (i.e.: that Kersey is presented without complication as the film's hero) had necessarily changed in this new America. He says:

It is certainly not intended as a fascist picture.... It was simply a story that said that society had reached this extraordinary point where it was so desperate for peace of mind and law and order that it would applaud a killer.... If you see ... a picture about a man who becomes a killer and society applauds him, it does not mean the filmmaker applauds him. We are saying that there are certain things this man does which strike a gut reaction to which you are sympathetic; but if you applaud him, you're obviously applauding the same sort of violence he's out to perpetuate himself.82

The ideological status of the film therefore hinges upon how the spectator is positioned in relation to the film's key actions, and this is nowhere clearer than in the scene where Joanne is murdered and Carol is raped. The sequence itself is diabolical in its not as explicit as many of the rape scenes discussed in this book, the painting of Carol's buttocks with red spray paint provokes a deeply visceral sense of shock and horror. The film makes literal the idea that female bodies are nothing but spaces for male expression, to be defaced with graffitilike on a brick wall. Carol's rape is shown primarily from Joanne's perspective, but as she dies only moments later, her maternal perspective is not privileged. Rather, both Joanne and the former's actual death and the latter's symbolic little more than narratively provide Kersey with a reason to seek vengeance.

The function of rape in Death Wish is solely to justify the intensity of this vengeance; this stands as solid fact, regardless from which side of the political divide one chooses to read the ethical validity of that vengeance. Like other Winner films that demonstrate a continuing interest in the intersection of rape and as Chato's Land and Dirty this instance the inclusion of rape is once again narrative rather than thematic. But both Death Wish itself and the critical discourse that surrounds it are of significance to an analysis of rape-revenge because of its melodrama of masculine morality, of how male bodies attempt (and perhaps fail) to "play out" distinctions between right and wrong, right and left, and hero and villain. If this is ambiguous in Death Wish, it is spelled out spectacularly in the opening scene of J. Lee Thompson's Death Wish IV The Crackdown (1987). Here, a woman walks to her car in a deserted parking lot and is attacked by three men. Paul Kersey interrupts the attempted rape, shoots two of the men and chases the third after he escapes. Finally cornering him, Kersey shoots and bends over the body of this third man and removes the stocking from his head to reveal the rapist's identity. Underneath the stocking, Kersey discovers his own face. Cutting to a shot of him waking up in a sweat, this sequence is revealed to be a nightmare that makes explicit Kersey's greatest fear: that the line that separates those capable of rape and murder and the self-appointed vigilantes who so violently and ruthlessly seek to avenge it is not as clear as he had assumed.

Sudden Impact (1983) shares Death Wish's focus upon the relationship between masculinity and the often-hazy distinctions between justice and vigilantism. Parallels between the two films were not uncommon at the time of Sudden Impact's release 83 (both films were widely considered part of the "right cycle" of films from this era). William Beard, however, observes that the heroic image of by "Dirty" Harry to a much more poetic, even mythic, level than Bronson's Kersey.84 Like Kersey, Callahan's now-iconic image of masculinity was linked to its star's intertextual persona. Returning Clint Eastwood to the screen after a seven-year break in the role of Dirty Harry, Sudden Impact is not only the one film in the series directed by Eastwood, but if also contained the line so famously associated both with Dirty Harry and Eastwood himself: "Go ahead, make my day." Ironically, the film proved to be the most financially successful of all the Dirty Harry titles,85 despite the fact that Eastwood had previously stated he would not return to the series86 (Sondra partner at the time and Sudden Impact suggested that his motives were purely financial after the lackluster box office performance of Honkytonk Man and Firefox the previous year87).

Structurally, Sudden Impact focuses upon two concurrent stories. The first follows conflicted policeman Callahan as he struggles to balance his idea of justice with those deemed acceptable within the parameters of the law; while the second concerns artist Jennifer Spencer (Locke), who seeks to find and kill those involved in the rape of her and her sister (who, like Death Wish's Carol, also became catatonic after the assault) ten years earlier. Callahan and Spencer's stories intersect when the former is punished for unruly behavior and sent from San Francisco to the fictional town of San Paulo to investigate the murder of George Wilburn (Michael Maurer), one of Spencer's victims. Initially ignorant of Spencer's involvement in his case, Callahan and Spencer establish a sexual relationship while each focuses on their missions. The film reaches its climax after Spencer has killed the majority of her and her sister's rapists, and is captured by Mick (Paul Drake), the remaining assailant and leader of the first rape, in the same amusement park where the initial assault took place. Spencer fights back, but Mick and his two lackeys restrain her and attempt to rape her again. Callahan rescues Spencer at the last minute, and Spencer believes Callahan will turn her over to the police. Instead, she is surprised when he frames the now-deceased Mick for her murders. With Spencer protected by Callahan's story, the film ends as the couple walk away from the amusement park together.

Considering Eastwood is one of the most revered living contemporary American directors today,88 revisiting reviews of Sudden Impact from the time of its release is an odd experience. While a box office success, critical responses were dismissive and often outwardly hostile, considering it as no more than what the Los Angeles Times' Kevin Thomas described as an "exploitation picture at its most nakedly manipulative."89 Again, Vincent Canby was no more complimentary, stating, "The screenplay is ridiculous, and Mr. Eastwood's direction of it is primitive"90; while for Gary Arnold of the Washington Post, it was "obviously cuckoo," as he attacked its "crackpot obviousness" and dismissed Callahan himself as no more than an "indomitable, reactionary fantasy figure."91 Peter Stack at the San Francisco Chronicle offered a rare take on the film at the time as something more sophisticated, noting in particular its black humor.92 Even with the benefit of hindsight, however, some elements of the film are still far from palatable. As Deborah Allison indicates, the character of Ray Parkins (Audrie J. Neenan) - a two-dimensionally vicious and evil lesbian who set up the rape of Spencer and her sister, her characterization spawned by "misogyny and homophobia"93- makes the film impossible to wholly rescue retrospectively. So extreme is the depiction of Parkins that Allison agrees with Stack, identifying a turn against the realism of the earlier Dirty Harry films and other crime films of the era towards a style more selfconsciously theatrical and postmodern.94

When approached in this manner, Callahan's deadpan machismo can be understood as competing than vampish female avenger. Sudden Impact pitches the two types of rape male-lead vengeance trope, where a man takes revenge as an agent for the female victim, and the female-lead vengeance trope, where a woman is the agent of her own against each other. The film's original script did not initially include Callahan, as Sudden Impact was intended as a star vehicle for Locke alone.95 Certainly the film's generous emphasis on her story retains strong elements of these origins, with some critics even christening her "Dirty Harriet."96 When these two models of rape-revenge are pitched against each other, a surface reading of the plot's skeleton suggests Callahan's version emerges victorious. After all of her tough girl posturing and successful annihilations, Spencer ultimately needs to be "rescued" by a male hero who arrives in the nick of time. But formally, the image of Callahan's arrival can be read very differently. When Callahan's silhouette is shown against the bright lights of the deserted amusement park, the iconic image of Dirty Harry and his absurdly phallic oversized gun is drenched in irony and ambiguity. While he is there to "rescue" Spencer, that he is coded so heavily as a film noir villain marked by such excessive masculinity in this shot articulates Spencer's predicament: she is still at the mercy of men (it was, after all, Callahan's decision to not report her to the police). This image in Sudden Impact thematically carries the same disturbing message contained within the opening scene of Death Wish IVfour years later: whether he is there to rape you or save you, a woman's safety is still in the hands of the man in black who comes out of the shadows. While the film is problematic in many respects (particularly in its depiction of Ray Parkins), Sudden Impact suggests in this single shot that there is only a thin line between the hypermasculinity defined by Callahan and Kersey, and the type of behavior they so self-righteously seek to eradicate.

Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry in Sudden Impact (Clint Eastwood, 1983) [Warner/Malpaso/Kobal Collection].

This section has focused upon the function and depiction of masculinity and how it relates thematically to rape and revenge in these four films. What has remained untouched thus far is how each of these examples refers in some way to the generic construction of the Western. Michel Ciment regards Deliverance as an "updated Western in which the director turns a number of American myths on their head."97 While Alan Casty considers Straw Dogs explicitly in how it re-adapts the structure and conventions of the Western but eradicates the "romantic dignity" of its predecessors.98 (Christopher Sharrett shared the basic approach, but diverged in his conclusion when he noted, "Straw Dogs is the commonest of Westerns."99) Bill Harding also views Death Wish as an updated Western"" a claim supported by the fact that iconic Western actor Henry Fonda turned down the script before Winner and Bronson became involved.101 Both Winner and Bronson had worked together previously on numerous projects, including notable of these is the raperevenge Western The relation to the Western is even more obvious in Sudden Impact. Eastwood, of course, had established his career with a range of Westerns as both an actor and director before the Dirty Harry films appeared, and his image as a readily identifiable Western protagonist undeniably influenced how audiences read Harry Callahan at the time of the film's release. The next chapter explores how generic structures such as the Western have accommodated the rape-revenge trope, and once again proposes that rather than presenting a unified treatment of rape, horror films, Westerns and other genres, the rape-revenge film offers a diverse and often contradictory vision of rape and revenge.

CHAPTER Two

The Rape-Revenge Film

Across Genres

Rape and revenge appear across a range of generic frameworks, and while the first chapter has sought to examine the most well-known rape-revenge films, the rest of this book will demonstrate that broad, diverse and often contradictory treatments of sexual violence exist well beyond this loosely-defined canon. This chapter explores both the diversity and potential complexity with which rape and revenge can appear in horror and the Western, as well as other genres where they may not necessarily be expected. For example, while by no means a rape-revenge film as such, Spike Jonze's art-house comedy Being john Malkovich (1999) illustrates the various ways that sex, violence and vengeance can intersect. Craig (John Cusack) locks his wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz) in a cage so he can "be John Malkovich" in order to have sex with Maxine (Catherine Keener). Maxine believes she is having sex with Lotte in Malkovich's body, when in fact Craig has used violence against Lotte to procure sexual penetration with Maxine. When Maxine discovers the truth, she and Lotte enact their revenge against Craig, and the film ends with the two women romantically united as Craig is punished. The women seek revenge against him as punishment for his decision to use violence to gain sexual penetration. Although certainly far from what is readily identifiable as a rape-revenge plot, this example suggests that rape and revenge may intersect and co-exist in film far more elastically.

The ubiquity of rape and revenge becomes even clearer when examining a number of perhaps equally surprising texts. For example, the full-length versions of Lady Gaga's music videos "Paparazzi" (Jonas Akerlund, 2009) and "Bad Romance" (Francis Lawrence, 2009) present the pop star in narratives where she avenges attempted rapes. For Gaga, the "Bad Romance" video is about the "tough female spirit,"' and in this clip she is captured by the Russian Mafia and auctioned off in a sexy routine to the highest bidder. Gaga approaches the buyer as he waits for her in bed, but it explodes into flames as she sings in the foreground. The video ends with her wearing a firework-shooting bra as she lies victoriously next to his burnt skeleton. "Paparazzi" opens as Gaga and her boyfriend (played by Alexander Skarsgard) make out on a balcony. When Gaga sees a photographer, she urges her boyfriend to stop but he does not (she realizes that he has set up the scenario and is in cahoots with the photographer). They struggle as her boyfriend continues to fondle her, and when she hits him he pushes her off the balcony. Recovering from her physical injuries, the music video concludes when Gaga poisons him and is arrested with great media fanfare. "Paparazzi" was followed in 2010 by the sequel video "Telephone" (also directed by Akerlund). It follows Gaga's time in j all and her subsequent escape with pop singer Beyonce, as the two women drive off in the "pussy wagon" from Quentin Tarantino's 2004 rape-revenge-tinged film Kill Bill Vol. 1(a film that engages with rape-revenge traditions in many ways, as will be discussed further in Chapter Four).

Once a sensitivity to the presence of rape-revenge structures begins to develop, even the antics of the Warner Bros. skunk Pepe Le Pew can be seen to regularly cross the line between seduction and assault. On most occasions, Penelope Pussycat clearly does not enjoy his sexual advances, squirming desperately when he holds her tightly, and running away. But there are a few instances where the tables are turned. In Little Beau Pepe (Chuck Jones, 1952), Le Pew joins the French Foreign legion in order to recover from an unspecified heartbreak. On duty, he neglects his post when he sees Penelope Pussycat and attempts to woo her. During his pursuit of the terrified cat (she is repulsed by his terrible odor), Le Pew reflects on what he considers the typical female no means yes" attitude to romantic contact: "You know, one of the mysteries of my life is why a woman runs away when all she really wish is to be captured." At the end of the cartoon, however, the situation has been reversed. In order to seduce her, Le Pew makes a concoction of exotic perfumes and douses himself in it, causing her to instantly fall in love with him. It is now Le Pew who is terrified and struggling, as she chases him across the desert. "Why is it whenever a man is capture by a woman," he asks rhetorically at the end, "all he wants to do is get away?" He also learns a similar lesson in how distressing unwanted and aggressive sexual attention can be in For Scentimental Reasons (Chuck Jones, 1949).

Even without a revenge component, filmic comedy rape may also appear as the source of incongruous hilarity. The most cursory survey offers a diverse range of titles that include rape or attempted rape in some way, including Revenge of the Nerds (Jeff Kanew, 1984), Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990), Sixteen Candles (John Hughes, 1984), and Switch (Blake Edwards, 1991).

A far more explicit intersection of rape-revenge and comedy can be seen in Michael Winner's darkly satirical Dirty Weekend. The film returned its director once again to the terrain of rape-revenge after Death Wish and Chato's Land. Dirty Weekend is based on Helen Zahavi's controversial novel of the same name, a book that garnered comparisons to Bret Easton Ellis' notorious American Psycho (1991) that was released in the same year. Winner co-wrote the script for this black comedy with Zahavi, and the film was as controversial as the novel when released (it was banned by the British censor on video for a number of years). After a series of humiliations at the hand of her uncaring and promiscuous boyfriend in London, mousy Bella (Lia Williams) moves to Brighton on the British seaside for a new beginning. Despite the superficial festivity of her new surrounds, Bella so many of her female rape-avenging sexual threat encircles her. A neighbor aggressively stalks her, and the policeman who comes to her assistance is equally as menacing. As the threats from her stalker become increasingly more disturbing, Bella awakens one morning and declares that she's "had enough." She visits a psychic who deliberately provokes her and, handing her a knife, tells her: "You hold the answer in your hand ... murderer or victim, take your pick." From this point onwards, the new femme fatale Bella takes control. She finds her prey is not difficult to locate, as her world is riddled with revolting, aggressive and violent men, some of whose excessive repulsiveness borders upon the comic (like Michael Cole's sadistic academic Norman, or David MacCallum's sleazy dentist Reggie). That it is not until late in the film that Bella is actually sexually assaulted seems neither here nor threat has been constant, and she makes it clear from the film's opening moments that it is only a matter of time before verbal threats take physical form.

There is nothing "funny" about Dirty Weekend or its subject matter, but the bleakly sarcastic tone of its narrator throughout the film culminates in a strangely detached, bitterly ironic victory as she leaves Brighton to continue her rampage against misogynists. Dirty Weekend is a corrupted fairy tale from the outset, beginning with the protagonist's voiceover declaring, "This is the story of Bella, who woke up one morning and realized she'd had enough." Narrating her own story in the third-person, Bella exists outside of herself, and the film suggests that she, too, watches herself go through the "motions" of rape-revenge along with the spectator. Feminist responses to the book were divided, but tended not to stray far from Elizabeth Wilson's dismissal of it as "repellent." The fact that Michael Winner directed the film tended to render its ideological status as an open-and-shut case (Winner, as she puts it, is "not exactly well-known for his feminist credentials"'). While the film is doubtlessly as exploitative as the book upon which it is based, and the director has a history of making rape-revenge films deemed "problematic" at best (in terms of their gender politics), there is, regardless, something refreshing about Lia Williams' performance as such a self-aware protagonist. The sarcastic knowingness of her voiceover implies that she is fully aware of the rape-revenge traditions that she now participates in. Whether audiences find this as amusing as Bella is open for debate, but there is no doubt that she herself finds it the source of great humor.

Lia Williams in Dirty Weekend (Michael Winner, 1992) [Michael Winner Ltd./ Scimitar Films/Kobal Collection].

Not all rape-revenge comedies are as bitter as Dirty Weekend, of course, as demonstrated in exploitation parodies like I Spit Chew on Your Grave (Chris Seaver, 2008) and Mother's Day (Lloyd Kauffman, 1980). Despite the seriousness of the subject matter, it is hard to not recognize the blatant attempts at bringing levity to both of these films: the humor in Mother's Day, for example, stems from the hyperactive viciousness of its "mother" figure, who provokes her hillbilly sons into their violent crimes against the film's female protagonists. Configuring the rape and revenge in direct relation to this controlling matriarch, one of these women murders "mother" in the movie's climax by suffocating her with a pair of giant inflatable breasts. Films such as these demonstrate how broadly rape-revenge has been applied to a range of exploitation sub-genres.

Rape and revenge are not uncommon in blaxploitation films, for example, although as Novotny Lawrence indicates, even this label must be understood as having cross-generic reach.' On its own, revenge is not an uncommon theme in blaxploitation, as demonstrated in titles such as Black Sister's Revenge (Jamaa Fanaka, 1976), JD's Revenge (Arthur Marks, 1976), Ghetto Revenge (Wendell J. Franklin, 1971) and Avenging Disco Godfather (J. Robert Wagoner, 1979). Examples such as Black Caesar (Larry Cohen, 1973) and Black Heat (Al Adamson, 1976) also illustrate how rape has been deployed in this context, while rape and revenge intersect most visibly in films like The Black Gestapo (Lee Frost, 1975) and Foxy Brown (Jack Hill, 1974). As Stephane Dunn observes, the union of blaxploitation and rape-revenge has a clear historical context, as "the tough, sexy, avenging black woman personified in Coffy and Foxy Brown emerged during a period that the B-grade rape and revenge films appeared amid the second-wave feminism of the 1970s."4

However, it is not only African American women who seek vengeance for rape in this context. Fred Williamson's Fight for Your Life (1977) plots its "races at war" intent clearly, as an African American family are terrorized by a group of escaped prisoners consisting of a Caucasian, Hispanic and Asian man. When his teenage daughter is raped, the father can take no more and exacts his violent and spectacular retribution. One of the more unusual blaxploitation revenge tales involving sexual violence is Soul Vengeance (Jamaa Fanaka, 1975). Here, an African American man survives a beating and attempted castration by white policemen and seeks revenge upon his release other a man with his penis. While these films are notable for their diversity, even in such outrageous examples as Soul Vengeance, it remains clear that sexual violence and rape is coded in specifically racial terms, becoming a "metaphor for racial power and relations."5

Grindhouse classics such as Black Alley Cats (Henning Schellerup, 1973) and Rape Squad (Robert Kelljan, 1974) feature another popular variation, the rape-avenging girl gang. In the latter, a group of women, unsatisfied with police treatment after they are assaulted by a serial rapist known as the "Jingle Bells Rapist" (named after the song he makes his victims sing during the attacks), band together to form an action group. Initially, the women seek legitimate avenues of resistance and establish a 24-hour rape counseling hotline, but they soon find more aggressive techniques are required, and they turn to vigilante tactics. The "Jingle Bells with his hockey mask, looks suspiciously like the cult horror figure Jason Voorhees as he appeared in Steve Miner's 1982 film Friday the 13th: Part III beaten to death at the end of the film after he attempts to assault the key five members of the "rape squad" for a second time.

The girl-gang avengestress motif continues in later films, including The Ladies Club (Janet Greek, 1986), Lethal Woman (Christian Marhnam, 1989), A Gun for Jennifer (Todd Morris, 1996) and WA. R: Women Against Rape (Raphael Nussbaum, 1987). Again focusing upon a group of rape survivors who band together in search ofjustice, The Ladies Club boasts a female director and is based on Betty Black and Casey Bishop's novel The Sisterhood (1977). As will be discussed further in Chapter Four, Baise-moi (Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh-Thi, 2000) has demonstrated more recently that female authorship does not necessarily result in an instantly progressive text. In fact, while Dirty Weekend's Bella appears bitterly amused by her relationship to rape-revenge traditions, The Ladies Club seems confused by them. If contradictory attitudes about rape can exist simultaneously, then this film in particular stands as a significant instance where diverse (even conflicting) notions can exist even within the same text. On a surface glance, the sympathetic and lengthy focus upon each of the women in the eponymous society and the film's stylistic construction suggests a female audience-focused TV movie. This contrasts sharply with the brutal and explicit scenes of both rape and revenge that are notably incompatible with the daytime drama the women kidnap known rapists off the street and surgically castrate them surely tips its hat to its more extreme predecessors, such as the original I Spit on Your Grave.

This generic confusion is even clearer in W.A.R: Women Against Rape, whose conscious slide towards the exploitative becomes apparent when considering its alternate title: Death Blow: A Cry for Justice. Again, this film seems conflicted between its female-centered legal drama, the focus on the ethical debates between the eponymous women over what is and is not appropriate action, and the excessive form that their retribution finally takes. That the serial rapist who assaulted many of the women is revealed at the film's conclusion to be one of the policemen assigned to investigating the case alone renders W.A.R: Women Against Rape as one of the more intriguing girl-gang-centered raperevenge films. If anything, this movie clearly articulates the connection between the literal violation victims suffer at the hands of rapists and the continuing symbolic violation received by an unsympathetic legal system.

While these two films in particular struggle with the tensions between the demands of mainstream and exploitation audiences, there are many more straightforward rape-revenge TV movies. The origins of these films coincide with their more famous cinematic counterparts, such as the original The Last House on the Left. As Maria Bevacqua has noted, "Beginning in 1972, movies, documentaries and specials produced for television increasingly focused on rape,"6 coinciding with the growth in public interest in feminist issues alongside the rise of second-wave feminism. In same year that Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Wilk Men Women and Rape achieved blockbuster screened the groundbreaking A Case of Rape, directed by Boris Sagal. Bewitched's Elizabeth Montgomery stars as Ellen, who is raped after a night school class. Deciding against reporting the crime to the police or even to her husband, she is soon raped again by the same man, and this time badly beaten. Reporting the second attack, the attention lavished in this movie upon the lack of sympathy of her husband, the police and the legal system in general is generous. As her lawyer tells her at one point, "Never try a rape case unless your victim is a 90-year-old nun with at least four stab wounds." A Case of Rape includes no revenge-coded he is found "not guilty" for Ellen's assaults and is shot during an attempted rape of another woman is presented as far from a victory for Ellen. To emphasize this point, the film ends with Ellen divorcing from her emotionally estranged husband. Two years later, another unlikely sitcom star appeared in a TV movie concerning rape, this time more explicitly concerned with rape and vengeance. Revenge for a Rape (Timothy Galfas, 1976) stars Robert Reed as an inept sheriff in this made-for-television Deliverance adaptation; Reed is more familiar to contemporary audiences for his role as Mike Brady in the zeitgeist-defining The Brady Bunch. Replacing Deliverance's four men with a heterosexual couple, the rape victim is female, and it is the man who acts as agent for her revenge. Ultimately, however, Revenge for a Rape lacks the complexity of Deliverance and is little more than a simplistic melodrama.

Rape-revenge TV movies were not confined to their supposed 1970s heyday,7 of course, with the '90s in particular featuring additions to the category such as Eye for an Eye (John Schlesinger, 1996), No One Could Protect Her (Larry Shaw, 1995) and The Rape of Dr. Willis (Lou Antonio, 1991). So popular was sexual violence as a motif in TV movies from this era that it had even been labeled the "season of rape."8 In Eye for an Eye, Sally Field stars as Karen McCann, whose happy family life is shattered when her teenage daughter is raped and murdered by Robert Doob (Kiefer Sutherland). With Doob released on a technicality, Karen becomes increasingly obsessed with Doob and stalks him; Doob begins to threaten Karen's surviving daughter. At the film's climax, Karen lures Doob into her house and kills him, and the police believe her story that she has acted in self-defense. The film ends with her not being punished for Doob's murder, although her husband is aware of her involvement in his death. Eye for an Eye depends heavily upon the performance of its central actress, but her star presence overshadows the thematic intensity of the film itself. Unlike Farrah Fawcett's performance in Extremities, which consciously feeds off her broader star personae, at no point here is Field's character able to effectively harness her star presence in the same way. The manner in which her pedestrian performance is executed renders Eye for an Eye a relatively conservative venture into rape-revenge terrain.

This is not to say that all rape-revenge films intending to appeal to a female audience are necessarily unchallenging. Another TV movie from this era, No One Could Protect Her, centers on Jessica (Joanna Kerns) and the emotional fallout she suffers after being raped by a home invader. Jessica struggles both with rape trauma itself and with an additional sense of neglect as her wellmeaning husband becomes increasingly determined to avenge her rape. His crusade, however, renders him absent to her, both literally and metaphorically. She does not want a vigilante as much as she wants a supportive, caring husband, and the film presents a sensitive portrayal of their relationship as much as it does the more sensational hunt and capture of the rapist himself.

No One Could Protect Her is not the only film seemingly designed with a female audience in mind worthy of note. While garnering passing mentions by both Carol J. Clover and Jacinda Read, Positive I.D. (Andy Anderson, 1986) is long overdue for recognition as one of the more intelligent and subtle deployments of the rape-revenge trope, and deserves a reputation equal to Ferrara's Ms. 45. Suburban housewife Julie (Stephanie Rascoe) is still deeply traumatized by a rape that occurred before the film began (the rape is never shown), and the opening scenes focus upon her pain and inability to return to a normal life with her devoted but frustrated husband, who is attracted to a female family friend. The film begins a year after her rapist has been put in jail, and focuses explicitly upon Julie's difficulties connecting emotionally with those around she one day by accident realizes that she can establish an entirely new identity. Thrilled that Julie is beginning to show some enthusiasm, her husband is unaware that she is building an elaborate new life as the sexy and sophisticated Bobbie King. It is not until "Bobbie" pulls the trigger on her rapist that the spectator is fully aware that her activities have been anything more than post-trauma catharsis: the viewer is excluded from her revenge strategy until after the fact.

The result of this is as simple as it is effective: Julie forces the spectator to understand her emotional process of trauma and recovery independently of her wish for vengeance. Julie's desire to be "someone else" is shown very clearly to be separate from her plan for vengeance, as she starts changing her identity before she hears her rapist is being released. This is made even more apparent at the film's conclusion, totally alienated from her adopts another disguise and leaves her old lives (as Julie and Bobbie) behind her. Positive I.D. is unusual (although not alone) in that it is a retrospective rape-revenge film: it is only exposed as a rape-revenge plot after the key acts of vengeance are executed. Until that moment, the ethical questions the film raises are solely to do with the details of Julie's attempts to rebuild her life reconstruct a post-rape identity. The sympathy and compassion for Julie's situation, combined with the fact that the revenge component itself is almost incidental when placed next to this complex emotional portrait, renders Positive I.D one of the more insightful (and underrated) efforts regarding rape trauma, identity and the search for female agency.

Rape-revenge appears in a range of other genres, such as thrillers (perhaps most famously in Kathryn Bigelow's 1990 film, Blue Steel) and a number of action films, including Sig Shaw's 1985 film Sudden Death (whose very title indicates the influence of Death Wish and Sudden Impact), High Kicks (Ruta K. Aras, 1993), Deadbeat (Harry Kerwin, 1977), the supernatural-action movie The Crow (Alex Proyas, 1994) and Robert Clouse's famous Enter the Dragon (which will be discussed in the next chapter). Not all rape-revenge action films concern male protagonists, as demonstrated by Kathy Long's appearance in The Stranger (Fritz Kiersch, 1995) and cult action star Cynthia Rothrock's Angel of Fury (David Worth, 1992). Science fiction movies such as Douglas Cammell's Demon Seed (1977), Inseminoid (Norman J. Warren, 1981) and Breeders (Tim Kincaid, 1986) are all based around sexual violence, and Ernest D. Farino's science fiction film Steel and Lace (1991) hinges on a strong raperevenge plot. Here, a successful young pianist, Gaily Morton (Clare Wren), is viciously gang raped by a group of yuppie real estate developers, lead by the corrupt Daniel Emerson (Michael Cerevis). When they are found not guilty at trial, a devastated Gaily commits suicide in front of her roboticist brother Albert (Bruce Davison) by throwing herself off the roof of a building. Five years after her death, Albert builds a cyborg "Gaily" and systematically sends her out to kill the rapists as he watches remotely in his lab via a camera he has installed in her. The courtroom artist from Gaily's trial, Alison (Stacy Haiduk), becomes interested in the murders, and her investigation leads her to the cyborg "Gaily," who (with traces of the real-life Gaily's personality becoming more dominant) is becoming increasingly unsure of her brother's orders and lured to the idea of Alison as a potential friend. When Albert asks the cyborg "Gaily" to kill Alison, she defies him. After the execution of Emerson on a rooftop when Albert overrides Gaily's personality, police surround Albert and the cyborg Gaily. Repeating the real Gaily's death, the cyborg Gaily commits suicide by throwing herself over the edge of the building, this time taking her brother with her.

While aspects of Steel and Lace are inescapably problematic (particularly its highly glamorized gang rape scene), the film features the curious incorporation of two types of rape-revenge film. It plays off the tension between a woman seeking to execute her own vengeance with the idea of a man exacting vengeance on the woman's behalf. But where Sudden Impact contrasts these two figures through the characters Harry Callahan and Jennifer Spencer, Steel and Lace combines that struggle within a single cyborg entity. It looks like it is Gaily who acts out the revenge, but it is cyborg "Gaily" acting under the orders of her brother. Consequently, Sudden Impact's battle for narrative supremacy between Spencer and Callahan in Steel and Lace becomes a battle over the body of Gaily herself in a Frankenstein-like tension between creator and creation.

Peter Lehman bases his discussion of Steel and Lace on its assumed male audience, specifically in regard to issues of male spectatorship demonstrated in Albert's watching of the murders committed by the cyborg Gaily.9 While Lehman is right to note the film's fascination with male spectatorship, it is with a great deal of self-aware dark humor that it makes literal the notion of female bodies as a conduit for male spectatorial pleasure. There are strong elements of black comedy in the film: the chest-propeller blades which the robotic Gaily uses to execute her first victim are as grimly absurd as the scene in Mother's Day where Mother is suffocated with giant inflatable breasts. But when Lehman states that the film's "narrative structure makes clear that the seeming female revenge takes place entirely in the service of male desire,"10 he does not fully acknowledge the fact that plot-wise the film focuses much more on Alison's investigation and Gaily's personality as it struggles in a synthetic body. Both the narrative propulsion and the film's spectacular and often absurd key action scenes rely on the two women much more than they do on the rapists or Albert. To focus only on Albert inflates his centrality and dismisses the core relationship between the film's two female characters, which is pivotal to its climax. There is also a deliberate ambiguity between the two versions of Gaily in the cyborg Gaily commits almost all of her murders in disguise, and it is of note that those disguises are not always necessarily female (one memorable moment shows a supposed male investigator growing breasts as "he" peels off his mask to reveal the cyborg Gaily underneath). Ultimately, the cyborg Gaily is deliberately constructed as a space where Gaily's personality and Gaily's physical form (symbolically controlled by her brother) battle for ownership. The body itself is thus for Albert a kind of perverse technological vengeance doll, and it is against this that Gaily struggles. For obvious reasons, Steel and Lace may not readily lend itself to a progressive reading, but to ignore its self-conscious black humor and dismiss the central female-driven narrative misses the fact that in the generic context of science fiction, rape-revenge is often ideologically less clear-cut than has previously been credited. Films such as Steel and Lace and those mentioned previously demonstrate the ease with which rape-revenge crosses generic boundaries beyond its assumed realm of horror and the Western.

Westerns and Rape-Revenge Film

As Read has observed, rape and revenge in the Western are not just "standard motifs ... they are intimately connected."" a claim supported by films ranging from The Bravados (Henry King, 1958), Chato's Land, For a Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone, 1965), Kid Vengeance (Joseph Manduke, 1977), Hannie Caulder (Burt Kennedy, 1971), Last Train from Gun Hill (John Sturges, 1959) and The Hunting Party (Don Medford, 1971), to name but a few. Rape and revenge also manifest in the Western in ways that exist well outside what is most instantly recognizable as a rape-revenge structure. For example, while rape-revenge assumes violence is sought to avenge a rape, in High Plains Drifter (Clint Eastwood, 1973) the film's protagonist rapes a woman as part of his revenge.12 Rape is an inescapable part of the Western environment, as demonstrated in a range of movies, including Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963) and The Outlaw Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood, 1976). The associations between rape and the American frontier in popular screen cultures have distinct literary traditions in the form of the nineteenth century captivity narrative, whose influence upon the Western cannot be underappreciated. These captivity narratives have also influenced contemporary rape narratives beyond this generic context, including the category more broadly.

The basic structure of the captivity narrative concerns the rescue of "helpless" maidens who have been kidnapped by "natives" at the last possible moment by a "hero." Commonly, this "hero" is rewarded through marriage. For James R. Lewis, the nineteenth century captivity narrative was intended to either entertain or titillate audiences, or to function as propaganda.13 Just as the function of rape shifted between entertainment and propagandist captivity narratives, so too did its representation. Those designed to entertain frequently contained "unconsummated threats" of rape, whereas "consummated rapes usually characterized propagandistic literature designed to evoke moral indignation."14 These narratives were primarily structured in terms of the relationship between the virtuous victim and the villain, and this frequently indicated the primary function of the narrative itself. For Lewis, the ethical articulation of heroes, victims and villains were a crucial part of how the entertainment-focused captivity narratives functioned; but in propagandist captivity narratives, the role of the hero was often deliberately less clear. "The motivation behind captivity propaganda is to involve the inspire the reader to take up the role of the heroic avenger," he states. As a consequence, this allowed

male readers of captivity literature [to identify] ... not only with the sexy violence of the hero, but that they also [though usually not consciously] participated imaginatively in the sexual violence of the hero's shadow self, the villain. The guilt aroused by relishing sexual sadistic fantasies could be subsequently purged when the rescuer slew the villain."

This tradition is examined in rape-revenge films that reference most notably, in the beginning of Death Wish IV The Crackdown and the ambiguous shot of Harry Callahan at the end of Sudden Impact, as discussed in the last chapter.

From variations such as King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933) to The Last of the Mohicans (Michael Mann, 1992) to Taxi Driver (Michael Scorsese, 1976), the legacy of captivity narratives in cinema is strong. Part of its adaptability is the constant reassessment of the ideologies that lay behind the structure, which suited perfectly the wave of revisionist Westerns from the 1960s and 1970s. For Elliot Gruner, modern captivity narratives seek to titillate as they mimic morality tales. Contemporary filmic instances of captivity, he suggests, reduce the impact of rape, as it is little more than a generic requirement of the captive's story:

Surviving rape or sexual assault is an essential trial which the female captive must face. Such moments of cinematic rape are so persistent that the rape of the female captive has become an assumption, an assumption that negates male responsibility for the crime since such a scene has come to be accepted as inevitable.16

From this perspective, the abduction, captivity and implied rape of Debbie (Natalie Wood) in John Ford's The Searchers (1956) drives the narrative, as it provides Ethan (John Wayne) and Martin (Jeffrey Hunter) a motive for the "search" of the film's title. The film's power lies in its ability to expose the redundancy of these male "searchers," mirroring threatened white masculinity in a period rocked by the Civil Rights movement. Barbara Mortimer suggests that The Searchers re-adapts the conventions of the captivity narrative to speak not of a distant past, but as a coded response to the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in 1954 that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.17

Linda Colley's observation that "captivity narratives have been persistent, protean, profusely distributed over time and often downright plebeian"18 manifests nowhere more distinctly than in the rape-revenge category. While Death Wish, Sudden Impact, Deliverance and Straw Dogs may most immediately demonstrate how closely rape-revenge and the Western sit more generally, the be it produced in an American or littered with references to captivity narratives. While some of these seem to enforce the racist assumptions of the captivity narrative, others appear to subvert them, demonstrating (again) that diverse and often-contradictory treatments and attitudes toward rape can exist at the same time. In terms of rape-revenge films set in the present day, they almost always present as a drama between Caucasians. Read has noted an absence of African American female victims and avengers,l9 while Philip Green has stated, "To my knowledge, there has never been a rape-revenge film in which the victim was black and the rapist(s) white. 1120 This may in part stem from the fact that "deliberate interracial rape" is uncommon: as one recent statistic suggests, "88 percent of victims are the same race as the perpetrator."21 This is not to say that interracial rape is totally absent in rape-revenge film, and even in the rare cases where this does as Descent (Talia Lugacy, 2007), Chaos (David DeFalco, 2005), A Time to Kill (Joel Schumacher, 1996), Fight for Your Life and Rape Squad-it is again worth emphasizing just how diverse are their budgets, intended audiences, production contexts, and (in particular) depictions of sexual violence.

Westerns are set most commonly in a historical past-tense, so while they sometimes function as symbolic metaphors for contemporary issues (such as in The Searchers), there is still some diversity in their treatments of race and rape. Chato's Land features a Native American's search for vengeance after white settlers rape his wife. In Blackjack (Gianfranco Baldanello, 1968), a gang hires a Native American man to rape and scalp the sister of the gang's leader, and the film follows the gang leader's retaliation. Richard C. Sarafian's The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing (1973) stars Burt Reynolds as a man on the run from the law after killing the man who raped and murdered his Native American wife. The Animals (Ron Joy, 1970) follows the story of a woman who is nursed back to health by an Apache chief after she is gang raped, and the chief assists in her search for vengeance. Even the adult film Sweet Savage (Ann Perry, 1979) plays with captivity narrative traditions in its focus upon the rape of a Native American girl as punishment for embarking upon a relationship with a white man, and her brother's search for revenge.

The influence of the captivity narrative and its treatment of race transcend the generic borders of the Western. The brazenly "plebeian" original version of I Spit on Your Grave references captivity narrative traditions; and as both Joe Bob Briggs22 and Clover note, "When we hear Johnny and his friends ... whooping in the forest outside Jennifer's house at night, we must recognize the trope of the restless natives."23 Upon closer analysis, I Spit on Your Grave responds to the four defining anxieties of the captivity narrative as outlined by Barbara Mortimer. It evokes "a primal fear of physical danger" in the threat of physical violence against Jennifer; the four rapists exhibit a clear and distinct "fear of unrepressed sexuality, especially female sexuality"; the men also inflict their violence upon Jennifer more to perform for each other, indicating "cultural doubt or self-questioning;" and the absence of a non-diegetic soundtrack combined with the minimal dialogue in the film speaks directly to an "anxiety of silence, a tension between what is said and not said."24 I Spit on Your Grave does not simply mimic the structure of the captivity narrative, but reconfigures it. From this perspective, Mortimer's description of how certain character types function within captivity narratives is crucial:

The hunter is ambiguous in that he inhabits a middle ground between the Indian's "world" (associated with the wilderness and uncultivated nature) and the white woman's "world" (associated with Christianity and civilization). In the captivity narrative, he must use this position between two opposing worlds on behalf of civilization, even though the latter will ultimately destroy the conditions of his own way of life. Thus, the hunter's importance lies in his role as a mediator between two opposing categories, "civilization" and "savagery."25

Zarchi's I Spit on Your Grave expands this scenario and exposes its flaws by making the hunter and victim one and the same in the figure of Jennifer. In doing so, the lines between "civilization" and "savagery" become murkier. With this allusion to traditional captivity narratives, I Spit on Your Gravenot dissimilarly to The Searchers, although an aesthetic and reputational chasm away from a redundancy in the structure, while at the same time acknowledging its influence.

In rape-revenge film, the sexual threat so often implicit to "captivity" is obviously joined by notions of vengeance. Again, in the Western there is a strong heritage of revenge, identified most influentially in Will Wright's foundational treatment of the genre's popular "vengeance plot." In Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (1975), Wright suggests that this particular Western trope had little box-office impact before 1949, and demonstrates a blurring of the ethical legibility of the classical plot that dominated the genre between 1931 and 1955. "Unlike the classical hero who joins society because of his strength and their weakness," he observes, "the vengeance hero leaves society because of his strength and their weakness."Z6 From his analysis of Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939), The Man from Laramie (Anthony Mann, 1955), One-Eyed jacks (Marlon Brando, 1961) and Nevada Smith (Henry Hathaway, 1966), Wright identifies a number of key features that typify this vengeance plot:

1. The hero is or was a member of society.

2. The villains do harm to the hero and to the society.

3. The society is unable to punish the villains.

4. The hero seeks vengeance.

5. The hero goes outside of society.

6. The hero fights the villains.

7. The hero defeats the villains.

8. The hero gives up his special status.

9. The hero enters society.27

This vengeance plot is marked by an ideological shift in the Western hero from the classical plot. In these films, "society is no longer dependent upon the hero for survival, and he is no longer directly involved with it," Wright observes. "Rather, he is directly involved with the villains through his desire for revenge."28

In a rape-revenge context, this is illustrated in The Bravados. The film follows Jim Douglas (Gregory Peck) on his mission to track down and execute the four men he believes raped and murdered his wife. Having been on their trail for six months, the film opens with Douglas' arrival in a town where the men, now captured by the law, are to be executed. He meets his religious exgirlfriend Josefa (Joan Collins) and soon discovers that the four prisoners have escaped from jail and taken local woman Emma (Kathleen Gallant) hostage. Douglas returns to his hunt, and the first man he finds is Alfonso (Lee Van Cleef), whom Douglas kills despite his victim's denial that he had ever seen Douglas' wife when shown her portrait. Soon thereafter, Douglas finds and kills a second man. The two surviving prisoners happen across the cabin of Douglas' neighbor, John (Gene Evans), whom they kill, and Bill (Stephen Boyd) rapes Emma. Douglas tracks Bill to Mexico, where again he shows him the portrait of his wife; like Alfonso, Bill also denies having seen her. Furious, Douglas kills him as well, and then pursues the last of the group, Lujan (Henry Silva). Lujan's wife knocks Douglas unconscious, and with Douglas now his prisoner, Lujan asks why they have been so viciously pursued. It is during this conversation that Douglas discovers the four men whom he so mercilessly hunted were, in fact, innocent of the rape and murder of his wife; the crimes were committed by his neighbor, John, whom the gang murdered earlier. Shattered by this realization, Douglas cries out "Oh God!" and returns to the church in town to confess. Reunited with both Josefa and with the Church, the joyous townsfolk celebrate the demise of the gang as Douglas realizes that his desire for vengeance blinded him to basic Christian morality.

While The Bravados ticks all of the boxes for Wright's Western vengeance plot, from a rape-revenge perspective it deviates in a number of important ways. Firstly, it is a clear reversal of what would later become a common motive for films like Death Wish and Sudden Impact, the male agent exacts his vengeance explicitly because the law is unsatisfactory. But in The Bravados, it is Douglas' attempts at justice that prove initially law plans to execute the gang after Douglas had spent six months trying to find and kill them himself. Secondly, the broader thematic message of the film actively undermines the self-righteousness of Douglas' moral agenda. That its protagonist is driven so aggressively to seek revenge blinds him to the basic issue of the men's guilt for his wife's rape and murder. But it is not only Douglas who neglects this essential fact: the spectators are forced to question their own ethical assumptions also. But revenge is still executed upon the film's rapists, albeit inadvertently: John is punished for his crimes against Douglas' wife, and Bill's suffering is emphasized so as to punish him for raping Emma. In contrast, his sick child and devoted wife, and the fact that he is the messenger of truth for presented as comparatively innocent. The film's opening credits are an unbroken close-up of Douglas' intense stare, and in hindsight refers to the "bravado" of the film's title: a foolhardy courage that leads to his misfired vigilantism. The spiritual revelation at the film's conclusion (one that foreshadows that of The Virgin Spring's Tore a few years later, as discussed in the previous chapter) therefore feels slightly toolittle-too-late. While a necessary part of Wright's vengeance plot, Douglas' return to society pales next to the thematic intensity of the fact that he was so completely off target in his search for vengeance in the first place.

Not all rape-revenge Westerns adhere so closely to Wright's vengeance plot. Read argues that Westerns with a female avenger reconfigure the relationship between rape and revenge as presented in rape-revenge films where a man acts as an agent for a violated woman. The latter tends to treat rape as a property crime between men. As Kate Millett describes it, "Traditionally rape has been viewed as an offense one male commits upon of abusing `his woman. 11121 For Susan Brownmiller, rape was a crime that one man committed against the "property" of another man, and the establishment of rape as a criminal offence therefore "entered the law through the back door."30 This manifests in the Western rape-revenge film (and rape-revenge films more generally) as a male avenger who responds to the "theft" (rape) of a man's "property" (woman). Most commonly, says Read, this is a wife or fiancee, but the diversity of these relationships adds to the potential variety of the trope. A brief survey offers a range of significant instances that support this diversity. Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang, 1952) concerns the rape of the protagonist's fiance, and films including The Bravados, His Name Was King (Giancarlo Romitelli, 1971), Cole justice (Carl Bartholomew, 1989) and Cut Throats Nine (Joaquin Luis Romero Marchent, 1972) involve the rapes of wives and girlfriends. Sisters are also popular victims, as demonstrated in examples like Blackjack, I Want Him Dead (Lo voglio morto, Paolo Bianchini, 1968), The Long Cavalcade of Vengeance (Lunga cavalcata della vendetta, Tanio Boccia, 1972) and Django Does Not Forgive (Mestizo, Julio Buchs, 1966).31 Even mothers are not spared, as in Death Rides a Horse (Da uoma a uomo, Giulio Petroni, 1967) and Kid Vengeance, where a young Leif Garrett avenges the rape and murder of his mother.

Read claims that second-wave feminism provided a new context for rape and revenge to be understood in the context of the Western; and in examples such as these, "rape is not a crime against women ... [but] a crime whose social resonance to a patriarchal society is symbolized through the villains' robbery."32 Just as other genres focused on women avenging their own rapes, so did similar patterns emerged in the Western.33 Read's analysis of this type of female-centered Western rape-revenge film focuses on Hannie Caulder and Handgun (Tony Garnett, 1983), and considers how the shift to a femalecentered vengeance narrative responds to Wright's vengeance plot. For Read, these films suggest a shift from a male vs. female binary, to a more conceptual feminine/private vs. masculine/public one; and "these films engage with and attempt to make sense of some of the more sophisticated and complex debates and oppositions put on the agenda by feminism" during this period.34

Female-centered rape-revenge Westerns superficially assume a rejection of women as male property. Women are not objects to be fought over, but rather active agents seeking to right a wrong committed against them. The supposed autonomy of Hannie Caulder's title character is suggested through her dress alone, as she spends much of the first part of the film in a poncho and fedora highly reminiscent of Clint Eastwood's loner protagonist in A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964).35 Hannie (Raquel Welch) is raped and her husband murdered by the Clemens Brothers (played by Ernest Borgnine, Jack Elam and Strother Martin), who happen upon their remote home after a failed robbery. Shattered, Hannie meets bounty hunter Luther Price (Robert Culp), who is sympathetic to her situation and teaches her the skills necessary for her revenge. She develops romantic feelings towards Price during her training, and the Clemens Brothers continue their often comically inept criminal endeavors. Despite Price's ethical protestations, Hannie insists on carrying out her vengeance, and the Clemens Brothers kill Price when he attempts to hand them over to the sheriff before Hannie can locate them. With her desire for revenge now even stronger, she confronts one brother in a whorehouse and another in a perfume shop, and swiftly executes them. Hannie tracks the final brother to a prison, but her skills fail her. She is saved at the last moment by a mysterious man in black who had appeared earlier in the film, and he shoots the final rapist dead. The film's final shot shows Hannie riding back to town with the last corpse alongside the mysterious man, implying that she is now a bounty hunter herself, and suggesting a future romantic involvement with the stranger.

Raquel Welch and Robert Culp in Hannie Caulder (Burt Kennedy, 1971) [Paramount/Kobal Collection].

While placing a woman at the center of a Western rape-narrative may suggest a step forward in its inherent rejection of the "woman as male property" tradition, Hannie Caulder as a whole forbids such a simplistic reading. On the one hand, Hannie succeeds in gaining her revenge without losing her Read notes, Hannie does not need to choose between a male (aggressor) and female (victim) identity, but rather she renegotiates gender difference by reprogramming notions of femininity itself to suit her On the other hand, this model of femininity is hypersexualized, and the very presence of superstar Welch herself (who spends much of her onscreen time half-naked) makes the film's desire to titillate inescapable. Even more problematic is the emphasis throughout the film upon the comic and bumbling ineptness of the Clemens Brothers. Verging frequently on slapstick, they are not presented as evil or dangerous, despite their violent assault of Hannie and the murder of her husband. In the pursuit of her vengeance, Hannie is therefore not required to demonstrate skill or strength as such, but merely to prove that she is not as hopeless as they are. Read notes that the only places where Hannie is successful in her attempts to kill the Clemens Brothers is in spaces coded as perfume shop and a "heterosexual femininity is traditionally reproduced and transformed."37 Beyond these spaces, men are still a needed Price to train her, and she needed the mysterious man in black to save her at the film's climax.

For Read, female-centered Western rape-revenge films such as Hannie Caulder and Handgun support her broader argument that the rape-revenge narrative structure seeks to articulate the tensions between feminism and femininity. While set in contemporary urban Texas, her selection of Handgun as her second case study illustrates this point well. As she indicates, the film explicitly relies upon Western mythology and character types.38 Issues of genre aside, Handgun is a remarkable film for a variety of reasons, first and foremost as it concerns a date rape. In perhaps a surprising number of rape-revenge films, rapists are commonly either strangers or distant acquaintances. As Lisa M. Cuklanz has noted, in screen fictions "date and acquaintance rape will never lend themselves to the moral clarity of violent stranger rape is clearly non-consensual [whereas] date and acquaintance rape are more ambiguous, especially if weapons and physical violence are not involved."39

Handgun follows Kathleen (Karen Young), who has moved to Texas from the East to teach in a high school. At a party she meets lawyer Larry (Clayton Day), a gun-collector with a roving eye and a penchant for Westerns. The two begin a tentative relationship, but after-dinner drinks one evening turn into a refused sexual advance, and Larry rapes Kathleen at gunpoint. Lying in bed next to the frightened and devastated Kathleen, Larry embarks upon terrifying, intimate chatter completely inappropriate to the situation. The audacity with which he begins to smoothly psychoanalyze what he perceives as her frigidity demonstrates just how dangerously unhinged he is. With little help from the police, her lawyer and a priest (who tells her to forgive and pray for her rapist's soul), Kathleen cuts her long hair short and joins Larry's gun club. She spends a large portion of the film developing her firearm skills in front of an increasingly nervous Larry. At the film's climax, Kathleen lures Larry out to the deserted gun club at night, where she shoots him with a tranquilizer, then dumps his body in front of the courthouse. Showing him humiliated and humbled in the hospital, the film ends as Kathleen returns to school, smiling and victorious.

Kathleen's story is rich with references to the Western. The high school musical performance of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers that opens the film acknowledges the heritage of rape in frontier mythology, and at one point she even asks Larry explicitly if he sees himself as John Wayne or Alan Ladd. She is a woman who has been forced to take up a role in what the film suggests is specifically masculine terrain. This is emphasized in the lengthy sequences of Kathleen's training under the watchful eye of an all-male peer group; and what in many films would be swiftly communicated in a rapid-cut montage sequence here takes up a large amount of screen time. The matter-of-fact nature of both her approach to training and her trainer's approach to her reiterates the shift from feminine to masculine. The final image of Kathleen in the film marks a return to a new kind of femininity that she has negotiated on her own terms.

Despite Handgun's obvious engagement with the Western, there are other female-centered Westerns concerning rape and revenge that more immediately encourage comparisons with Hannie Caulder. In 1976, Lina Wertmuller and Piero Cristofani co-directed the spaghetti Western The Belle Starr Story under the shared alias of Nathan Wich. This was an adaptation of the real-life female outlaw's life story Belle Star (Irving Cummings, 1941), CourtMartial (George B. Seitz, 1928), Belle Star's Daughter (Lesley Selander, 1946) and Montana Belle (Allan Dwan, 1952) -showed little interest in historical accuracy. The Belle Star Story opens during a poker game where Belle (Elsa Martinelli), dressed in men's clothing, plays and drinks at a table of men in a saloon. The enigmatic bandit Blackie (George Eastman) takes Belle on oneon-one, and when he asks her to use her own body as the stakes, she throws the game and ends up alone with him in a bedroom. Even from these early stages, their relationship is volatile and passionate. Their first encounter darts between intense passion and violence on both their parts, and Belle has flashbacks to images of sexual violence throughout. Telling Blackie that the only man who ever tried to have sex with her is now dead, Belle explains to Blackie through flashbacks how her reputation as an outlaw began. a man called Cole in Missouri who was a lost childhood friend. Teaching her how to shoot and galvanizing what Belle saw as a solid friendship, the two form a gang and undertake to steal horses. Belle's excitement at the news that her Uncle Jonathan had arranged a marriage fades at the discovery that the man is old and ugly, and the marriage was only to assist her uncle's political career. She runs away to stay with Cole, but soon hears that her uncle had raped her servant Rappica and used his position to set her up to be hanged. Belle takes Cole's gun to save Rappica and murders her uncle. On her return, Cole is furious that he was left without a weapon, and he attempts to rape time, it is Rappica who rescues Belle. The second half of the film returns to the present, where Belle and Rappica become involved in a jewel heist, and Belle's relationship with Blackie becomes increasingly hostile. Although seemingly now enemies, Belle saves Blackie from being tortured, and at the end of the film the couple agree that their love-hate relationship "will always be like this." Rape and revenge are key elements of The Belle Starr Story that actively pertain to Belle's struggle for autonomy in an overwhelmingly violent, male-dominated world. That an on-again-offagain relationship with the volatile Blackie is the best the film can do to reach a romantic conclusion highlights how damaged Belle is in terms of her relationships with misogynistic and aggressive men.

Al Adamson's Jessi's Girls (1975) is also readily identifiable as a Western in terms of its surface iconography, and features not one but four women at the core of this female-centered rape-revenge story. Director Adamson is a familiar name to trash film fans, and was a prolific director during the 1960s and 1970s when he produced low-budget movies, predominantly in the horror genre. Despite featuring his signature high dose of nudity and sex, Jessi's Girls is a useful point of comparison to Hannie whose mainstream success it shamelessly seeks to a variety of reasons, particularly in regard to its treatment of female agency. The film opens on a happy young Mormon couple, Jessica (Sondra Currie) and Seth (Rigg Kennedy), in their covered wagon as they relocate from Utah to Arizona. They are hijacked by a group of five men who murder Seth and rape Jessica. Believing she is dead, they leave the traumatized woman to heal her wounds and bury her husband. An elderly man called Rufe (Rod Cameron) takes Jessica into his house, nurses her back to health and teaches her how to shoot. Deciding upon revenge, and knowing she needs assistance in her mission of revenge, Jessica intercepts a wagon carrying three female prisoners being transported for trial, and the women form a gang. From here, the film focuses upon the politics between the women as they support the now masculinely-dressed "Jessi" in her search for vengeance. The film's exploitative intent is impossible to escape, and much of the movie hinges upon softcore sex scenes (including an explicit and ugly gang rape scene) and Russ Meyer-style girl-fights. But unlike Hannie, Jessi was at least able to kill her rapists outside space marked as specifically feminine, and she did not need male assistance to do so.

The all-girl Western perhaps reached the peak of its public visibility in the 1990s with Jonathan Kaplan's Bad Girls (1994), a film about a group of prostitutes who team up to avenge a range of gender-based injustices, including attempted rape. Kaplan did not receive the same accolades he did with The Accused only a few years earlier, despite returning to the familiar terrain of gender and violence. Bad Girls is marked by a radical shift not only in generic focus, but also in its campy tone. The exploitative and graphic nature of Jessi's Girls make it one of the nastier female-centered rape-revenge Westerns, and while only brief, its rape scene is so violent that it draws comparisons to the much lengthier sequence in the original I Spit on Your Grave. But next to the range of texts discussed in this section, at the very least it again supports the claim that a broad range of attitudes about rape can co-exist in film, even within the generic confines of the Western. The same is also true of the horror film.

Horror and Rape-Revenge Film

The assumption that movies depicting violent and graphic scenes of rape belong to the horror genre makes sense in terms of semantics alone: rape is horrifying, it is horrible. It is therefore unsurprising that films containing graphic depictions of rape encourage a generic approach, if only in order to quarantine such conceptually difficult material in an attempt to isolate it as a dark curiosity or a monstrous abnormality. As Read has convincingly has been illustrated in this chapter thus consider rape-revenge only as a subgenre of horror risks misidentifying its diversity and broader cultural significance. At the same time, however, to dismiss horror altogether because of this ignores what is an undoubtedly important element of rape-revenge, one well deserving of critical investigation. Horror cinema is useful to an analysis of rape-revenge film if only because of horror's particular treatment of the body. Linda Badley notes that that "horror's language is somatic, communicating on a preliterate, subconscious level."40 Horror predominantly occurs through, on and around bodily spaces, and is often predicated upon bodily harm (or, at least, the threat of bodily harm). Many writers, including Badley, Angela Ndalianis and Linda Williams, agree that horror is concerned as much with a physical sensory response from the audience as it is with exhibiting its drama through filmic bodies in crisis. This centrality of these of the audience as much as those represented on the the performative, staged aspects of the cinema (from both sides of the proscenium). As Clover indicates, the spectator is often highly aware of this synthetic aspect when watching these movies: "The `art' of the horror film, like the `art' of pornography, is to a very large extent the art of rendition or performance, and it is understood as such by the competent audience."" The frequent and excessive focus in the horror film upon visceral bodies emphasizes its defining generic sense of the theatrical and the fantastic, and a heightened awareness of physicality both on the screen and within the spectator themselves.

Williams has argued that post-Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), horror has been riddled with "sexually disturbed but entirely human monsters."42 In this sense, it is little surprise that the genre's sexual predators who most immediately attract critical attention are those with a psychological make-up most closely resembling "real-life" perpetrators. While literal rape is not rare in demonstrated by its presence in texts ranging from Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980) to Hollow Man (Paul Verhoeven, 2000)-its metaphorical presence is even more expansive. Most immediately, the ubiquity of symbolic rape in horror is critically understood through the phallic nature of the knife, a weapon frequently employed in slasher films in particular. For Clover, "Knives ... are personal, extensions of the body that bring attacker and attacked into primitive, animalistic embrace."43 This symbolic relationship between knife and phallus predates the psychoanalytic approach deployed by Clover and many other feminist film critics in their treatment of horror. Diane Wolfthal identifies a historical precedence, as "the sword and dagger as symbol for the male sexual organ was a long established tradition in literature and art."44 From this perspective, films including Psycho, Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960) and Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) can be situated in critical debates about rape and horror, as the violence in these examples can be understood as violent and penetrative in a more general sense.

This section will consider both supernatural horror and examples grounded in a less fantastic realm. Of the latter category, the most notorious examples today still surely include Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left, which, while itself an adaptation of Bergman's The Virgin Spring, has spawned a number of explicit and implicit remakes. As will be discussed further, despite what is often a clear attempt to profit from the success of Craven's film, these Last House knock-offs demonstrate that rape can be treated in a variety of ways even across films that share similar plot elements. Although director Meir Zarchi himself considers I Spit on Your Grave less a horror film than "an extreme dramatic thriller."45 it is, regardless, another notorious rape-revenge horror film that shares The Last House on the Left's ultra violent grindhouse aesthetic. It, too, has imitators within the horror genre. While Naked Vengeance (Cirio H. Santiago, 1985) begins by establishing a diegesis not wholly dissimilar to Death Wish and Ms. 45, Carla's (Deborah Tranelli) revenge includes an underwater castration and a motorboat sequence that acknowledges the influence of I Spit on Your Grave. More overt references can be seen in the titles of films such as I'll Kill You ... I'll Bury You ... I'll Spit on Your Grave, Too (Thomas R. Koba, 2000), I Spit on Your Corpse, I Piss on Your Grave (Eric Stanze, 2001) and the previously mentioned rape-revenge parody, I Spit Chew on Your Grave. The most recent addition to this list is Stephen R. Monroe's remake of I Spit on Your Grave, a film that shall be discussed further in Chapter Four.

Donald Farmer's unauthorized sequel to I Spit on Your Grave was released in 1992 under a variety of names, including Savage Vengeance, I Will Dance on Your Grave, I Will Dance on Your Grave: Savage Vengeance and I Spit on Your Grave 2: Savage Vengeance. The inclusion of Camille Keaton appears to be the main connection between the two projects, although that she appears under an alias46 supports rumors that her involvement with the project was a far from positive experience. The first shot of the film makes its intended relationship to the first movie explicit, as Keaton's called Jen shown in profile driving in her car to the countryside, mirroring the opening shots from the original. In what appears to be a reconstruction of the events in the earlier film, she is gang raped by four men. Jumping to five years later, a law professor explains to his class that Jennifer was found not guilty of their murders, and was studying law in that very same class. Annoyed at the public disclosure of her past, she and her friend Sam (Linda Lyer) drive to the countryside, where Sam is raped and murdered, and Jennifer is raped. Again, Jennifer seeks revenge as she tracks down each of the men involved and executes them.

Despite its surface claim of an association with the original I Spit on Your Grave, Savage Vengeance deviates significantly in a number of ways. The most obvious of these are stylistic issues. In the opening rape scene, for example, while attempting to reconstruct the rape in the earlier film, the use of an intense melodramatic musical score and the manner in which it cuts between Jennifer's rape and shots of a nearby waterfall imply an attempt at some kind of artistry notably absent from Zarchi's film. Even the rape itself is toned down substantially in its intensity, duration and explicitness, and Jennifer clearly has her jeans fully done up throughout the attack. Apart from this opening scene, the film merges consequent rapes with knife attacks, thus allowing ample scope for the type of gore more typical of the slasher subgenre. In many ways, Savage Vengeance more closely resembles a slasher film than a rape-revenge horror movie.

This shift from the rape-revenge ultra violence of the original versions of The Last House on the Left and I Spit on Your Grave towards a slasher aesthetic can also be identified in Demented (Arthur Jeffreys, 1980). The film begins with the violent gang rape of Linda (Sallee Elyse). Despite the fact her rapists are imprisoned, Linda has ongoing hallucinations of men invading her home and attacking her. Compounding her situation is her unfaithful and increasingly hostile husband, Matt (Harry Reems, under the alias Bruce Gilchrist). While earlier in the film it is clear that Linda has imagined the home invaders, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell what is real and what is imagined. When four local teens break in and one attempts to rape Linda, she snaps and murders him with a meat cleaver. She then dresses in sexy lingerie and one by one kills the remaining one and even castrating another with piano wire. It is only when her husband returns from an evening with his mistress to tell Linda he is leaving her that it becomes clear the teen (and Linda's revenge) were not imaginary. The final moments of the film show him uncovering the bed sheets to discover a corpse, as he turns to find Linda coming at him with the meat cleaver.

Demented wears its slasher film intent on its the rapist teens all wear Halloween masks (one even says "trick or treat"), combined with the construction of each killing as a hyper-stylized, elaborate murder vignette, make this abundantly clear. The rape-revenge elements are therefore troubling, as the "demented" of the title obviously refers to Linda herself, who is presented throughout the film as alternating between clingy, hysterical, shrill, seductive, and murderous.47 Openly disinterested in her trauma beyond how it propels her transformation into a slasher-style killer, the film's emphasis upon its gore shots again highlight its true sub-generic allegiance. However, even within this gray area between rape-revenge and slasher horror (pertaining to non-symbolic variants, of course), there is evidence to suggest that diverse notions and treatments of sexual violence can exist at the same time in the rape-revenge film. In the case of The Last House on the Left's influence in particular, the scope for differing treatments of rape even in examples sharing a similar plot is both broad and fascinating.

Last Houses on the Left (and Right)

The influence of the original The Last House on the Left is illustrated nowhere more obviously than in the vast number of films whose names so clearly seek to imitate it. While the title of Wes Craven's film itself may owe a debt to John Sturges' rape-revenge Western Last Train from Gun Hill (1959), movies such as Last House in the Woods (Gabriele Albanesi, 2006) and Last House on Hell Street (Robin Garrels and John Specht, 2002) are just two recent examples that demonstrate the longevity of the original's notoriety. During the 1970s in particular, sexually violent exploitation film from around the world was often re-branded with Last House-sounding titles in the United States in order to profit upon the theatrical success of Craven's movie. Mario Bava's Twitch of the Death Nerve (1971) was re-released in the United States as The Last House on the Left, Part II; Aldo Lado's Night Train Murders (1975) was released at different stages as Second House on the Left, The New House on the Left and Last Stop on the Night Train, the Turkish film Ugly World ((:irkin dunya, Osman F. Seden, 1974) was released as Last House in Istanbul; Enzo G. Castellari's Sensitivita (1979) was released as Last House Near the Lake; Death Weekend (William Fruet, 1976) was released as Last House on the Lake and Pasqueale Festa Campanile's Hitch Hike (Autostop rosso sangue, 1977) was at one point released as Hitchhike: Last House on the Left (this latter film even starred David Hess). Other as Roger Watkins' Last House on Dead End Street (1977)-were U.S. productions that deliberately employed titles mimicking Craven's title. There were even whispers at one stage of an official sequel to the 1972 The Last House on the Left, rumored to star David Hess again and to be directed by Danny Steinman (who would go on to make the rape-revenge film Savage Streets with Linda Blair in 1984).

One of the first manifestations of The Last House on the Left's influence is the low-budget exploitation film Wrong Way (Ray Williams, 1972). To those unfamiliar with grindhouse aesthetics, The Last House on the Left may appear to be as crude as cinema production can get, but when compared to Wrong Way it demonstrates moments of genuine artistry. The closest aesthetic (and perhaps tonal) point of comparison to Wrong Way is Roberta and Michael Findlay's unfinished film The Slaughter, which, with the addition of an infamous coda by Simon Nuchturn in 1976 became Snuff, a film that reached international notoriety through the "Video Nasties" scandal in the U.K., as well as being central to anti-pornography feminist discourse during the 1970s in the United States. If the rape and revenge depicted in the original versions of The Last House on the Left and I Spit on Your Grave have been critically deemed to be more complex than its raw production values suggest, Wrong Way demonstrates that this is by no means the norm. While it spends ample time on the depiction of its ghastly and vicious rape sequence, its story is inexplicably interrupted with an irrelevant side story before any revenge component is fully established.

The Last House on the Left (Wes Craven, 1972) [Sean S. Cunningham Films/Kobal Collection].

Regardless of its incoherence, its debt to The Last House on the Left is clear - not only because of its shockingly realistic and lengthy rape scenes that stand in notable opposition to the softcore pantomime-style romps of earlier "toughie" films, but also in its basic story. Its plot elements are only loosely established and flagrantly directionless, but Wrong Way tells of two teenage girls, Nancy and Kathy (played by Laurel Canyon and Candy Sweet), who are picked up by a group of men when their car breaks down in the woods. The women are viciously brutalized for over twenty minutes in a sequence as lengthy and harrowing as the gang rape in the original I Spit on Your Grave. The girls are then abandoned in the woods, where they stumble upon yet another group who appear as equally intent on rape (the leader of this group tells them he will make the girls "sexual beasts"). While the film provides no explanation as to why it leaves the girls' story at this point, these two sequences are intercut with scenes that show one of the girl's father calling the police, who later discover the girls' underwear in the woods. While the last section of the film deviates to a new, unrelated story and does not return to the girls, these similarities between Wrong Way and The Last House on the Left are surely not coincidental.

More explicit homages to Craven's film were soon to follow. For cult audiences, Aldo Lado's name is most immediately associated with slick gialli like Short Night of Glass Dolls (La corta notte delle bambole di vetro, 1971) and Who Saw Her Die? (Chi l'ha vist morire?, 1972). And while demonstrating a sharp increase in its nasty depictions of sexual violence, Lado's Night Train Murders does not lack the impact of these other films. Superficially, the basic plot of Night Train Murders diverges only slightly from The Last House on the Left, moving the action to the train of its title. The primary difference lies in the politics of the addicts Blackie (Flavio Bucci) and Curly (Gianfranco De Grassi) are loutish, but they do not appear to become dangerous until they fall under the influence of a wealthy, sexually-dominant older woman enigmatically called the Lady (Macha Meril). It is she who encourages them to rape and murder the two girls, and earlier she even offers one of the girls to a passing businessman who was spying on them (he eagerly accepts the offer to rape her). The inclusion of the Lady radically shifts the message of Night Train Murders from The Last House on the Left: in Craven's film, it is a case of the poor Krug and Co. versus the wealthy Collingwoods. But in Lado's film the poor (Blackie and Curly) are under the control of the bourgeoisie. Night Train Murder's Mrs. Collingwood equivalent, Mrs. Stradi (Marina Berti), does not join in her husband's vengeance, and, in fact, she repeatedly begs him to stop. Unlike The Last House on the Left, this therefore provides a voice of reason from within the film's own diegesis. Professor Stradi (Enrico Salerno) chooses to ignore her, and in doing so suffers the consequences of his actions. This presents another binary relationship absent in Craven's original, this time between a self-policing middle-class (Mrs. Stradi) and an out-of-control middle-class (Professor Stradi). The result of this tension is made devastatingly apparent in the film's final shot: as Professor and Mrs. Stradi survey the carnage in stunned silence, the Lady joins them. In doing so, she aligns herself with the devastated parents rather than with the murdered Curly and Blackie. It is implied that Professor and Mrs. Stradi do not never it was the Lady who masterminded the rape and murder of their daughter. The Lady gets away with it not because she is innocent, but because she is rich and can therefore socially align herself with the family she has just destroyed.

Last House on the Beach (La settima donna, Franco Prosperi, 1978) is another Italian film whose title was changed for release in the United States to profit from Craven's earlier movie. Combining the nunsploitation subgenre with rape-revenge, the film deviates plot-wise from The Last House on the Left substantially, but arrives at a similar ethical conclusion. Florinda Balkan stars as Sister Christina, a nun who has taken five teenage schoolgirls to a deserted beach house to rehearse a production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Only moments into the film the house is invaded by a group of violent thugs. These men are thieves who have just escaped a failed heist, and in between reading William Faulkner's 1931 novel Sanctuary (upon which Stephen Roberts' notorious 1933 rape film The Story of Temple Drake was based) and bickering among themselves, they spend the bulk of the film terrorizing and torturing the women. The rapes range in intensity, length and stylistic treatment, but one of the more gruesome and bizarre instances is shot entirely in slow motion, with the leader of the gang wearing a full face of make-up. When one of the girls is murdered after being raped with a large wooden stake in the film's most harrowing scene, the god-fearing nun puts her cross aside and executes two of the invaders. The surviving invader confronts Sister Christina in the garden, and the remaining girls beat him to death with garden rakes and shovels as they rescue her. The final image focuses on the shattered and disillusioned Sister Christina as she turns her head away from the violence before her.

Last House on the Beach lacks the shocking eloquence and impact of Craven's The Last House on the Left, but while it deviates from that film's storyline substantially, it shares its same message in this final shot. Although there is no doubt that Sister Christina's vengeance was understandable according to the logic of the film, it is problematized when she realizes with terror that not only has she herself become a violent monster, but that she also has taught her whose spiritual as well as physical care she was violence is acceptable. Like the Collingwoods, she realizes that she too has become a monster.

Last House on the Beach sharply contrasts with Trip with the Teacher (Earl Barton, 1975), another teacher-and-schoolgirl-themed rape-revenge film. Unlike the Italian film, Barton's movie concludes with the surviving girls happily embracing their smiling female teacher. Last House on the Beach is substantially darker than films such as this, and therefore closer in tone to Craven's The Last House on the Left.

Ruggero Deodato's House on the Edge of the Park (1984) aspires to a more explicit homage to The Last House on the Left, as demonstrated by both its title and the casting of David Hess as the villain. The controversy surrounding Deodato's earlier gore masterpiece Cannibal Holocaust garnered him a reputation for extreme violence, and House on the Edge of the Park is appropriately ferocious. The film begins as Alex (Hess) rapes and murders a woman whose car he forces off the road in New York City. Later, Alex is shown preparing for a night out with Ricky (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) at the garage where they both work. Their plans are interrupted when sophisticated Lisa (Annie Bell) and her boyfriend arrive with a broken down car and casually invite them to a party. Increasingly frustrated with the guests' behavior, Alex loses his temper and beats up a male party guest, then rapes and tortures many of the women. These scenes take up the bulk of the film and culminate in a lengthy, graphic scene where he mutilates a woman with a razor. The guests finally find a gun and shoot Alex in the genitals, telling him that the entire event had been planned as a way to avenge the rape of the woman at the beginning of the film, who was the sister of one of the guests. Mirroring Sadie's death at the hands of Mrs. Collingwood in The Last House on the Left, Lisa and her guests push Hess' Alex into the pool to bleed to death. Aside from this shot, the film's treatment of rape and revenge is casual in contrast to Craven's original, as the guests half-heartedly debate the ethics of their vengeance.

Italian directors such as Lado and Deodato were not the only ones interested in expanding The Last House on the Left universe. In 2005, an American film set out to resurrect Craven's original film with hopes of shocking a new generation of filmgoers. Directed by David DeFalco, Chaos was made in 2002 but was not released until 2005 in the United States. Its association with The Last House on the Left was explicit, despite the creators' denials (probably stemming from legal issues). The plot is almost identical, the film poster overtly referenced the promotional material for the original, and it is even rumored that David Hess was initially intended to star in it. Like the original I Spit on Your Grave, Chaos is noted for provoking the ire of film critic Roger Ebert, who gave the film a rare zero stars and asked, "Is it admirable for filmmakers to depict pure evil? Have 9/11, suicide bombers, serial killers and kidnapping created a world in which the response of the artist must be nihilistic and hopeless?"48 For Ebert, there were two key issues that separated Craven's original from DeFalco's remake: the violence is undeniably more vicious and explicit in the latter, and the different endings of each film carry different moral messages. In terms of the latter, it is difficult to deny that the ending of Chaos is both arbitrary and silly, and speaks more of a project stuck for what to do than it does of any profound thematic intent. In Craven's film, the Collingwoods dispatch Krug and his gang, only to be left stunned at their actions as the police arrive. But in Chaos, a confusing and illogical sequence of events has its Mr. Collingwood character, Leo (Scott Richards), turning a gun on Chaos (the Krug character, played by Kevin Gage), only for Leo to be shot by a racist policeman who disapproves of his interracial marriage. Leo's wife, Justine (Deborah Lacey), then shoots the policeman, and Chaos kills the second policeman and then Justine herself. The film ends with Chaos' survival, thus turning Craven's reflection on the nature of violence into a melodramatic battle between good and evil, where the latter wins out.

Both this ending and its extreme and excessive depictions of sexual violence expose Chaos' indifference to the central themes of The Last House on the Left. Although even today the violence in Craven's film is shocking and brutal, that its intensity is so inherently connected to its broader thematic intent is undeniable. In Chaos, however, because the conclusion does not aim to provide any concrete message beyond a simplistic "the world is full of bad people" message, the function of violence also changes. It is precisely because of this that its revolting scenes of rape and torture are exposed as little more than manifestations of a creatively challenged and regressive adolescent mind. In particular, the scene where one of the victims' nipples is cut off and she is force to eat it is juvenile, misogynistic and disgusting in equal measure. As Eric Somers notes, the DVD extras to the film feature DeFalco referring to himself on numerous occasions as "the director of the most brutal film of all time."49 thus showing he was propelled more by "bad-ass" posturing than a desire to present a deep or complex social critique.

Despite all of this, however, Chaos offers at least one significant point of interest that makes it unique among most of the films in this book, and demonstrates that even the most idiotic text can be worth examining. Craven's Mari is replaced in Chaos by Emily, who has an African American mother and a Caucasian father. The film thus raises a range of issues about race, rape and power absent in the original. Chaos does not deal satisfactorily or progressively with these issues by any means, but it is worthy of note that Justine's suspicions that there are racist motivations for the police's indifferent response to their missing person report are confirmed when one of the policemen goes on a vicious rant against interracial relationships to his colleague as they leave to investigate. The film does not make it clear, but it appears to be this racism that leads the policeman to shoot Leo in the film's hasty conclusion. It is in relation to race that Chaos almost finds itself capable of making some kind of statement in what is otherwise no more than an unsophisticated and misogynistic The Last House on the Left knock-off. That its violence is so glaringly functionless beyond stoking the director's desire to be "the director of the most brutal film of all time," however, renders this potential line of investigation underdeveloped at best.

Less critically abhorred than Chaos, Dennis Iliadis' 2009 remake of The Last House on the Left (one of the rare adaptations of Craven's film to use the same name) also goes to great lengths to deflect its thematic meaning far from that in the original. In Chaos, Justine and Leo fight not out of a desire for vengeance, but for survival. In the 2009 version, the same can be said up to a point of its equivalent couple, Emma Collingwood (Monica Potter) and her husband John (Tony Goldwyn)- at least until after they commit their first murder. The major difference between the original and this remake is that Mari (Sara Paxton) does not die: the gang believe they have killed her, but she manages to return home where her father, a doctor, performs emergency surgery. It is Emma and John's desire to get their daughter to proper medical care (not to mention their own survival) that propels them to remove Krug and his cohorts. This changes, however, after John and Emma assault Krug's brother, Frank (Aaron Paul). Face-down in the sink, it is clear that they have disabled him as a threat, but as John turns on the garbage disposal near Frank's arm, his eyes light up with joy and offers the first concrete moment where revenge trumps survival as a driving force behind his actions. The motivation for the Collingwoods' violence alternates between these two points for much of the rest of the film: it is often unclear if they are fighting because they are trying to remove obstacles to getting their daughter to safety, or if they are simply on a vengeance-fuelled rampage. If it is the latter, there is the added complication that this automatically means they are opting to indulge their desire for vengeance over helping the badly injured Mari. In the conclusion, where John paralyzes Krug and blows his head up in a microwave, the ethical complication is that Mari is waiting to leave for medical attention; instead of rushing to get her help, her father instead chooses to execute this gruesome and elaborate torture. The film tries to gloss over this fact by intercutting John's revenge with footage of the family leaving on the boat, skewering the linear logic of how these events had to have chronologically unfolded.

The family that leaves on the boat includes Krug's son, Justin (Spencer Treat Clark), whose role in the 2009 remake also deviates substantially from the original. In the first film, the Collingwoods discover the gang is responsible for Marl's death by accident, but here Justin deliberately provides them with the clue. The film's climactic face-off is between the father figure from each group, John and Krug, and it is Justin who provides the resolution. He attacks Krug, and although Krug stabs him in retaliation, this distraction allows Emma and John the opportunity to finally subdue Krug. This violent showdown is between two families, led by men, who fight over a son figure. Despite Marl's key presence in the film, this son figure is crucial to the 2009 remake. As an addition to Craven's story, the Collingwoods in this version had recently lost a son, and Justin's role as surrogate is foreshadowed by Emma's earlier affection for him (referring to him gently as "sweetheart" and "honey"). Unlike the earlier film that finds the Collingwoods standing alone and shocked at the monsters they have become in order to combat monsters, here the ending is notably more positive and hopeful, if somewhat conservative when compared to the original. Explicitly reaffirming dominance of the middle-class nuclear father, daughter and the new is this reconstituted family that leave the weaker, poorer and now dead Krug, his brother and his lover Sadie (Riki Lindhome) behind.

Monica Potter and Tony Goldwyn in The Last House on the Left (Dennis Iliadis, 2009) [Midnight Entertainment/Kobal Collection].

The 2009 Last House on the Left is also coded much more explicitly as a horror film than the 1972 version, suggesting it is responding more to current genre conventions than it is seeking any particular political statement. The remake loyally adheres to genre conventions, particularly with its use of ambiguous point-of-view shots and its suspenseful hide-and-seek vignettes. The bulk of the film's action in and around the Collingwood house takes place at a thunderstorm, no this also demonstrates that this remake is "genrefied" as much as gentrified by its high budget and slick production values. Despite this, the rape scenes in particular are undeniably nasty, and to a contemporary audience the shock value would surely be as intense as that of the original at its time of release. There is, of course, graphic violence beyond the vicious attacks on the girls: the scene of Krug's head being microwaved, for example, recalls horror classics such as David Cronenberg's Scanners (1981) and Brian De Palma's The Fury (1978). The violence in the film does not adhere solely to this Krug vs. Collingwood trajectory, however, which suggests that there is a desire on the part of the filmmaker to get as much gore in as possible. This is most apparent in the two home surgery of Frank's nose being put back into place and stitched up, and then of John tending to Marl's bullet wound and removing blood from her in lingering detail, and shot in close-up with vivid sound effects.

The most obvious shift towards a more generic horror structure, however, manifests in the "final girl" elements of Marl's character that are absent in the original. In 2009, Mari is not interested in drugs and argues against it (although she finally succumbs). She fights back consistently throughout her attack; she deliberately lures Krug to her parents house as a way of possibly getting help; and Krug himself even observes at one point that she is a "cool customer." The film celebrates Mari's determination to survive, and the fact this Mari lives and the 1972 one does not inadvertently acts as condemnation of the earlier version. The 2009 Mari was a fast swimmer and could get away (she was still shot, but only in the shoulder). But the 1972 Mari was physically unable to escape, and thus her "punishment" was death. Sara Paxton's Mari in the recent The Last House on the Left is not killed, and this presents the possibility that she herself was able to enact her own revenge, a dramatic act that would have significantly moved the film from being a rape-revenge film where her parents act for her, to one where the raped woman seeks vengeance on her own behalf. Although her survival should have made this likelihood a possibility, the film does not explore this option. Rather, it opts for what in contrast is a surprisingly old-fashioned scenario, where the climactic scene of violence takes place between men in what effectively feeds into traditional views of rape as a property crime dispute between men. As mentioned above, that this property dispute is as much about the son as it is the raped daughter is of significant concern.

Unlike the original film, the 2009 remake also denies Emma Collingwood the satisfaction of killing on her own. The best she can do is either assist (as with Frank and Krug) or come to John's rescue (as in the bathroom with a unnecessarily topless Sadie). Emma is not the only incapacitated woman in the Collingwood family in this new version. The depiction of Mari after Krug and his gang leave her (assuming she is dead) is a clear genre-marker, as she climbs out of the dark water at night to stumble home Creature from the Black Lagoon-style. This depiction of her as vacant monster continues throughout the rest of the film. Mari is not so much a rape survivor as she is the walking dead, whose only function is to provide her parents (specifically, her father) with a motivation for violent and spectacular vengeance. Even in the scenes where John performs emergency surgery on their living room coffee table, Marl's face is mostly turned from the camera. It is less about her reaction and trauma than it is the impact her traumatized body has on her father. As will be discussed further in Chapter Four, the 2010 remake of I Spit on Your Grave also emphasizes that its rapists believe Jennifer is dead, and she too goes through less a transformation than an almost supernatural return-from-thedead. Again, these remakes appear far more concerned with issues of genre than ideology. As shall now be examined, however, rape-revenge has ventured more concretely into the realms of the supernatural long before these more recent examples.

Supernatural Rape-Revenge Film

Like film more generally, supernatural horror rape-revenge movies do not present a unified treatment of rape. These stories function within the realm of the fantastic, and thus may stretch the limitations of Earth-bound feasibility. By appealing to spectatorial awareness that their events can only occur within the fictional world of the film's diegesis, these movies offer new perspectives on rape that would seem illogical or absurd in other contexts. As one of the many acts of violence (and threats of violence) that riddle the genre more broadly, rape appears across a vast range of supernatural horror films. Even the most cursory survey offers a range of examples that encompass Rosemarys Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1981), The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977/Alexandre Aja, 2006), Dead Girl (Marcel Sarmiento, 2008) and Jack Frost (Michael Cooney, 1996). When approached with a particular eye towards the intersection of rape and revenge, there is again a variety of ways in which vengeance and sexual violence are represented in the context of supernatural horror. Recent examples include (but are not limited to) The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (David Slade, 2010), Wicked Lake (Zach Passero, 2008), Bloodrayne (Uwe Boll, 2005), the short film Pig Tale (Adrien Van Viersen, 2007) and the remake of Herk Harvey's 1962 film Carnival of Souls (Adam Grossman and Ian Kessner, 1998). The following selection of films is neither an exhaustive list of supernatural rape-revenge horror films nor the most famous. However, they provide useful points with which to explore the diversity and impact of this particular subgeneric manifestation.

Of all the supernatural horror films to center on rape, Sidney Furie's The Entity (1981) may be one of the most memorable, a movie that documents the serial rape of suburban mother Carla Moran (Barbara Hershey) by an invisible ghost.50 There is only one visible body in the room during these attacks as she is violently restrained and assaulted by an invisible adversary throughout the film. Beyond the supernatural specificities of its plot, The Entity resembles films like The Accused and Lipstick in crucial ways. In these films, the rape survivor must contend both with post-rape trauma and the unsatisfactory nature of the institutional treatment of their circumstances. Here, Carla is caught between both her supernatural abuser and the male-dominated world of science. She shares her frustration at the latter with the spectator, for while neither they nor Carla can see the face of her rapist until the end of the film, both are forced to look at a slew of unbelieving (mostly male) doctors and psychiatrists who dismiss her experience as a manifestation of repressed childhood trauma. Although a team of paranormal investigators are soon involved to prove her claims, Carla's is as much a showdown between her and the rapist ghost as it is a battle between believing and non-believing scientists and doctors who are predominantly men.

Significantly, that the rapist is a literal monster deletes any possibility of "his" vindication. The film's battle is not between victim and perpetrator, but between survivor and the system. The narrative is therefore firmly focused upon Carla's relationship between the two factions that seek to confirm or deny her claims. The Entity echoes Norman Bryson's observation that "attacker and victim are almost the least privileged to speak about rape, and even when accounts and confessions are forthcoming they are usually elicited and publicized by authorities with a stake in the wider melee."51 Ultimately, Carla's revenge is not necessarily against the eponymous and vague "entity" that raped her, but rather against the psychiatrists, psychologists and other doctors that dismissed her claims. Carla's body becomes not only the site of her initial trauma, but a battleground between two scientific approaches that, while distinct, are both still coded as primarily masculine.

The rapist in The Entity is an otherworldly force, and this results in the delineation between the natural (good) and the supernatural (evil). The supernatural horror rape-revenge film Stir of Echoes (David Koepp, 1999) does not assume these same binaries. This mainstream American horror film contrasts strikingly with The Entity in its construction of moral positions and how they propel its tale of rape and revenge. Based upon the novel of the same name by cult horror author Richard Matheson, of I Am Legend (1954) fame, Stir of Echoes concerns a psychic link established between a teenage girl who was raped and murdered and buried in the walls of a deserted house, and a later male tenant. The girl supernaturally bestows a subjective understanding of her traumatic experience upon the male protagonist, and she encourages him to act as an agent for her vengeance. This male protagonist is Tom (Kevin Bacon), who has his psychic abilities accidentally unlocked at a party one evening where his sister-in-law Lisa (Illeana Douglas) hypnotizes him to show that her belief in the supernatural is not unfounded. Planting a post-hypnotic suggestion that he be "more open-minded," her demonstration is more effective than she intended, and Tom becomes highly susceptible to strange and violent visions in his house that he does not understand. As these hallucinations become more vivid, Tom begins to lose his grasp on to the concern of his wife, Maggie (Kathryn Erbe). His obsession continues to grow, and Tom is inexplicably driven to start digging up the garden of their rental property. When this search is fruitless, he begins demolishing the house itself as he searches under floorboards. In a hidden wall cavity in the basement, he discovers the mummified corpse of Samantha, a girl he earlier discovered had gone information was conveyed by Samantha's sister Debbie (Liza Well), whom Tom's psychic son Jake (Zachary David Cope) had lured to the house earlier in the film. The discovery of the body triggers a vision where he sees Samantha raped and murdered by a group of local teenage boys whose fathers are Tom's close friends. When Tom confronts these fathers about Samantha's rape and murder, they threaten to silence Tom and Maggie until one of the men has a flash of conscience and kills his accomplice before Tom and Maggie can be hurt. Samantha's body is finally buried, and the family prepare to move out of the house. As they drive away for the final time, Jake continues to hear voices from the houses they pass. This final scene suggests all houses have secrets like the one Tom just uncovered.

Kathryn Erbe and Kevin Bacon in Stir of Echoes (David Koepp, 1999) [Artisan Pics/Kobal Collection].

Stir of Echoes received many positive reviews at the time of its release, but it was unavoidably compared to the blockbuster The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999), another supernatural horror film that also featured a young boy who had a psychic connection with the dead. When considering the raw mechanics of the plot itself, however, the young boy's abilities are only of secondary concern to how they intersect with Tom's relationship with Samantha. On a preliminary viewing, the film may not immediately appear to be concerned with rape and revenge as these factors only become apparent when revealed through Tom's climactic vision after the discovery of Samantha's body. There is, however, strong evidence suggesting the film holds sexual violence and issues of power and control at its core from very early on. In fact, having sex is what triggers Tom's first vision outside of those images that he saw under hypnosis. Maggie and Tom have sex after they return home from the party, but flashes of first-person images of violence interrupt Tom's enjoyment. This includes the striking image of a female hand clawing at a floor until her fingernail is ripped off. Tom asks Maggie to stop having sex because he is so shaken, but she ignores him until he physically removes her. She asks him what is wrong, to which he simply replies that it was "weird."

Stir of Echo es flags issues of consent early on (Tom asks Maggie to stop, but she does not do so immediately), and gender identification also becomes increasingly more complex as the film continues. This culminates in the final vision where Tom's face morphs into Samantha's: he literally becomes her, thus allowing him to see and experience the rape and murder from her perspective. The scene is cruel and violent, and much of it is shown from Tom/Samantha's first-person perspective. Despite the intensity of the moment, there is little actual all, the spectator and Tom both know that Samantha does not survive, so that when she is finally killed and the screen slowly turns black, the poignancy of the tragedy manifests stylistically as well as narratively. After the climactic action sequence where those both guilty of the crime itself and of covering it up are finally subdued, Tom sees Samantha finally leave the house. In this vision, she zips up her jacket, smiles, walks along the street away from the house, and then vanishes into what can assumed to be a less traumatic afterlife than that experienced behind his basement wall. Tom has brought Samantha justice and freed her spirit, but to do so Samantha found it necessary to show him rape through her own eyes and make him understand what it felt like. Employing the conceptual freedoms that supernatural horror allows, Stir ofEchoes constructs a generically plausible scenario where rape trauma can be effectively communicated and resolved. In perhaps the darkest element of the film as a whole, the film's stylistic self-ref most forcefully in the hypnosis sequences where Tom imagines himself sitting in a movie suggests that this mode of resolution is one that strictly exists within the realms of cinematic fantasy.

More recent examples of supernatural horror films that are revealed as rape-revenge in their final moments include both the Thai and Hollywood versions of Shutter (Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom, 2004/Masayuki Ochiai, 2008), two films that will be discussed in the final chapter. In contrast, many supernatural horror rape-revenge films position themselves as such from the outset. Stir of Echoes' idea of having a female rape victim control the body of a man in order to exact her revenge provided the basis for Joe D'Amato's Frankenstein 2000 (Ritorno dalla morte, 1991). Also called Return from Death, the work of trash auteur D'Amato (aka Aristide Massaccesi) lies as far from the mainstream credibility of David Koepp's oeuvre as can be imagined. As mentioned in Chapter One, Frankenstein 2000 was not D'Amato's only venture into rape-revenge territory; but unlike the adult film Emmanuelle's Revenge, this film returned him firmly to the generic domain of horror. Frankenstein 2000 tells the story of psychic yet neurotic Georgia (Cinzia Monreale); who, with her son Stefano (Robin Tazusky) and husband, lives in an Austrian resort town run by the powerful Mr. Hoffner (Maurice Poll). Hoffner's son is part of a teenage motorcycle gang who terrorize Georgia. When Hoffner's private security company refuses to investigate their attempted rape of Georgia, the gang embark upon a more successful assault during a home invasion where they attack Stefano also. With Georgia in a coma and Stefano hospitalized, the private security officers are able to frame Georgia's handyman, Ric (Donald O'Brien), for the crimes. Ric is brought to the hospital to do an experiment in an attempt to jolt Georgia out of her coma. He tells her he loves her, and the two establish a psychic connection. That night, Hoffman's private security officers murder Ric in an attempt to quash further investigation by the police. The catatonic Georgia psychically reanimates Ric from her hospital bed and sends him on a vengeance-fuelled killing spree to gruesomely murder her attackers. Once they have been dispatched, "Frankenstein" Ric has a taste for blood and soon appears to act beyond Georgia's wishes, attempting to kill her husband. When Ric threatens Stefano, Georgia jolts out of her coma, screaming and distressed, stopping her heart and therefore killing Ric. In the final scene her heart monitor reactivates. Her reign of terror, it is suggested, has yet to end.

Despite its obvious rape-revenge influences and eponymous homage to Mary Shelley, Frankenstein 2000's Rancestors include Lucio Fulci's Enigma (1987) and the Australian horror film Patrick (Richard Franklin 1978), the legacy of the latter most famously manifesting in Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol. 1 as the comatose Bride lies spitting in her hospital bed. Frankenstein 2000 also reverses many elements of Steel and Lace, where instead of a man controlling the reanimated body of the murdered rape victim in order to enact vengeance, it is a woman who controls the reanimated body of a murdered man for the same reason. The inability to act that female rape survivors often face is expressed literally through Georgia's comatose state; but far beyond a man acting as her agent to replace her, here she controls and directs that agent (at least up until the film's conclusion). With his long and illustrious career as one of the most notorious European sleaze merchants of the 1970s and 1980s, D'Amato's Frankenstein surprisingly tame next to films like Emanuelle in America (1977) and Porno Holocaust no attempt to disguise its exploitative intent (the attempted rape scene is even intercut with close-ups of the horror film posters on the wall of Georgia's office to make explicit its intended association with commercial horror film). At the very least, however, the film offers an alternate treatment of the relationship between the immobilized rape survivor and the men that seek vengeance on their behalf that dominates many other rape-revenge films. Frankenstein 2000 may be far from progressive, but it does provide a useful point of comparison for rape-revenge films that do not question the often-problematic scenario where men act on a woman's behalf.

Dusty Nelson's Necromancer (1988) provides yet another example of how rape-revenge can intersect with the supernatural in a horror context. While not a rarity by any means, Necromancer still falls easily under the umbrella of obscure cult film as it barely rates a mention on otherwise voracious online horror blogs and fan forums. The reasons for this are perhaps not surprising: its low-budget production values are less ironic than simply lackluster. From a horror perspective, it offers little of the hyperactivity of many of its more celebrated genre stable mates, despite its inclusion of one-time scream queen Liz Kaitan (here listed as Elizabeth Cayton). While far from being a progressive or sophisticated reflection on the nature of rape and its representation, Necromancer allows insight into the broader construction of rape-revenge through its particular merger of sexual violence, vengeance and the fantasy of the supernatural. The film follows the story of Julie (Kaitan), who is raped in a university theater one evening by a group of classmates. The rapists have discovered that despite having a current eligible musician Eric (John had a previous sexual relationship with drama professor Charles (Russ Tamblyn). Her rapists believe Julie will not report the assault out of fear her attackers will reveal her secret past.

Feeling trapped, Julie seeks advice from a female friend who finds a mysterious advertisement in the local newspaper offering vengeance for a price. The two girls visit Lisa (Lois Masten), a mysterious woman with supernatural powers who was shown at the beginning of the film murdering another female client. Not taking Lisa or her ad particularly seriously, Julie accepts her offer but is thrown by the intensity of Lisa's demonic ritual where a vengeance demon is called forth. Although laughing about it afterwards, Julie becomes increasingly concerned as her rapists begin to disappear. The revenge killings are executed by a Julie look-alike who dresses sexily and seduces each man before turning into a gruesome monster and killing them (often through genital mutilation). Once these initial targets have been dispatched, Lisa (appearing as Julie) continues to murder any man who angers Julie, including Charles (who tries to blackmail Julie into re-establishing their sexual relationship) and even Eric when they have an argument. The climax of the film occurs in Eric's bedroom when the two herself and the vengeance demon Lisa, who takes the physical form of in a violent confrontation. As they look and dress identical, it is difficult to tell them apart, and while it appears "good" Julie has won, the final shot shows Lisa's silhouette at her window, laughing. The closing title card features a quote ascribed to Edgar Allan Poe: "I am am I be not fool enough to make open confession!" Vengeance demon Lisa has successfully murdered Julie and permanently replaced her.

While stylistically unsophisticated, the rape scene in Necromancer occurring on a stage suggests a self-referential awareness of the performative nature of the crime as it appears on film. Rapist Paul (Stan Hurwitz) is "performing" masculinity - not for Julie, but for his accomplices Allan (Shawn Eisner) and Carl (Edward A. Wright). The reflexivity demonstrated within this sequence indicates the film's awareness of itself as a construction. Julie is raped at knifepoint under a giant glitter ball with dramatic colored lighting, thus emphasizing the contrived, theatrical nature of the film as a whole. Paul, Carl and Allan even wear Halloween animal masks during the attack, again reiterating the "staginess" of the sequence while simultaneously underscoring the primal, animalistic nature of their violence. Necromancer is even more noteworthy, however, in its division of Julie into two separate entities. While rape survivor and rape avenger are usually either the same person (the woman herself), or divided between the rape survivor and (commonly) a male agent who acts on her behalf, Necromancer finds a third option via the fantastic possibilities of supernatural horror. By dividing Julie into "good Julie" and "bad Julie" (vengeance demon Lisa in the form of Julie), the former retains her humanity and avoids any of the nastier ethical complications that arise for many of the other rape avengers in this book. This does not render the film "bad Julie" is ultimately victorious over "good Julie" does more than tick the generic box for a conclusion with a bitter twist. As `good Julie' herself tells her friend when she first witnesses her doppelganger in action, "I saw her ... me ... it!" That it is her fury that provokes the monster (it is made clear earlier in the film that the only way to neutralize "bad Julie" is for "good Julie" to forgive) implicates her in many ways in the gory murders. Necromancer makes explicit the difference between desiring revenge and acting it out, and its construction of two different versions of the central protagonist bring a spectacular element to this conceptual tension.

The spectacle of rape that Necromancer so explicitly references is the primary reason for its deployment in Jean Rollin's Demoniacs (Les Demoniques, 1974). While French horror from this period never quite achieved the international cult status of Italian offerings, Rollin is undeniably one of France's key figures in the genre. Films such as The Living Dead Girl (La Morte vivante, 1982), The Grapes of Death (Les Raisins de la mort, 1978) and Fascination (1979) still figure largely in the Eurohorror canon. Rollin's work is marked by his signature and often-breathtaking visual poetry, and shows little interest in concrete narrative beyond how it supports his defining cinematic style. Part horror, part art film and part softcore erotica, Rollin's films are heavy on both gore and exposed female flesh, and this intersection of sex and violence manifests often in his films as rape scenes. As the title Rape of the Vampire (Le Viol du Vampire, 1968) demonstrates, Rollin is not shy about deploying rape for its exploitative value; and in Demoniacs it is used specifically in a raperevenge context.

While the plot is loose, Demoniacs follows a group of "wreckers"- Captain (John Rico), the sadistic and beautiful "she-wolf" Tina (Rollin regular Joelle Coeur) and two others - who trick ships into coming too close to land and then plunder the cargo when they are incapacitated. In keeping with the pirate traditions to which the film lovingly pays tribute, pillage is often accompanied by rape, and when two unnamed blonde women (Lieva Lone and Patricia Hermenier) stagger on shore from one of these wrecks, the gang attack them and believe they have left them for dead. Celebrating later at a bordello in a local village, the drunken Captain has a vision of the two dead girls and is terrified. One of the prostitutes, Louise (Louise Dhour), has "second sight" and tells the Captain and his accomplices that tonight the spirits will seek their vengeance. Unsure if the girls are dead or alive, the wreckers return to the shore to dispatch them either way, but the girls manage to escape to the nearby ruins of a church that the locals believe is cursed. Here they meet a strange female clown (Mirelle Dargent)-whose inclusion typifies Rollin's surrealist inclinations -who takes them to the tomb keeper. Realizing that the girls are unable to speak (yet another instance of the rape-survivor-asmute motif that spans across films including Ms. 45 and Thriller: A Cruel Picture), the tomb keeper tells a mysterious man (Miletic Zivomir) of the girls' arrival. The girls sacrifice themselves in return for the power to enact their revenge against the wreckers. In Rollin films, of course, "sacrifice" translates to sexual submission, and much screen time is dedicated to the softcore erotics of this transaction. Although bestowed with supernatural abilities, the girls do not succeed in their attempted revenge and only manage to kill one of the four. The gang capture them, tie them to the skeleton of a shipwrecked boat and rape them again before the girls are drowned in the rising tide. Driven mad at his destruction of innocence, the Captain kills Tina and his remaining ally before he himself is drowned while attempting to rescue the girls.

So strong is Rollin's dedication to surrealism that this brief sketch of the already hazy narrative drastically undervalues the intense stylization of the film. Demoniacs is visually stunning, and many of its key scenes offer images that are both breathtaking and confrontational iconographic subversions, such as the sequence where the two girls attack Tina with falling religious statues. The rape-revenge elements exist solely as a canvas for Rollin's unique visual flair. Beyond its obvious deployment as exploitative titillation, Demoniacs has little interest in either rape or revenge thematically; nor does it pretend to. Rape is depicted very casually in the film, but unlike the bulk of supernatural rape-revenge horror films, here the supernatural elements are not only narratively inconsequential, but they also provide no benefit to the women who have been granted that power. Partially, this is because they choose to stay with the female clown who had helped them recover when she was injured in a confrontation with the gang at the cursed ruins; the girls chose friendship and loyalty over their own bloodthirsty desire for revenge. When the newly empowered girls confront the captain in the bordello or Tina in the ruins, however, they are still unable to kill them. In fact, the only member of the gang that dies appears to do so more because of his extreme drunkenness than any action taken by the girls. Their hearts do not appear to be into the idea of revenge, and this reinforces the Captain's revelation at the film's conclusion that they are innocent and pure. The bare threads of narrative that string Rollin's stunning imagery together in Demoniacs make it a difficult film to present in terms of its deployment of rape and revenge. But along with many of the others discussed in this chapter, Demoniacs demonstrates that raperevenge manifests in film from across the globe to a variety of ends and in a range of generic contexts. The following chapter examines international manifestations of rape-revenge more fully, illustrating again just how broad and diverse the category is.

CHAPTER THREE:

The Rape-Revenge Film

Around the World

As has become apparent in the last two chapters, any suggestion that rape-revenge films are specific to the United States in the 1970s or to any single genre neglects a range of intriguing texts. Accordingly, this chapter seeks to examine international manifestations of the rape-revenge movie more closely. It is undeniable that the popularity of North American rape-revenge films during this period had a strong influence on global production, but as the examination in the last chapter on The Last House on the Left adaptations demonstrates, the production of these films often transcends national borders. This chapter seeks to map the various configurations of rape and revenge that have appeared in cinema across different countries at different periods to demonstrate both its scope and diversity. To do this, ten case studies provide a brief overview of how rape-revenge has manifested internationally, in countries including Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Spain and Turkey. From the outset, it must be emphasized that these are not the only countries that have produced noteworthy examples of the rape-revenge film. Additionally, there is no suggestion that every single rape-revenge film in these particular national contexts will be examined, and in many instances it is not the most well-known examples that are explored. Rather, attention will focus on those movies that demonstrate the broad range of ways in which rape and revenge have intersected on screen.

Before embarking upon these case studies, the very task of cross-cultural analysis - particularly in an area as sensitive as sexual violence - raises as many questions about the cultural subjectivity of the critic as it does the texts they seek to examine. E. Ann Kaplan's reflection on the nature of cross-cultural analysis notes that the task is "fraught with danger," as "we are forced to read works produced by the Other through the constraints of our own frameworks/ theories/ideologies."' In her exploration of Chinese cinema, she describes a scene from Girl from Hunan (Xiangnu xidoxido, Xie Fei, 1986) that a Western critic would view as a rape scene, but asks if a Chinese audience would read it the same way. This leads her to pose a series of important questions: "How is rape conceptualized in China? Does the definition of rape vary from culture to culture? Is rape acceptable as representation but not socially? Are we driven to undesirable relativism in such cross-cultural comparisons?"2 Consequently, to assume that the "gaze" (a notion central to Western feminist film studies) or "social phases," such as modernism and postmodernism, apply to Chinese cinema is problematic.' With this in mind, this chapter does not seek to directly address Kaplan's questions as such, but it acknowledges them from the outset. The analyses that follow do not necessarily transcend the serious issues that surround cross-cultural analysis, but at their core they do not seek a singular or ultimate "meaning" of a particular film. Rather, they underscore yet again the claim that rape-revenge films provide a contemporary example of Diane Wolfthal's argument regarding the depiction of rape in medieval and early modern art, where "diverse notions coexisted contemporaneously."4

Argentina

From the introduction of sound in the early twentieth century, Argentina flourished as a key producer of South American cinema. It produced a wide range of films, including several relevant to this study of rape-revenge. To foreign audiences, Argentina is marked by its violent and dramatic recent history, political corruption and the struggles of its people against oppression. Perhaps unsurprisingly, rape-revenge has provided an opportunity for some filmmakers to reflect upon this history. Juan Carlos Desanzo is familiar to non-Argentinean audiences for biopics, including his Oscar-nominated movie Eva Peron (1996) and his fictional treatment of Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges in Love and Fear (El amor y el espanto, 2001). His earlier rape-revenge film The Search (La busqueda, 1985) arguably lacks the sophistication of films such as these, but it shares an intensity that marks the director's broader oeuvre. The Search was made in the early 1980s after a particularly strict period of censorship during the late-1970s. Because of this, its focus on corruption, abuses of power and a broader sense of uncertainty appears in some way to reflect the political climate around the time of its production.

The film follows the story of Patricia (Andrea Tenuta), a wealthy, happy teenage girl who witnesses her mother's sexual assault and her father's murder at the hands of a vicious gang. The criminals place a fake advertisement in the local paper to sell Patricia's father's Mercedes, and rob and hold hostage all the potential customers who come to inspect the car. The violence inflicted against Patricia's family is not the sole intent of the home invasion, but rather these acts are deployed as both a system of control and as punishment for trying to escape. After the surviving family members are released, Patricia descends into furious rebellion as her brother, now catatonic, is hospitalized. Adopting a party-girl lifestyle, she meets massage parlor owner Monica (Luisina Brando), an older woman who takes Patricia under her wing and gives her a job in her establishment as a waitress. Devastated at the discovery of Patricia's new life and the increasing tension and hostility between them, Patricia's mother commits suicide. Further outraged, Patricia continues to investigate the leader of the gang who traumatized her family, and discovers he is a criminal who demands protection money from Monica (she also witnesses his influence over the police earlier in the film when he facilitates Monica's release after a raid at an illegal party). Through work, Patricia identifies the gang leader's brother, who was also involved in the violation of her family; she meets him outside of work in the guise of a romantic rendezvous and kills him. This provokes the gang leader into another home invasion, this time with the intention of punishing Patricia for killing his brother, but Patricia murders both the remaining gang members (including the leader himself and her boyfriend Juan-Carlos, whom she discovers used her to gain information about her household in order to set up the initial crime). The film ends when Patricia and her younger brother, now fully recovered, are happily reunited via Monica.

The most immediately striking feature of The Search is how it separates Patricia's trauma from her later desire for revenge. It is her mistreatment of her mother that leads to the latter's suicide, thus exposing a degree of selfishness to Patricia's trauma-fuelled rebellion. Despite the surface of the film having dated stylistically, there is a strong sense of verisimilitude in the troubled girl's behavior. Unlike many of the avenging women in this book, Patricia is not driven by a clear desire for revenge, nor is the plotline able to be neatly divided into distinct categories of rape and revenge. So severe is her trauma that such systematic reasoning is well beyond her capabilities. While it is certainly a story of transformation, Patricia's evolution - that follows her desertion of the family (driving her mother to suicide) to a return to the family, albeit with Monica now as the mother not so neatly adhere to her search for vengeance against the men whose violence so dramatically changed her life. Rather, she floats around in a state of directionless fury until the opportunity for revenge finds her. Patricia's actions lead directly to her mother's suicide, and this prevents the spectator from completely aligning with Patricia (particularly considering it was the not who was sexually assaulted earlier in the film). It is this precise irrationality of Patricia's behavior, however, that makes her story so compelling. Her final victory over the men who destroyed her family was never her intended goal, but it was ultimately what was required to provide her passage to a new life with her reconstructed family of her brother and Monica.

Made over twenty years later, I'll Never Die Alone (No Morire Sola, Adrian Garcia Bogliano, 2008) offers another example of the Argentinean raperevenge film. I'll Never Die Alone and The Search offer useful points of comparison, separated as they are by the internationally recognized wave of New Argentinean Cinema that began in the 1990s and includes the work of directors Alejandro Agresti, Daniel Burman, Juan Jose Campanella, Pablo Trapero and Lucrecia Martel. I'll Never Die Alone is brazen in its alignment with North American exploitation film traditions. There is evidence, for example, that the film is an intentional homage to the original I Spit on Your Grave in particular: its rural setting, its minimal use of dialogue, its outdoor rape scene followed by a second period of violence inside a nearby cabin, and its editing (like the earlier film, it too features many shots of a long duration). But I'll Never Die Alone deviates from Zarchi's film crucially in its intense stylization, positioning it as an homage to this era of exploitation alongside the work of directors Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino and Rob Zombie rather than with Zarchi himself. The film's arty composition, digital effects and sophisticated soundtrack render it more a love-letter to I Spit on Your Grave than an updating of it. The strength of the film is the casting of its central female characters, whose uncontrived youthfulness makes their exposure to such extreme violence (both as victims and perpetrators) truly shocking.

I'll Never Die Alone begins with four young female friends driving through the La Plata region, where they see the barely-alive body of a young woman on the side of a road. Seeing the men responsible for her injuries, the girls place the body in their car and head to a local village for help. Despite their efforts, the woman does not survive, and at the local police station they discover that the men responsible are policemen out of uniform. They file a report about the dead woman with the uniformed, lower-ranking policeman and seek to flee the area quickly. Their attempts are unsuccessful, however, and the senior policemen capture them, raping and torturing the girls in the nearby bushland, killing one of them. After this lengthy and brutal sequence, the girls help each other to dress and attempt to find help. They happen across a wooden cabin, but here again are discovered by the out-of-uniformed police. Another of the girls is killed here, and the uniformed police officer whose suspicions had lead him to the cabin is also killed by his superiors. Shattered, the two surviving girls mobilize their fury and seek vengeance against the men who raped them and murdered their friends. One perpetrator has his nose graphically removed and is beaten in the head repeatedly with a hammer; one is strangled with barbed wire and then buried alive; and the final man is shot and left to be eaten by wild animals. Like I Spit on Your Grave, the end credits roll almost immediately as the last rapist is dispatched.

While the examples offered here are not intended to be the final word on rape and revenge in Argentinean cinema, that both I'll Never Die Alone and The Search explicitly feature rapists and murderers who are either policemen or have influence over the police appears to be far more than mere coincidence. Although neither of these films make explicit references to broader Argentinean political history, considering the state-approved violence that marked Argentina during the 1970s and early 1980s, it is significant that both these films feature corrupt, sadistic and violent men with links to the state. The military dictatorship during this period was marked by its use of rape and torture, and these films, whose villains are either government-sanctioned officers of the law or criminals that have control over such officers, cannot help but reflect upon this period of recent Argentinean history. While a surface reading of both films may initially suggest attempts at dehistoricizing sexual violence, the category of rape-revenge itself offers a strong thematic framework with which to consider the intersection of fiction and the real. This is nowhere more apparent than in The Search, when Patricia tells one of her victims, who asks about her family, "Mine got murdered in the war. What war? I'll tell there are many wars." Here, the intersection of the private sphere and her personal experience of violence is linked openly with the public and the political. This does not mean all Argentinean rape-revenge films after the so-called Dirty War must be assumed to be explicitly engaging with this period. However, that these two films in particular so deliberately construct their malevolent forces as being explicitly linked to a corrupt state is surely significant.

Australia

Colonized by the British in the late 1700s as a penal outpost, the proud "wild colonial boy" mythology that plays such a major part in the construction of white Australian identity renders the use of rape in Australian national cinema of little surprise. Rape in these films frequently translates to gang rape, and gang rape is often treated as the dark side of culturally celebrated notions of "mateship" and male friendship. Alice Aslan outlines the long history of gang rape in post-Invasion Australia, beginning with the abuse of Indigenous women by Anglo-Australian officials, and culminating with a seemingly neverending stream of modern day news stories about male sports teams sexually assaulting female fans.5 Two well-known contemporary Australian films in particular focus on issues of male friendship and loyalty in the context of gang rape and murder. Blackrock (Steven Vidler, 1997) marks the feature film debut of Oscar-winning actor Heath Ledger, who plays one of a group of teenage surfers accused of raping and murdering a local girl, and thus putting their friendship with central protagonist Jared (Laurence Breuls) to the test. Starring Toni Collette, The Boys (Rowan Woods, 1998) also focuses on a gang rape and murder, as it documents the events leading up to the involvement of three brothers in a vicious and unprovoked attack. Both The Boys and Blackrock were closely linked to famous real-life 1989 rape and murder of Leigh Leigh in Newcastle, New South Wales in Blackrock, and the infamous 1986 Anita Cobby case in The a sense of verisimilitude to each film. Together, these two movies place the mechanics of male bonding and masculinity under the microscope. They explore the notion of "mateship" that is so inherent to white Australian identity, and, through these extreme and disturbing narratives, expose their gender politics as deeply problematic.

Like The Boys, a group of rapist brothers also lie at the core of The Proposition (John Hilcoat, 2005). Written by acclaimed musician and author Nick Cave, The Proposition shifts the generic structures of the Western to a specifically Australian context, as the notion of the "frontier" easily adapts to the Australian outback of the late 1800s where the film is set. The movie begins after the rape and murder of the Hopkins family, assumed to have fallen victim to the notorious Burns Brothers gang. In The Proposition, rape and revenge intersect and deviate so randomly and chaotically as to effectively collapse the structural integrity of rape-revenge films like Ms. 45, or the original versions of I Spit on Your Grave and The Last House on the Left. Violent and powerful, the haphazard and undecipherable turmoil that rules this vision of the Australian outback is precisely the worst-case scenario that other Australian films concerned with rape and revenge hint at but struggle to resist. This is nowhere clearer than in Shame, another popular Australian film that has also drawn explicit comparisons with Western traditions. The film's title is commonly read as a deliberate reference to George Stevens' famous Western Shane (1953), encouraging interpretations that suggest a conscious gender reversal of the male stranger who arrives in a town to restore order.'

Shame begins with the arrival of Asta (Deborra-Lee Furness), a blackleather-clad city barrister, in the rural Australian town of Ginborak. Forced to stay in town as she awaits the arrival of a part to repair her motorbike, Asia befriends the Curtis family, whose daughter Lizzie (Simone Buchannan) has been gang raped by a group of local youths. These of whom is the son of the town's powerful and rich matriarch, and owner of the meatworks that employs much of the town, Mrs. Rudolph (Pat the town and its female inhabitants, while the local police adopt a dismissive "boys-will-be-boys" attitude. As her relationship with Lizzie and her family solidifies, Asta mobilizes both the Curtises and many of the town's other oppressed women to take a stand, leading Lizzie to press charges against the boys who raped her. Released on bail, the angry gang attack Lizzie's house one night, abducting her grandmother and badly beating her father. Asta and Lizzie manage to escape, and Asta takes the girl to what she believes is the security of the police station while the police (and a furious group of women from the town) find Lizzie's the boys had attempted to detain most of the boys again. They realize too late that Lizzie has been left alone, however; in the time they are searching for her grandmother, the two lead boys abduct Lizzie in their car. Struggling to get free of the speeding vehicle, Lizzie opens the door and falls to her death. Still searching for Lizzie, Asta attacks one of the boys who mockingly feigns ignorance as to her whereabouts. Lizzie's body is soon discovered, and the police sergeant barks accusingly at Asta, "I hope you're bloody satisfied." One of the women answers for her and says, "No, we're not satisfied, not by a long way." The film ends on a still image of Asta's sad, defeated face.

While referencing the Western, Shame is also a deliberate subversion of traditional rape-revenge structures. It adapts the "agent" model of rape one person acts on behalf of a raped undermines its effectiveness and exposes its ethical weaknesses from the outset. While her intentions are good, the likeable and intelligent Asta feeds the raped girl post-feminist responses to rape, insisting that Lizzie should learn selfdefense so she can "stick up for herself." Lizzie appears to identify only too readily how little this advice has to do with her own experience of rape ("What if there's six of them?" she asks a dumbstruck Asta). For Lizzie the issue is less about feminism than it is about class. At one point, she even tells Asta, "You must be rich ... you're not careful"; in her world, poor country girls get raped, and rich city women get to talk about it. In the face of Lizzie's death, Asta finally understands how futile her advice has been in the context of the very real class and gender issues that victimized Lizzie all along. As a rape-revenge story, Asta's plight is exposed as being fundamentally disconnected from Lizzie, despite her good intentions. Asta attempted to empower Lizzie by granting her the legal, physical and emotional artillery she assumed the girl needed, without consideration for Lizzie herself. The price for this misfired feminist vengeance fantasy was Lizzie's own life. For Kathi Maio, Lizzie's death is crucial in the film is closer to the uncomfortable truth of women's lives." 7 But for Rose Lucas, the film is far more problematic: despite Asta's tomboyishness, the film appears to argue that gender inequality is inescapable and a simple fact of life. "Despite the horror and disgust engendered by the narrative," she says, "the film has offered no way out of the debilitating gender stereotypes of active male and passive female, as its bleak conclusion envisions no viable options for resistance to sexual attack."8 This may be true for Lizzie, but as Asta climbs aboard her motorcycle and rides out of town, the film implies that there are options - but only for women who can afford them. Unlike Lizzie, bourgeois Asta (who can afford her feminist ideals) at least has the option to simply drive away.'

Fair Game (Mario Andreacchio, 1987) also concerns a town whose central industry is turning kangaroo meat into pet food. In Shame, a clear parallel is drawn between the cheap, processed meat that the rapist's family's factory produces and the bodies of the women who work there. In Fair Game, this symbolism is taken even further. In this film, a group of three hunters are introduced in the opening sequence speeding through the bush in a customized "ute" (Australian slang for a coupe utility vehicle), shooting kangaroos. They have trespassed on the property of the film's female protagonist, Jessica (Cassandra Delaney10), who runs a wildlife sanctuary on her property, where she is left to fend for herself while her partner is away. Even in its opening moments the film makes it explicit that in the world of Fair Game, masculinity is aligned with machines, while femininity is aligned with nature. The three men's determination to control nature through monstrous masculinity is demonstrated by the fact that they name their car "the beast"they grant an animal-like quality to this machine in an attempt to construct an even playing field so the hunt can be considered a "fair game." From their perspective, reducing this hunt to a "beast" versus beast against it less a slaughter than a competition where only the fittest will survive. That the men poach kangaroos to turn into pet food acts as a clear threat to Jessica, because her alignment with nature in their eyes also makes her the "fair game" of the film's title.

The three (Peter Ford), Ringo (David Sandford) and Sparks (Garry Who)-become increasingly enraged by Jessica after she attempts to press charges against them for trespassing, and their mild harassment evolves rapidly into an all-out attack. Jessica begins to realize the seriousness of her predicament when she awakens to find photographs of her sleeping nude stuck to her refrigerator door, and she spends a terrified night alone in her house waiting for further attacks. When the men awaken to find she has turned their weapons into an elaborate sculpture, they capture her and stage the film's most notorious, shocking and memorable feat: stripping her half-naked, they gag Jessica and tie her to the front of their car, then proceed to drive around in the scorching Australian sun until she collapses, humiliated and suffering from exposure. They dump her body back at her house, and she recovers enough again to retaliate. After a series of further confronta an attempted rape by Sparks - Jessica briefly gains control of the situation by luring them into a cave and trapping them inside by triggering a rockslide. After they escape, both sides ready themselves for their final confrontation. Jessica booby-traps what remains of her destroyed property and kills them in a series of elaborate executions: Ringo is electrocuted, Sparks is impaled on an anvil, and Sunny is trapped in his ute and burned to death. The final shot of the film shows Jessica limping away from the destruction and reuniting with her beloved dog.

Quentin Tarantino has celebrated Fair Game as a "female Straw Dogs,"" noting the centrality of the fetishized car to its revenge narrative (a relationship he references explicitly in his 2007 film Death Proof, which shall be discussed in the next chapter)." While the film is rich with moments of explicit sexual threat - most notably the naked photographs and Sparks' attempted the image of Jessica tied to the front of the ute remains one of the most excessive and horrific images of violence against women not only in Australian "Ozploitation" film, but in rape-revenge as a whole. The centrality of cars and machines mark the film's most obvious predecessor a Mad Max (George Miller, 1979), another vengeance-centered Outback action film. With its futuristic dystopia, Mad Max's monstrous car culture is explicitly referenced in Fair Game, where Jessica's vision of a natural, "feminized" and harmonious Australia is placed in direct opposition to the "masculinized" world of violence and machines. In light of this binary, it is of note that the only way she can survive her predicament is to turn to machines herself: Jessica is victorious because her mechanical prowess outdoes that of her opposition. Although she is seen returning to nature in the film's final moments as she reunites with her dog, her victory is bittersweet. If the film's symbolic logic is to be understood correctly, the only chance nature (and the feminine) have against machines (and the masculine) is to succumb totally to its dominant order and use its power to fight it. The film therefore suggests that the Australian outback offers no opportunity for the natural or the feminized to survive on their own terms.

Rape-revenge films are still being produced in Australia, as diverse examples such as Wasted on the Young (Ben C. Lucas, 2010), The Book of Revelation (Ana Kokkinos, 2005) and Defenceless: A Blood Symphony (Mark Savage, 2004) demonstrate. Writer, producer and director Steven Kastrissios' The Horseman (2008) blends the rough plot outline of Paul Schrader's Hardcore (1979) with a distinctly Australian vision of raw, masculine aggression. The film's title evokes apocalyptic overtones through the four horsemen from the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, while also prompting associations with Australian outback mythology in the figure of the drover who can tame wild horses, typified in Banjo Patterson's 1890 poem "The Man from Snowy River." The Horseman follows the story of a Brisbane man Christian (Peter Marshall) whose teenage daughter Jesse (Hannah Levien) died of a heroin overdose. He is anonymously sent an adult movie called Young City Sluts 2 that show a heavily drugged Jesse having sex with three men. Determined to seek vengeance for her death, Christian tracks down those involved in the production and distribution of the tape and slaughters them as he gains information regarding the location of other participants. Along the way he picks up the young hitchhiker Alice (Caroline Marohasy), and the two develop a strong relationship. Through Alice, Christian begins to come to terms with his guilt and grief regarding his daughter's rape and death. As the film's chilling climactic sequence unfolds, this revelation has arrived too late, and he cannot undo the inevitable consequences of his actions. Both he and Alice suffer horrifically for his decision to take justice into his own hands.

Despite its gritty look and its intense depiction of male-against-male violence, as a rape-revenge film, The Horseman shows little violence against women at all, even though such violence is at the heart of the narrative. There is a short clip of Young City Sluts 2 shown early in the film that implies Jesse is drugged and forced to have sex, but in this brief clip Jesse herself is not naked, and there is little physical contact actually shown between her and the men. Later in the film, Alice struggles with a group of men, but again the violence against her is implied and happens off-camera. This should not suggest that this is a tame or gentle film by any means, however, and its depiction of Christian's revenge is graphic and disturbing. Peter Marshall's performance as the coldly determined Christian flawlessly depicts a man destroyed by his daughter's rape and death, and although not sympathetic as such, his reactions are believable and convincing. The Horseman is a harrowing view of contemporary Australian masculinity, but its impact spans far beyond its country of production. In terms of its impact, brutality, and final chilling message regarding the futility of vengeance, The Horseman is arguably the closest any filmmaker has yet to come in equaling Craven's original The Last House on the Left. Earnest, tragic and ferocious, The Horseman does not allow its audience the distancing luxury of irony. It is a difficult and intelligent film that deserves recognition well beyond the cult audiences that have already embraced it.

Canada

To those familiar with the often-surreal climate of sexual violence in the work of David Cronenberg, to claim that Canada has produced some of the most confrontational images of sexual violence in film comes as little surprise. Despite a film industry that stretches between Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto, much critical treatment of the Canadian film industry focuses upon the long shadow cast by the dominant cinema of the neighboring United States. Not only does Canada appear to hemorrhage talent to its southern neighbor at a rapid rate (James Cameron, Seth Rogen and Paul Haggis, among many others, are originally from Canada), but many films are also criticized for lacking anything uniquely "Canadian." Certainly, some Canadian raperevenge films offer no immediate marker of their production context, such as the low-budget cult films of Ryan Nicholson, including Torched (2004) and Gutterballs (2008). Torched, a 44-minute feature, gained a fan base through its initial online release and subsequent inclusion in the straight-to-DVD female-revenge horror anthology Hell Hath No Fury by Vancouver-based Creepy Six Films in 2006. Seemingly made by friends for friends, there is little narrative logic or thematic clout to Torched beyond its determination to shock and disgust, as its tattooed protagonist Deanna (Michelle Boback) captures an attempted rapist, dancing around him in her underwear and knee-high boots while burning him with a blow torch and mutilating his penis with syringes in graphic detail. Unlike Gutterballs, Torched is worthy of note because while its rape scene is fast, vague, and shows no nudity, its depiction of sexual violence is totally centered on these scenes of male genital mutilation.

Comparatively, the production values of Gutterballs are of a much higher standard than Nicholson's earlier film, and its pastiche of'80s slasher demonstrated by its clever poster campaign parodying films like Happy Birthday to Me (J. Lee Thompson, 1981), Maniac (William Lustig, 1980) and John Carpenter's 1978 Halloween- is overt and implies a sense of fun. But unlike Torched, the brutal rape scene at the beginning of Gutterballs is lengthy, graphic and revolting (the bowling-alley setting suggested by the film's title seems solely employed to allow the abhorrent rape of the main female character, Lisa [Candice Lewald] with a bowling pin). Like Torched, it shares a focus on explicit scenes of penis mutilation, but this supposed "horror comedy porn" outdoes these brief shots with the sheer longevity of the opening rape scene, reveling in its own shocking excesses. Nicholson's are not the only low-budget rape-revenge films made in Canada recently, and Sweet Karma (Andrew Thomas Hunt, 2009) is a far less volatile and offensive example that is worth mentioning as a point of contrast. Despite their overtly regressive nature, Torched and Gutterballs at the very least demonstrate just what type of films can be produced in the movement away from national cinema towards global niche audiences defined through a taste for "badfilm" and access to DIY filmmaking technologies.

Death Weekend (William Fruet, 1976) set a much earlier precedent for Canadian exploitation rape-revenge films. As a classic example of 1970s Bgrade "Canuxploitation," Death Weekend has retrospectively developed a cult audience beyond the lackluster response it garnered upon its initial release. While A.H. Weiler from the New York Times politely rejected the film as being "a good deal less than meets the eye,"13 Clive Denton at Cinema Canada was less restrained in his declaration that it was no less than "an ugly, vicious, and downright shitty movie," and "mean-spirited garbage .1114 Recently, defenders of the film have argued for its status as a Canadian Straw Dogs;15 and certainly in terms of its form and tone (as well as a few specific plot parallels), the suggestion holds some merit. But while granting it an air of legitimacy through comparisons to Peckinpah's film, this association simultaneously acts to highlight Death Weekend's lack of "Canadian-ness"; even at the time of the film's release, Denton countered such defenses by asking, "Can't we be first in anything? 1116

Set in the deserted Ontario countryside, the film opens with dentist Harold (Chuck Shamata) driving in his expensive sports car to his country house with model Diane (Brenda Vaccaro). A car enthusiast, Diane takes over the driving duties, and almost immediately a car full of threatening thugs challenges the couple to a race, lead by the ominous Lep (Don Stroud). After a lengthy action sequence, Diane outsmarts and outdrives the group, leaving Lep furious and humiliated by what he sees as a direct insult to his masculinity. When she arrives at the materialistic Harold's house, Diane discovers that his intentions are far from wholesome: he admits to lying to her about having a house party that weekend, and confesses it is only the two of them on the deserted property. She is furious when he asks her to pose nude for some photographs; but unbeknownst to her, he has already taken naked pictures of her through a two-way mirror installed in the bathroom. Before she has the opportunity to leave, however, Lep and his gang invade the house, and their threatening attitude collapses into violence when Lep rapes a terrified Diane when she attempts to run away. Lep makes it clear that the rape is motivated not only by his desire to repay her for his earlier humiliation on the road, but also as a direct attack on Harold. After the rape, Lep realizes that Harold is so materialistic that he cares only for his property. At this discovery, Lep and his gang gleefully destroy Harold's house with a baseball bat, smashing pianos and shattering toilet bowls. It is only when faced with the destruction of his material possessions that Harold reacts and runs to get his gun. Lep overpowers him easily and takes the weapon, then chases Harold outside into the night. Left inside with the rest of the gang, Diane is raped again but this time manages to fight back and slashes her assailant's throat with a piece of broken mirror. Escaping outside, she continues her violent revenge as she drowns and burns to death the two other gang members, leaving only Lep. Discovering the dead body of Harold in a car, she pushes it aside as she attempts to escape but is pursued by a gun-wielding Lep. In the film's climactic finale, she runs Lep over and kills him, leaving her in a brief slowmotion moment of shock before the end credits roll.

Released in the U.S. as The House by the Lake, Death Weekend played at theaters alongside a film similarly focused on rape and revenge, The Last House on the Left. But where Craven's film placed thematic attention on issues of class and the ethical ambiguities of revenge itself, Fruet's film is concerned primarily with the struggle between men to assert their masculinity, and the violent consequences that women who get in the way may be exposed to. In Death Weekend, sexual threats come at Diane from Harold as well as from Lep and his gang, and by constructing her host as a malevolent force from the outset, the film avoids simplistic class-based binaries. Here, all men are potential rapists, and all men are enemies. Consequently, there is an indistinct yet always present suggestion of inevitability to Diane's experiences. The way that she glazes over or is presented in slow-motion at crucial moments adds a feeling of "not quite there-ness," implying that she is in some way opting out of the reality of her circumstances because she simply does not know what else to do. Even the revenge component of the film seems somewhat lackluster next to comparative scenes in other movies - rather than actively relishing her vengeance, Diane seems to be merely tying up administrative loose ends. Although all the men in the film that had tormented her so brutally - including Harold - are dead by the end of the movie, the catharsis that so often accompanies such a conclusion is notably absent here, while still lacking the powerful ambivalence of the original The Last House on the Left. Fruet had hoped that Death Weekend would herald a return to the earlier successes of his career, but the critical rejection of the film prevented such an outcome.'? With two well-known American actors in its leading roles, this may have partially stemmed from a view of the film as yet another Canadian-produced movie pandering to a commercial U.S. audience. But in terms of how the film functions as an example of the rape-revenge film so popular during this period, Death Weekend is strangely neither-here-nor-there. Despite solid performances and competent execution, the movie appears to dance unsatisfactorily around some interesting thematic terrain without ever seriously acknowledging it.

Richard Ayres and Brenda Vaccaro in Death Weekend (William Fruet, 1976) [CFDC/Kobal Collection].

It would be incorrect for films like Gutterballs, Torched and Death Weekend to suggest that rape and revenge only intersect in Canadian cinema in English-speaking and exploitation instances. The title alone of Gilles Carle's The Rape of a Sweet Young Girl (Le Viol d'une jeune fille douce, 1968) suggests the centrality of rape to its narrative action; but it is Denys Arcand's Gina (1975) where rape and revenge merge even more explicitly. As one of the key figures of contemporary Canadian cinema, Arcand's name is internationally associated with Quebecois cinema, with films such as Jesus ofMontreal (1989), The Invasion ofthe Barbarians (2003) and The Decline of the American Empire (1986).

Gina begins with a shocking sequence of a woman being beaten and abused by a group of men as the title character (played by Celine Lomez) looks on indifferently while eating breakfast cereal. The central male figure tells the woman that, as an employee, she is to fulfill her work duties as a striptease dancer and not pursue external transactions while working for him. While never called a pimp, the viciousness with which he chastises the the fact that he takes money from her purse to compensate him for his perceived this is effectively his role. Gina interrupts the violence only when she believes it is getting out of control, and while she blots the beaten woman's nose with a tissue, the "boss" asks her if she can replace the girl as a dancer. Gina agrees and catches a train to the Quebecois town of Louisville. Simultaneously, the film introduces a team of four documentary filmmakers traveling from Montreal to Louisville to make a documentary about the textile industry. A supervisor from the National Film Board makes it clear to them that their project is controversial, but the four men are determined to continue production. In between the lengthy periods of the film that focus on the progress of the documentary - including interviews with local townsfolk (mostly women and the elderly) about how their lives have been affected by the poor, exploitative working conditions of the town's cotton factory -Gina establishes an informal friendship with the film crew. They hang out, smoke marijuana, go ice-skating, and accept a challenge to a game of pool with two burly snowmobile-riders, who are humiliated when Gina and her partner easily beat them.

The crew attend Gina's striptease performance at the hotel with the hardworking factory employee Dolores (Frederique Collin), whom they had previously interviewed. The evening becomes uncomfortable when the two men whom Gina and the film crew had earlier beaten at pool turn up with their snowmobile riding gang. The gang sexually harass and intimidate Gina before, during and after her performance. Refusing the advances of the gang's leader, Gina says goodnight to the film crew and retires to her room, where the fifteen of them, including women, and all wearing their brightly colored balaclavas, parkas and in and viciously gang rape her. The deeply traumatized Gina showers and drinks gin, calming herself for the walk to a phone booth where she calls her "manager" who turns up at the hotel the next morning with a group of heavies. The film crew are unaware of what has happened to Gina and do not understand why she suddenly does not wish to talk to them. They face their own crisis, however, when they are informed that the owner of the textile factory has persuaded the National Film Board to cancel the documentary project, barring the crew from the premises of any textile factory in Canada. After the crew pack up and return to Montreal, Gina follows the leader of the snowmobile gang around town, while her manager locates the gang's headquarters. That night he and his associates surprise the gang at their abandoned ship on a frozen beat them with baseball bats and chains. Three snowmobile riders manage to escape, but Gina (who is waiting in a car outside) sees them and pursues them in a fast-paced action sequence that climaxes with the final rapist being fed through a woodchipper. The film finishes by showing what has happened to its central protagonists: Gina boards a plane to Mexico, the film crew happily shoot a television program about a crime of passion in Montreal, and smiling Dolores finally marries her fiance.

At first glance, the juxtaposition of the textile documentary story with Gina's rape-revenge tale may seem incongruous, but the behind-the-scenes details of the film's production allow insight into how Arcand unites these two narrative threads to create his overall impact. Long before his status as a credible auteur was established, Arcand had a reputation within the Canadian film industry as "an unbankable trouble-maker."" a political agitator whose Direct Cinema-imbued documentary work focused on controversial subject matters. Like the filmmakers in Gina, he, too, worked with the National Film Board, and had a documentary about textile production shut down. Arcand began filming Cotton Mill (On est an cotton, 1970) in 1968, and while the film finished shooting in 1970, broader nervousness about artists and radicals during the October Crisis lead to the cancellation of the project. The National Film Board considered the film to be unreasonably biased and banned it, garnering Arcand a reputation as a "champion of free speech."19 According to Pierre Veronneau, Gina began solely as a rape-revenge film, and Arcand later added the autobiographical aspects to emphasize his broader social critique.20 Generic references to the Western have been identified in the film,21 and in terms of its narrative structure, construction of a "frontier" space, and in particular the narrative-propelling function of a woman's rape as the cause of male confrontation, this association makes sense.

But in its bringing together of the textile documentary storyline with Gina's rape-revenge story, Gina also looks explicitly at industrial exploitation and the abuse of workers in all its guises, and frames rape in a broader picture of corruption, inequality and unfair work practices. The film focuses on the economic exploitation of a range of of factory workers like Dolores and the elderly man interviewed by the documentary crew; the staff and unhappy wife of the man who runs the hotel; sex industry workers like Gina herself; and the unnamed woman whose beating was so graphically depicted in the film's opening moments. As an outraged Gina explains to her "manager" after their arrival in Louisville, "I've been pushed around before, but never like this." There is an implication that while she understood that the type of already nasty sexual harassment she faced before the rape was part of the job, to be gang-raped by fifteen people is an occupational hazard she was unprepared for. The vengeance sequence where Gina mows down some of her rapists is privileged as the film's climactic moment, and draws parallels with the many rape-revenge films that were finding success in the United States during this period. To some degree, this supports criticisms of the film in Canada at the time of its release as "attempting to copy the `American way. 11122 But this grossly neglects how specifically Arcand's broader social critique of Canada (and Quebec in particular) manifests itself in Gina. This is nowhere clearer than during the rape scene itself, as the Canadian national anthem plays in the background while Gina is viciously assaulted. The act of rape is therefore explicitly tied to an entrenched system of exploitation and abuse that, to Arcand at least, was intrinsic to the nation itself.

France

The recent cinematic movement referred to as the "New French Extremity" offers one of the most immediately recognizable instances of the contemporary rape-revenge film. As will be explored further in the next chapter, films such as Baise-moi (Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, 2000) and Irreversible (Gaspar Noe, 2002) explicitly engage and explore the boundaries of rape-revenge, while Martyrs (Pascal Laugier, 2008), Inside (A l'interieu, Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, 2005), High Tension (Haute Tension, Alexandre Aja, 2003), Frontier(s) (Frontiere[s], Xavier Gens, 2007), Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis, 2001) and Bruno Dumont's Humanite (L'humanite, 1999) and Twentynine Palms (Dumont, 2003) all involve rape or sexual violence in some way. But revenge tales more generally have a strong history in French cinema, as demonstrated by auteurist offerings such as Claude Chabrol's The Beast Must Die (Que la bete meure, 1969) and, of course, one of the most famous female avenger films of all time, Francois Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black (La Mariee etait en noir, 1968). Following in this tradition, a series of French rape-revenge films were produced during the 1970s and 1980s alongside the more widely discussed American rape-revenge cycle.

Rape-revenge films from this period demonstrate the variety of ways that sexual violence and vengeance were conceptually configured during this period. The Old Gun (Le vieux Fusil, Robert Enrico, 1975) is set during World War II in occupied France, where a disillusioned surgeon attempts to hide his wife and daughter from the Nazis, and seeks revenge when he discovers they have been raped and murdered. Act of Aggression (L'agression, Gerard Pires, 1975) addresses the potential futility of revenge in a rape-revenge context. Based on Montreal-based writer John Buell's novel The Shrewsdale Exit (1972), Pires' film focuses on a man's frustrations after the law is unable to satisfactorily respond to the rape and murder of his wife Helene and daughter Patty after a gang of motorcyclists terrorizes them. While the novel's focus is primarily upon the ethical turmoil of the male protagonist as he rallies against the motorcyclists he believes responsible, the film is distracted by what becomes its central area of blossoming romance between Paul (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and his sister-in-law Sarah (Catherine Deneuve). Both these actors were considered sex symbols at the time, explaining perhaps why the emphasis of the film shifts from the rape and murder of Paul's wife and daughter to some degree. However, the deployment of a rapeas-seduction motif during their courtship exposes Pires' ambivalence towards rape. After Sarah's arrival, Paul gets drunk and attempts to sexually assault her when she takes him back to his home to sober up. Her response to his announcement that he wants to "ball" her, and his subsequent violent pursuit around the house constructs it as an attempted rape as she screams at him, "You want to do to me what they did to Helene!" In the world of Act of Aggression, rape is apparently only a problem if it involves murder. That Sarah ends this scene by taking off her wedding ring, stripping and saying to Paul, "Come on, I dare you!" indicates that rape here is merely part of a broader ritual of seduction that both Paul and Sarah seem both familiar and comfortable with.

Because the spotlight is placed more on Paul and Sarah's relationship than it is on Paul's with the fact that rape itself is dismissed from within the diegesis as being serious only when associated with intensity of the film's climax is substantially weakened. Paul finally finds himself in a position to enact his revenge upon the three motorcyclists when it is revealed that they did not rape and murder Helene and Patty after all. While they were responsible for the initial assault that drove Paul off the road, it was, in fact, Andre (Claude Brasseur), a man whom Paul had believed was an ally in his search for the motorcyclists, who was responsible. The revelation that he had attempted to kill the wrong party should have provided the source of the film's thematic clout about the ethical haziness of revenge, but in this context at least, this message is potentially complicated by a romance problematically constructed through the equating of rape with seduction.

Not all rape-revenge films of this period in France feature male avengers. French documentary maker and feminist Marie-Annick Bellon (working under the alias Yannick Bellon) released a low-budget film in 1978 called Love Violated (L'Amour viole), where a young nurse is gang-raped by a group of four men in an isolated country area. The film focuses on her mission to seek justice through a legal system ill-equipped to deal with her trauma.

Six years before Act ofAggression, Rene Clement cast a pre-Chato's Land and Death Wish Charles Bronson in the rape-revenge thriller, Rider on the Rain (La Passager de la pluie, 1969). Unlike Act of Aggression and Bronson's latter rape-revenge offerings Rider on the Rain focuses primarily on the experience of its female rape-surviving protagonist, the young and naive Mellie (Marlene Jobert). Far from Act ofAggression's ambivalence about rape, Mellie's assault and the consequent complications that from the trauma of the rape itself and from the fallout after Bronson's mysterious Colonel Dobbs arrives to investigate the whereabouts of the rapist she has are presented sympathetically. Predominantly, the story is mostly told from her subjective not literally through the deployment of first person camera angles, then certainly in its focus on her emotional state and feelings of guilt, fear, anger and confusion. Dobbs' ethical position is ambiguous right up until the end of the film, but despite Mellie (and the spectator's) inability to decide if he is working for or against her, the two develop a platonic bond. It is her relationship with Dobbs (and his final decision to keep her secret about both her rape and the murder of the rapist) that finally grants her the maturity to accept the flaws in her life, forgiving her unfaithful yet jealous husband, and her loving but bitter and passive-aggressive mother.

One Deadly Summer (LEte meurtrier Jean Becker, 1983) places a female rape-avenger at the center of a rape-revenge film that gained great commercial and critical success in France at the time of its release. Set in a rural French town during the mid-1970s, One Deadly Summer follows the story of young and beautiful Elle (Isabelle Adjani) in her attempts to avenge the rape of her mother by three men in Italy in the 1950s that lead to her own birth. Elle moved to the village with her still traumatized mother and a disabled man whom she knew as her father. Elle's relationship with both parents is tumultuous and complicated, as a confronting scene where her mother breastfeeds her adult daughter suggests. The adoptive father's disability is widely believed to have been caused when he fell off a ladder, but a flashback later in the film demonstrates Elle's long-term psychological frailty, showing her as a teenager beating him violently with a shovel after she reads a sign of affection as an inappropriate sexual advance. Both Elle and her mother demonstrate disappointment and disrespect for the adoptive father's inability to seek vengeance for the mother's rape, so Elle accepts this undertaking herself in the belief that the death of the rapists will allow her family life to return to how it was before she found out the truth about her origins. Elle does so by seducing and becoming engaged to naive fire fighter Pin-Pon (Alain Souchon), the son of one of the men she believes responsible for her mother's rape. Discovering that Pin-Pon's father is dead, Elle vows to destroy his whole family. Elle's grasp on sanity weakens further after the wedding, and she discovers that her adoptive father killed the rapists many years ago but did not tell anyone in order to avoid punishment. Shattered by the news that her plan for vengeance was more significantly, that the death of the rapists did not lead to a return to her earlier happier family has a mental collapse and regresses to her nine-year-old self. Deeply in love with Elle, Pin-Pon finds her list of potential victims and decides to continue Elle's plans of vengeance as a sign of devotion. Although knowing Elle had been mentally unstable for a long time, the film ends as Pin-Pon shoots two innocent men.

This plot synopsis fails to capture the eloquence with which Becker presents what may at first appear to be familiar rape-revenge terrain. Guy Austin offers an excellent analysis of One Deadly Summer in which he emphasizes just how crucial the film's unusual democracy of perspective is to its total affect. Rather than presenting the story from one point of view only, the voiceover darts between Pin-Pon, Elle, Elle's mother, Pin-Pon's aunt and Elle's adoptive father." For Austin, this supports his central claim that the film functions as a tug-of-war between male and female genres: the male-oriented recit and sex comedies on one side, and the melodrama or "weepie," which tends to be predominantly understood as female-oriented, on the other.24 Austin does not mention rape-revenge traditions at all, however, and this illu urinates how invisible the trope has become, and how far it has spread into genres not immediately associated with it. Like The Bravados and Act ofAggression, One Deadly Summer can be understood as a failed rape-revenge narrative in the sense that the person who has chosen to peruse a path of vigilante revenge is ultimately foiled. But its cinematic family tree expands well beyond sex comedies, melodramas and films more typically thought of as rape-revenge. As Austin's passing comparison to Betty Blue (37°2 le matin, Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1986) suggests, One Deadly Summer also fits neatly into a filmography of French films concerning women, madness and power'21 such as The Story ofAdele H (L'Histoire d'Adele H, Francois Truffaut, 1975) and Camille Claudel (Bruno Nuytten, 1988).26 From this perspective, One Deadly Summer may be best understood as weaving together many generic, conceptual and thematic threads to create a final, crushing impact. That it grafts these disparate elements so securely to a rape-revenge framework demonstrates the potentially centrifugal force of rape-revenge more generally.

Germany

Even by today's standards, Volker Schlondorff's adaptation of Gunter Grass' The Tin Drum (1982) stands as one of the most vicious depictions of the trauma of World War II from a German perspective, and much of its intensity hinges upon its deployment of sexuality and violence. Beyond the context of twentieth century war, rape has featured in German cinema more broadly, be it in Fritz Lang's powerful M (1931) or Eric Rohmer's adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist's 1808 novel of the same name, The Marquise of 0 (Die Marquise von 0, 1976). Regardless, Schlondorff's The Tin Drum remains perhaps the most widely recognized offering from the New German Cinema. This period, spawned in the 1960s as a conscious step away from the increasing exposure of German audiences to American cinema, and inspired in part by the French New Wave, brought the work of such noted directors as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog and Schlondorff to the attention of international audiences. These films, noted for their art-house aesthetics and humble budgets, were predominantly government funded and provided a platform for perhaps Hollywood careers of three of these auteurs (except for Fassbinder, who died in 1982). According to Aristides Gazetas, the New German Cinema was marked by a collective interest in "the political and social situation arising from the postwar American Occupation," and these films were generally "preoccupied with questions of sexual identity, paranoia and disillusionment within a radical left-wing political framework."27 In regards to rape in particular, its place in the German cinema's vision of the war would become explicit in films such as Helma Sanders-Brahm's Germany, Pale Mother (Deutschland, Bleiche Mutter, 1979), which follows a woman's postwar experience that includes her rape by enemy soldiers.28

It is in this context that Schlondorff's second film, A Degree of Murder (Mord and Totschlag, 1967) is worthy of note, due to its particular configuration of rape and revenge. As the follow-up to his impressive debut Young Torless (Derjunge Torless,1966), A Degree ofMurder did not achieve the critical nor commercial acclaim of its predecessor, despite featuring a soundtrack (now lost) by Rolling Stone Brian Jones, and being retrospectively hailed by Fassbinder as one of the top ten best films of the New German Cinema.29 Sharing a similar focus on meandering urban hipsters as Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966), A Degree of Murder is loosely structured and is largely dedicated to capturing a zeitgeist. Young waitress Marie (Anita Pallenberg) has a fight with her drunk ex-boyfriend Hans (Werner Enke) one night in her apartment, and she shoots him after he beats and attempts to rape her. Confused and panicked, she meets Gunther (Hans Peter Hallwachs) at the cafe where she works and confesses her story, begging for his assistance. In need of the cash that she offers for his services, he agrees and follows her to her apartment, where the two discuss their plans, drink coffee and have sex. Gunther borrows a car from the garage where he works, and he and Marie roll Hans' body up in a rug and place it in the car. With Gunther's friend Fritz (Manfred Fischbeck)-with whom Marie also becomes romantically drive to the country and dump the body near an autobahn construction site. After visiting Fritz' mother, they return to the city. In what is assumed to be some time later, Marie is shown working in the cafe happily, but the final shot of the film shows the discovery of Hans' body by construction workers.

Anita Pallenberg in Degree of Murder (Mord and Totschlag, Volker Schlondorf, 1967) [Rob Houwer Productions/Kobal Collection].

The film consists of a parade of vignettes that only barely pertain to the central narrative: drinking in cafes and bars, hanging out in pinball arcades, shopping, of driving and arguing. Generically, A Degree of Murder features elements of the road movie and the black comedy that revolve around its central crime story of Marie's murder of the man who attempted to rape her. Hans-Berhnard Moeller and George Lellis describe it as less a genre film than an "anti-thriller" that "operates with topoi of the crime film but shows ambivalence about following the rules of the genre too closely."30 Nowhere is this demonstrated more clearly than in the film's opening sequence, where a laughing Marie, Gunther and Fritz playfully chase each other around with a gun near the autobahn as the credits roll. It is as an "antithriller" that Moeller and Lellis suggest A Degree ofMurder functions as a precursor to films such as Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994) in its postmodern, pop-culture-influenced approach to quotation and style."

By comparing A Degree of Murder to Thelma & Louise,32 Moeller and Lellis also tacitly acknowledge that it is a part of rape-revenge film history. Both The Tin Drum and Schlondorff's later film adaptation of Margaret Atwood's 1985 Booker Prize-winning novel The Handmaid's Tale (1990) demonstrate a continued fascination in the director's oeuvre with the relationship between sex and power, an interest that also manifests in A Degree of Murder. On the one hand, in its wandering, lighthearted tone, the assault and attempted rape of Marie early in the film can be taken as an almost insignificant act with little function outside of providing the barest of plot devices to propel the rest of the film. On the other hand, there is something unspoken and undeniably powerful within the constant flashbacks to the attack that Marie experiences throughout the film. She rarely articulates her trauma verbally, and the memories appear to strike her almost randomly-while they are driving or playing foosball. This more long-term trauma is suggested when she finally returns home after burying Hans'- seeing a photograph of Hans next to her bed, she screams hysterically. It may be a stretch to identify A Degree of Murder as a parable of postwar German guilt and trauma, but there is something poignant about Marie's inability (and through their association in disposing of the body, Fritz's and Gunther's also) to deal with the reality of their situation. As they cling desperately to a business-as-usual lightheartedness, despite the overwhelming seriousness of the events that lead them to this point, it is impossible to not reflect on the post-war context.

Not all German rape-revenge films share such prestigious heritage. Despite Eckhart Schmidt's position as a renowned writer and a figure in the West German punk movement during the 1970s, his New Wave movie Loft (1985) is barely remembered outside of Germany. Drunk on its own neon aesthetic, Loft follows the bourgeois young couple Raoul (Andreas Sportelli) and Raphaela (Rebecca Winter), who go to an art exhibition in Loft's dystopian future to find a place to have sex. They are confronted by a violent pack of punks who, furious that the couple have ignored the art, torment them in a violent outburst of class rage. The rape and torture of the couple provokes a naked Raphaela into a vicious retaliation, depicted through a series of ultra violent sequences, including the graphic stabbing of one of the gang in the testicles with a knife.

Unlike Loft, the work of director Uwe Boll has been far from forgotten, and he is widely celebrated as a "love-to-hate" figure in contemporary genre film production. Boll is known mostly for his videogame-to-film adaptations (although he has directed non-videogame-inspired movies) and for what is popularly viewed as his cynical manipulation of German film funding policy.33 His 2005 U.S.-German co-production BloodRayne typifies the type of genre film for which Boll is now notorious. Based on a computer game of the same name, the film follows the story of Rayne (Kristanna Loken), a "dhampir" (half human, half vampire) who is told by a fortune teller that she was conceived when her mother was raped by the King of the Vampires, Kagan (Ben Kingsley). The film follows Rayne through her search for vengeance as she gains allies along the way, until she finally confronts Kagan and kills him in her mother's name.

Another recent German-American rape-revenge co-production is One Way (Reto Salimbeni, 2007). To an international audience, Schweiger may be most immediately recognizable through his role of Sgt. Hugo Stiglitz in Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009), but in Germany he is associated with the hugely successful romantic comedy Rabbit Without Ears (Keinohrhasen, 2007) and its sequel Chicken with Two Ears (Zweiohrkuken, 2009), both of which he produced, wrote, directed and starred in. The Schweiger of One Way is as far from a romantic comedy hero as possible: here he plays Eddie, a successful advertising executive. His engagement to Judy (Stefanie von Pfetten), the daughter of the head of his agency, positions him to become a partner in the company; but despite this, Eddie cannot quell his promiscuity and continues to have affairs. Because of this, he prides himself on not having slept with his shy and mentally unstable colleague Angelina (Lauren Lee Smith), and tells her that the platonic nature of their relationship has provided the solid foundations for their deep friendship. However, when their colleague Anthony (Sebastian Roberts)-Judy's brother and the son of the firm's Angelina, Eddie is placed in a difficult position. Anthony has evidence of Eddie's infidelities and blackmails him into testifying against Angelina's character in court. Anthony is freed because of Eddie's testimony, and Angelina must face an added humiliation on top of her already severe trauma. In retaliation, she announces to the court that she and Eddie were, in fact, lovers, and with Judy's already serious suspicions of her fiance's Judy to break up with him. Eddie loses his job, and that evening gets in a fight with Anthony in a nightclub. After he leaves, a disguised Angelina drugs and seduces Anthony, luring him to a deserted location where she handcuffs him to a car, sodomizes him with a strap-on dildo, and shoots him dead. The nun who is caring for her provides a false alibi when the police begin to investigate, and this leads the police to arrest Eddie for Anthony's murder. Although Angelina tells Eddie that she murdered Anthony, Eddie does not tell this to the court during his trial out of fear that Angelina would commit suicide if placed in prison. Despite it appearing that Eddie will face life in prison for a crime he did not commit, at the last moment Judy takes the stand and provides him with an alibi, adding that she had not come forward sooner out of loyalty to her family. But, she declares, she has had enough: Anthony had raped her when she was fifteen years old, and she was not prepared to further lie to protect his honor. The film ends with a tentative reunion of Eddie and Judy, as a smiling Angelina catches a taxi to the airport to begin a new life elsewhere.

If One Way seems overly complicated, it is. Initially, the film suggests that its particular take on the rape-revenge structure was to focus on the transferral of the notion of rape as a property crime between men into a corporate setting. This comparatively lucid idea rapidly vanishes underneath a frenzy of other less well thought-out elements. Most striking of these is the figure of Eddie, who embodies the film's strangely off-kilter moral compass. Despite the visceral intensity of the rape scenes themselves (firstly, of the gang rape of Angela as a teenager, then Anthony's horrendous attack, and finally her retaliatory assault in the car before she kills him), they are all but forgotten next to the dominant focus upon Eddie's infidelities and the effect it has on Judy. It is in this sense that the film appears to be feebly attempting to offer a "what would you do?" ethical conundrum that falls flat because Eddie is neither likeable nor enigmatic. It is never clear why he cheats on his loving fiancee, for example, and his weakness and greed are rarely presented as general human frailties as much as they are the actions of a selfish, sleazy misogynist. He therefore appears less as an anchor for the plot than yet another revolting man who uses women, be it for personal satisfaction, business reasons, or both.

Even more problematic is the depiction of Angelina herself. While Lauren Lee Smith's outstanding performance should place her as one of the more sympathetic instances of the rape-avenging female, the ideological ambiguity of her character makes her difficult to celebrate. The film opens in a rural scene where four rednecks gang-rape a young teenage girl, but they are interrupted by a man Angelina later calls "the black General" (an older, African American man in a military uniform) who shoots the rapists. Most immediately, this scene's explicit referencing to the original I Spit on Your Grave (and, later, the clear homage to Lady Snowblood [Toshiya Fujita, 1973] when Angelina kills Anthony) expose One Way's conscious engagement with rape-revenge traditions.

The problem with the "black General," from the film's determination to hold a non-white character responsible for the violent tendencies of a white that he's not real. Angelina has severe mental issues, and she herself understands that she must take anti-psychotics to keep the "black General" away. While there is no doubt that her rape by Anthony is real, the film is ambiguous about whether the gang rape she swears happened when she was fifteen actually occurred or was a figment of her deranged mind. It is, in part, this supposed "false" rape accusation that frees Anthony (along with Eddie's damning testimony). The film never addresses Angelina's background properly, and by painting her both as dangerously insane and as a woman with the potential to make false accusations of rape, the film is inadvertently hostile to her experience, despite the remarkable efforts of Smith to bring the character to life. It is unclear how the departure of Angelina on an airplane to begin a new life can be seen as any kind of victory for her; that it took Judy's admission of rape for her story about Anthony to be believed renders her just as powerless as ever. One Way's inability to address the complex issues that it sets up pushes it far too close to a "blame the victim" treatment of rape, because Angelina's actions are explained not because she was viciously violated and then denied j ustice because of male corruption, but simply because she is "crazy."

Hong Kong

For Sally Stockbridge, rape is so pervasive in Hong Kong cinema that it is a "dominant trope."34 For audiences outside Asia at least, rape and revenge in Hong Kong film merge most readily in the U.S.-Hong Kong co-production Enter the Dragon (Robert Clouse, 1973). This film was by no means unique in its deployment of rape and revenge in a Hong Kong kung fu context - for example, Shaw Brothers films such as The Kiss of Death (Ho Meng Hua, 1973) and The Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan (Yuen Chor, 1972) were both action films that focused upon rape and revenge. But as Bruce Lee's final film, Enter the Dragon launched his iconic status as the face of Hong Kong action film internationally, bringing that country's kung fu cinema to a new audience. Bruce Lee stars as Shaolin martial artist Lee, who is invited to a martial arts tournament on an isolated island by the enigmatic Han (Kien Shih), who had defied the laws of Shaolin and was expelled in shame. Lee is engaged as an undercover agent for British intelligence to investigate Han's involvement in drugs and the sex trade. Before he leaves on his mission, Lee's father tells him that one of Han's assistants, O'Hara (Robert Wall), was responsible for the death of Lee's sister: when she realized that O'Hara was going to rape her, she committed suicide by stabbing herself in the stomach with a shard of broken glass. As the plot unfolds, Lee is finally forced into battle with both O'Hara and Han himself, and glass plays a symbolic part in both battles as a reminder of his sister's fate. At the film's conclusion, Lee ultimately defeats both men because of his Shaolin training.

The most vivid and notorious depictions of rape in Hong Kong cin manifestations of in the "Category III" films. In 1988, a three-tiered ratings structure was introduced, where Category I status was granted for films intended for all ages, Category II pertained to films not suitable for children, and the infamous Category III was applied to films restricted to adult audiences of 18 years and over.35 According to one account, by 2001 Category III films accounted for up to 25 percent of Hong Kong film production,36 and it was applied to such notorious films as Sex and Zen (Michael Mak, 1991) and Naked Killer (Wong Jing, 1992). While Andrew Grossman narrows Category III film down to ten major subgenres (of which rape-revenge is one),37 Darrell W. Davis and Yeh Yeh Yueh-yu contend the films are far too diverse and varied to allow such a reading. Instead, they offer three broad conceptual categories: "Quasi-pornographic films" (because actual hardcore pornography was banned outright), genre films (particularly thrillers, gangster films, and horror) and "pornoviolence,"38 the latter of which would include rape-revenge. These rape-revenge examples include movies like Her Vengeance (Xue mei gui, Ngai Kai Lam, 1988), The Wrath of Silence (Chen mo de gu niang, Frankie Chan, 1994), The Lady Punisher (Tung chong 2 mung, Cheung C. Law, 1994), Daughter of Darkness (Mie men can an zhi nie sha, Kai Ming Lai, 1993), Naked Poison (Shou xing xin ren lei, Man Kei Chin, 2000) and Water Margin: Heroes' Sex Stories (Shui hui chuen ji ying hiu sik, David Lam, 1999).

As Linda Ruth Williams has indicated, the extreme depiction of often highly glamorized sexual violence that openly suggests that it is possible for a rape victim to enjoy their assault has caused the banning of many (if not most) of the Category III films that depict rape in countries like the United Kingdom.39 perhaps not has added a broader cult value to these movies for audiences in countries whose dominant treatment of rape is strikingly different from that depicted in films like the Raped by an Angel series (1993-2003), for example. These hugely popular Hong Kong Category III films began with Raped by an Angel (Xiang Gang qi an zhi qiangjian, Wai-keung Lau, 1993), followed by Raped by an Angel 2: The Uniform Fan (Keung gaan 2: chai fook you waak, Aman Chang, 1998), Raped by an Angela: Sexual Fantasy of the ChiefExecutive (Keunggaan: Oiyau waak, Aman Chang, 1998), Raped by an Angel 4: The Rapists' Union (Jiang jian zhong ji pian zhi zui hou gao yang, Jing Wong, 1994) and Raped by an Angel 5: The Final Judgement (Billy Tang, 2000). Most of these films share a similar rape-revenge structure: a rape survivor (or group of survivors) mobilizes to seek vengeance against the man (or men) who raped them. The depictions of rape in this series are notable for their glossy eroticism and the focus upon the supposed "pleasure" of the victim.

The final Raped by an Angel film was directed by Hin Sing "Billy" Tang, who attained earlier notoriety for his representation of rape and revenge in Red to Kill (1994). As one of the most famously seedy Category III films, it has been described as a "sincerely atrocious ... perversion,"40 "a foul monument to depravity, 1141 and (for Michael Atkinson at the Village Voice), no less than "perhaps the most vile exploitation film about rape ever made."42 Red to Kill opens from the first-person perspective of its central rapist and killer as he walks down a shadowy, noir-like corridor and abducts an unidentified woman in a red satin dress. He viciously murders her and then rapes her nude corpse. This sequence is intercut with a social worker, Ka Lok Cheung (Money Lo), as she visits a frantic woman who throws herself out of her apartment window with her young son. Shaken by this event, Ka Lok tries to resign but is sent on another job, where she meets Ming-Ming, a teenage girl who loves dancing and who lives with an intellectual disability. Ka Lok tells Ming-Ming that her guardian has died in a car accident, and she takes the girl to live in the Social Welfare department's sheltered workshop and hostel, run by Mr. Chan (Ben Ng). While at first upset, the sweet and charming Ming-Ming adapts to her new life and develops a close relationship with Ka Lok, who also becomes her dance instructor. At the same time, the murders, rapes and attempted assaults continue, and are often shown again from the first-person perspective of the perpetrator. Revealed to be perpetrated by Mr. Chan himself, these attacks are triggered when he sees a woman (or, at one stage, a young female child) wearing red (the primal scene explaining this is shown in flashback, where his promiscuous, red-wearing mother murders his father when he catches her with another man). Neighbors of the shelter demand that the "crazy" ward be moved for their safety, but Mr. Chan and Ka Lok insist they are not dangerous and are simply "idiots." Both Mr. Chan and Ka Lok are moved by Ming-Ming's kindness to her peers, but when Ming-Ming performs a dance in a red dress, Mr. Chan is unable to control himself. In a lengthy, explicit and revolting sequence, he viciously beats and rapes her but does not kill her. The scene showing her trauma immediately following the rape is no less gratuitous: as she showers, her breasts and genital area are shown in medium and close-up shots that are frequently detached from the rest of her body. As she frantically cuts off her own pubic hair with a straight razor, she slashes her genitals until she draws blood in a scene almost as disturbing as the rape sequence itself.

Ka Lok discovers the traumatized Ming-Ming, and they take Mr. Chan to court. In a brief courtroom sequence, Mr. Chan is found not guilty because the judge -swayed by the defense lawyer's suggestions that Ming-Ming seduced Mr. Chan but was not mentally cogent enough to be able to understand consent-rejects the case and releases him because he believes MingMing is not capable of providing useful testimony. Mr. Chan continues to terrorize the now-shattered Ming-Ming, and begins to harass Ka Lok, the latter realizing the importance of red to Mr. Chan when Ming-Ming reacts badly to a red t-shirt. Although she dresses up seductively in red and approaches Mr. Chan in a bar (causing him to pour ice down his underpants in a rare comedic moment), she does not act to subdue him. Instead, he confronts MingMing and Ka Lok at the shelter, and, announcing repeatedly to the women "I must fuck you to death," he attempts to rape Ka Lok. Ming-Ming becomes hysterical and rips her clothes off as she begs him to stop, beating him with shoes and plastic trays. The two women fight Mr. Chan, who at one point is stabbed in the chest with fluorescent tubes and in the eye with a flower stem. Such attacks, however, do not curb the intensity of his violence. Once he has subdued Ming-Ming, Mr. Chan returns his attention to Ka Lok. She seductively lures him towards her on a saw bench, and in a graphic climax she kills him by cutting his head in half. The film ends in Ming-Ming's hospital room, where Ka Lok and Ming-Ming's friends weep and beg her to recover. She does not, and she dies as the film's credits begin to run.

While the plot outline of Red to Kill may seem shocking enough, it does not begin to credit the levels of depravity that have garnered this film its notoriety. Its graphic and confronting rape sequences are compounded by the gut-churning addition of Ming-Ming's status as someone living with an intellectual disability. Very little has been critically written on this film, no doubt for these reasons alone - surely, of all the films in this book, Red to Kill is one of the few instances that are simply beyond comprehension. The compelling work of Julian Stringer on Category III films presents a useful critical framework to consider a film such as this. While certainly not aiming to "rescue" or celebrate movies like Red to Kill, he provides a historical context in which their production makes sense. As Stringer explains, Category III films produced in Hong Kong in the lead up to the handover of the island from the British back to Chinese sovereign control on 1 July, 1997, can be understood as manifesting an "extreme pessimism and an alarmist mentality"43 of a dystopian future, and thus "such representations of eroticism and cruelty can be read as the death dance of a wicked, economically decadent city."44 He also notes that as Category III films engaged with working-class audiences (who cannot afford to go to the more expensive cinemas that play Hollywood films), these movies at this time spoke directly to the fears of the future many people faced:

To put it bluntly, many of the people who work on the films, and certainly those who view them, are the ones least able to act on any possible desire to migrate from Hong Kong, or at least to be financially "safe" after 1997. At the same time as the genre is careful not to include material that could cause political problems later on, it also speaks in a direct way to the people who will most be affected by reunification. The core Category 3 audience does not share the same pleasures as the arthouse demographic because its future is more limited in possibility.45

Although Stringer does not discuss Red to Kill specifically, that it depicts government officials such as Mr. Chan and the judge in his rape trial as vicious and corrupt representatives of the state is of no small note. Even more noteworthy is the significance of the color of communism as a whole - in Mr. Chan's behavior. During Ming-Ming's rape, for example, he explicitly flags the color as the cause for his violence, with statements such as "Why do you wear red clothes?" "I hate red most of all!" and "You know I hate red." Mr. Chan's hatred of red and its association with his incomprehensible and sickening violence can therefore be linked to broader fears about the impending "red" Chinese control as outlined by Stringer. Regardless of the historical specificity of this film to its era of production, however, even among all the films surveyed for this book, Red to Kills brutality and impact stand apart.

India

The Hindi film industry in informally referred to as "Bollywood"is today renowned as one of the most commercially successful and productive in the world outside of Hollywood. With a reputation for producing song-and dance romances and action films, Hindi cinema is often dismissed by "Westerners and Indians alike as an example of the worst escapist excesses of postcolonial capitalism."46 But as Gregory D. Booth has argued, such assumptions disregard the fact that Hindi films continue many cultural and literary traditions that existed before cinema. He identifies the origins of two of the main female character types of the Hindi epic film within the major ancient Indian Sanskrit epics. Along with the "chaste, long suffering example of Sita in the Ramayana," he also discusses the "determined, revenge seeking model of Draupadi" from the Mahabharata.47 In their cinematic form, these Draupadi figures commonly populate martial epics and are "often depicted as divinely inspired or, as actual (but temporary) manifestations of, such militant female goddesses as Durga and Kali."48 The avenging female appears beyond the martial epic, and in particular is notable in the context of Hindi rape-revenge films like renowned director B.D Chopras Scales of justice (Insaaf Ka Tarazu, 1980), The Revenge (Pratighat, N. Chandra, 1987), Damini: Lightning (Rajkumar Santoshi, 1993), and You Have My Heart (Hamara DilAapke Paas Hai, Satish Kaushik, 2000). The representation of women as a "social issue" to be "solved" can be traced back to the early days of Indian popular cinema49; and in the 1980s in particular the figure of the tragic/romantic woman began to be visibly overtaken by the popularity of a female equivalent of the angry male "antihero"- these women are provoked (often by rape) to take violent action.5o

Rape was an issue of much public debate leading up to and during this period, provoked by highly publicized and controversial cases concerning teenage girl Mathura, which began in 1974, and, later, the Maya Tyagi case in 1978. In both instances these women were gang-raped by police, and women's groups protested voraciously when the two policemen in the former case were found "not guilty." The Mathura case in particular can be seen to have inspired the foundational Hindi avenging woman film Scales ofJustice, which was released at a period of rising vocal feminist sentiment. This discourse mobilized around the vigorous public debate regarding how to implement and legislate the necessary updating of rape laws that cases such as these indicated were so grossly out of date.51 For some Indian feminist critics at the time, films such as this were merely exploitative attempts by the commercial film industry to profit from contemporary scandal." But later feminist critics do not dismiss the Scales ofJustice so easily, and Jyotika Virdi celebrates the fact that it "truly centers on the woman's narrative."53

The movie begins with a woman screaming as a hand (off-camera) rips her sari. She runs behind a frosted screen, and there is a silhouette of her being raped. Another man's shadow interrupts them and fights the rapist off the woman, and the rapist is stabbed. Cutting to a courtroom, a military man wearing many medals defends himself against a murder charge by saying that just as he kills to protect "Mother India," so too he must protect Indian women. After the title sequence that runs over various close-ups of a Lady Justice statuette, a beauty pageant introduces the film's central character, Bharti (Zeenat Aman), a beloved "beauty queen" and fashion model with many fans, including the wealthy businessman Ramesh (Raj Babbar). Bharti is happily engaged to Ashok (Deepak Prasher) and lives with her young sister Neeta (Padmini Kolhapure). Ramesh attempts to befriend Bharti, Ashok and Neeta, and throws Bharti a fancy birthday party where he gives her an expensive-looking necklace. Soon after, he goes to her apartment and is let in by Neeta before she leaves for school. He shows Bharti photographs from the birthday party and attempts to give her a portrait he has painted. However, Bharti is distracted by a phone call from Ashok, which infuriates Ramesh. He beats her, mocks her, drags her around her house by her hair and finally ties her up on her bedroom floor and rapes her. There is little nudity, and the intensity of Bharti's trauma is vivid as she cries and screams. Neeta comes home and discovers Bharti and Ramesh; Neeta escapes, upset but unseen.

The devastated Bharti tells Ashok what has happened, and she decides to press charges, despite the warnings of her sympathetic female lawyer (Simi Garewal) that "for the woman, a rape trial is no less a rape." Although Ramesh admits to his defense lawyer that he raped Bharti, a vindictive attack upon Bharti's character is launched in court that depends heavily upon associations between her job as a fashion model and an assumed looseness of morals (at one point he even suggests that she is a prostitute). In this lengthy courtroom scene, he declares "I object to the presence of women like this in our society." After Neeta is called to the stand and coerced into giving ambiguous testimony, Ramesh is found not guilty. Bharti is humiliated, loses her career, and breaks off her engagement with Anouk. With both her and Neeta suffering from damaged reputations, they move to another city. About two years later, Bhati now has a job as a typist. Neeta has learned to type and attends a job interview, only to find her potential boss is Ramesh. In another torturous scene, he locks the girl in his office and terrorizes her, forcing her to strip and then raping her also. When Bharti discovers her traumatized sister, she gets a gun, goes to Ramesh's office and shoots him at point-blank range. Again, Bharti finds herself in court facing the same male lawyer and the same male judge, and she delivers a lengthy speech in which she makes it clear that the legal system had neglected her and facilitated Ramesh's death. So moved are the lawyer and the judge by her speech and Neeta's powerful tale of abuse at Ramesh's hands that the judge not only finds Bharti not guilty, but resigns. The film concludes as Bharti and Anouk are reunited, joined by his conservative family who finally accept her.

If the plot outline of Scales ofJustice sounds familiar, it is because it is almost identical to that of Lamont Johnson's Lipstick (1976). These similarities come down to the shared fact that both films even depend upon an extratextual association between its lead female characters and their status as famous glamor icons (just as Margaux Hemingway was a famous supermodel, so Zeenat Aman had won the title of "Miss Asia" in 196954). But to dismiss Scales ofJustice as merely a color-by-numbers remake of an American film grossly undervalues the specificity of the film to Indian culture at that particular historical moment. When Bharti announces to the court, "I wish the eyes of the law would open to the blood to see how the mistakes of the law are making beasts of men," it is near impossible to not recall the details of the Mathura rape trial and the debates it provoked. Unlike many Indian feminists at the time who decried the rape scenes in Scales of Justice as exploitative and directed squarely at a sadistic male audience,55 Virdi disagrees and notes that while "protracted," the rape of Bharti in particular "conveys nothing but pain, horror and naked male aggression."56 But the film's conclusion in particular offers a number of areas of concern. Most obviously, that Bharti is suddenly deemed "acceptable" enough to return to both her fiance and his conservative, middleclass family, combined with the resignation of the judge, situates the film firmly in the realm of fantasy, despite its earlier attempts (particularly during the court scenes) to add a sense of believability to Bharti's experience. Even more troubling, as Virdi suggests, is Bharti's declaration that "women are temples": By situating women less as human beings whose rights have been violated and positioning them as sacred objects (returning them to a patriarchal goddess/slave binary), the film contradicts many of its central arguments about the urgency to treat women precisely beyond such binaries.57

Outside of India, the most immediately recognizable intersection of rape and revenge in Indian cinema is surely Bandit Queen (Shekhar Kapur, 1994). Presented as the "true story" of the legendary outlaw figure Phoolan Devi, who was assassinated in 2001 at the age of 37, the film was celebrated at international film festivals such as Cannes, and launched director Kapur's Hollywood film career, reaching its peak with the Oscar-winning biopics of Elizabeth I of England, Elizabeth (1998) and Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007). Bandit Queen opens as the adult Phoolan Devi (Seema Biswas) announces to the camera from behind bars, "I'm Phoolan Devi, sisterfuckers!" It then cuts to 1968, when as an 11-year-old (Sunita Bhatt), the lower-caste Phoolan Devi is forced into an early marriage where she is beaten and raped by her husband. She runs back to her family but is sexually harassed by the local Thakurs, and beaten for fighting back. Later, the police rape her, and she realizes early on that justice will not be afforded to her through conventional means. Kidnapped by a group of bandits, she is repeatedly raped by the leader of the group until Vikram (Anil Sahu), a lower-caste member of the gang, has enough of seeing her abused and shoots the leader. Vikram and Phoolan Devi fall in love and turn the gang's attentions to stealing from the rich in order to provide assistance to the poor. During this period she also locates her husband, the man who raped her as a child, and beats him to death with the butt of a rifle while he is tied to a tree. Sympathetic to the men that tormented Phoolan Devi, fellow Thakurs SriRam (Govind Namdeo) and LalaRam (Sitaram Panchal) betray the couple, and Vikram is murdered. Phoolan Devi is captured, gang-raped and beaten while chained to a shed. When she recovers, she forms a new, vengeance-seeking gang with Man Singh (Manoj Bajpai). Together, they raid a city and steal valuables to give to the poor. They return to the village where she was gang raped, and execute twenty-four members of the upper caste in a massacre. Because of Phoolan Devi's fame and celebrated status among the lower castes, the police decide that killing her will simply martyr her; so after brutally killing most other members of her gang, they force her to surrender. The film finishes with text announcing her release from j all in 1992, two years "after a government of lower castes came to power in the state of Uttar Pradesh." However, while SriLam died in an episode of gang violence while she was imprisoned, LalaRam was still alive at the time of the film's production.

While the film met with success on the international film festival circuit, in India it provoked a number of controversies. Partially, these had to do with the film's tenuous status as a representative of "Indian cinema," as the British television station Channel 4 funded it, and most of the film crew (initially, at least) were non-Indian.58 Because it was not focused solely on an Indian distribution context, the graphic representation of sexual violence and nudity (representations that existed far beyond any cinematic conventions of the Indian film industry) were also contentious. Bandit Queen was initially banned outright in India, and when it was finally released uncut, many cinemas offered separate screening sessions for women.59 In its status as a rape-revenge film, perhaps most significant is the response of Phoolan Devi herself to the supposed biopic. While she had given her permission for the film to be made (it was based on her 1994 book I, Phoolan Devi: The Autobiography of India's Bandit Queen), she was so outraged by the final product that she went to some lengths to stop the film from being shown in India. Aside from outright factual inaccuracies, Leela Fernandes suggests that it was the graphic manner in which the rapes were shown that Phoolan Devi felt were "a portrayal that would violate her sense of honor in the context of the hegemonic social norms in India that depicts rape victims as figures of shame and dishonour."60 Fernandes continues:

The film's emphasis on rape shifts Phoolan Devi from a legendary figure within the Indian context - a woman dacoit, both heroic and notorious, who stole from the rich and distributed wealth to the poor - to the status of rape victim. The film's presentation of rape as an explanation for Phoolan Devi's transformation into an outlaw transforms rape into the sole motivation for her subsequent actions. This presents a sharp contrast to the autobiography, which deals at length with a complex conception of social justice that motivated Phoolan Devi's numerous raids on various villages. In her vision of justice, resistance was not merely a retaliation against her own personal experiences of violence but also against the exploitation of lower-caste villagers by upper-caste landlords."

While Bandit Queen combines a harrowing and powerful display of the violence against Indian lower-caste women with a sympathetic treatment of the emotional trauma that lead the character of Phoolan Devi in the film to exact her revenge, that the real Phoolan Devi herself felt that this representation deviated so dramatically from her own experience and political agenda cannot be overlooked. Was the film Bandit Queen itself simply another patriarchal construction that Phoolan Devi was forced to rally against? In the context of the many real struggles and hardships she faced, fought and overcame during her remarkable life, there may be evidence to support this claim.

Japan

It is an understatement to suggest that Akira Kurosawa's Academy Award winning Rashomon (1950) is not any one of the most famous films on the subject of rape, but also one of the most influential Japanese movies ever produced the film tells the story of the murder of a samurai (Masayuki Mori) and the rape of his wife (Machiko Kyo) from four different points of view; and Colette Balmain has noted that "the manner in which Rashomon deals with rape can be considered typical of Japanese cultural mythology, in which rape has not, until very recently, been considered a crime."62 The place of rape in Japanese cinema transcends this key cinematic moment, of course. As demonstrated in areas such as the notorious Japanese "pink" cinema,63 sexual violence is deployed in a manner distinct from Western contexts. There is a long history of torture in the Japanese visual arts that predates cinema that differs from dominant European and North American traditions in particular.64 Katsushika Hokusai's Edo-period ukiyo-e woodcut The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (Tako to ama, circa 1820) famously typifies the striking explicitness of earlier depictions of sexual activity: this painting is also often cited as the origins of the so-called "tentacle rape" featured in the infamous hentai Legend of the Overfiend (Chdjin densetsu Urotsukid8ji, Hideki Takayama, 1989). At the same time, there is also a long folk heritage of vengeful, wronged women. Even non-Japanese viewers familiar with J-horror films such as Ring (Ringu, Hideo Nakata, 1998) will recognize the figure of the onryo, a vengeful spirit who returns after death to seek revenge for a wrong committed against them while they were alive. The history of this figure can be traced back to the Kojiki goddess Izanami and medieval Noh plays.65

For Colette Balmain, the depiction of rape in Japanese cinema (particularly in rape-revenge films) "has a direct correlation with the `real' world," given that "Japanese society is predicated on female obedience and submission."66 Sharing a focus on Japanese rape-revenge film, James R. Alexander observes that these films not only examine but are often highly critical of the "traditional social norms regarding women's role in public society and the social stigma of rape."67 This is apparent in Kameto Shindo's 1968 horror film Kuroneko, his follow up to the supernatural vengeance tale Onibaba (1964). Kuroneko has a strongly mythic tone as it delivers its tale of two raped and murder women who return from the grave as feline vampires intent on revenge. An intersection of sexual violence and retribution is also evident in Female Demon Ohyaku (Yoen dokufuden hannya no ohyaku, Yoshihiro Ishikawa, 1968) and in a range of other Japanese rape-revenge films including Rica the MixedBlood Girl (Konketsuji Rika, Ko Nakahira, 1972); Girl Boss Revenge: Sukeban (Sukeban, 1973) and School ofthe Holy Beast (Seiju gakuen, 1974), both directed by Norifumi Suzuki; Grotesque Perverted Slaughter: Present Day Bizarre Sex Crime (Gendai ryoki sei hanzai, 1976) and Please Rape Me Once More (Mou Ichido Yaru, 1979), both directed by Giichi Nishihara; Entrails ofa Beautiful Woman or Guts ofa Virgin 2 (Bijo no harawata, Kazuo "Gaira" Komizu, 1986); All Night Long (Ooru naito rongu, Katsuya Matsurama, 1992); High Heeled Punishers (Oshioki haihiiru, Takashi Kodama, 1994); and Blood Sisters (Senketsu no kizuna: Kichiku reipuhan o shinkan saseta shimai, Daisuke Yamanouchi, 2000). The excessiveness of the titles here should not suggest that rape-revenge exists only in the terrain of horror and softcore pornography, however. For example, both the Sonny Chiba martial arts vehicle The Streetfighter (Gekitotsu! Satsujin ken, Shigehiro Ozawa, 1974) and the third installment of the popular Lone Wolf and Cub series, Babycart in Peril (Kozure Okami: Oya no kokoro ko no kokoro, Buichi Saito, 1972), revolve around rape-revenge storylines. Additionally, it is worth emphasizing that rape has a strong presence in Japanese cinema well beyond the context of rape-revenge, as typified by a range of texts stemming from Go, Go, Second Time Virgin (Yuke, Yuke, Nidome No Shojo, Koji Wakamatsu, 1969), the Rape.!13th Hour,68 Hanzo the Razor'61 Subway Serial Rape70 and Rapeman71 series, and anime such as Legend of the Overfiend and Perfect Blue (Satoshi Kon, 1998).

As James R. Alexander states, in pink rape films that do not include an element of revenge, rape itself acts as both a tool of vengeance against, and a method of subduing, women who do not adhere to traditional submissive roles: "Rape is a punishment for display of ambition beyond one's expected role in society and by which the victim is permanently degraded in the eyes of her family and society."72 In these situations, the idea of the rape survivor herself seeking revenge is therefore illogical, and Alexander looks towards contemporary Japanese rape films like Takashi Ishii's Freeze Me (Furiizu Mii, 2000) and Takashi Miike's Audition (Odishon, 1999) as demonstrations of what he considers a "maturation" of Japanese cinema. Although convincing and vigorously argued, the absence in Alexander's essay on rape-revenge in Japanese cinema of one of the key figures of Japanese pink cinema, Meijo Kaji, is worthy of note. For non-Japanese audiences, Kaji may be most readily identifiable for her title role in Lady Snowblood (Shurayukihime, Toshiya Fujita, 1973), which Quentin Tarantino so explicitly paid homage to in structure, theme and style in Kill Bill Vol. 1. As Rikke Schubart states, "Meiko Kaji is to Japanese cinema what Pam Grier is to American cinema: a queen of cult cinema and erotic bloodshed."73 Lady Snowblood begins with Yuki Kashima's birth in a prison in 1874, where her mother tells her "you were born for vengeance" before she dies. Yuki's story is told via male voiceover, and is split between a series of flashbacks and flashforwards. Set during the Meiji era in a period of corruption and injustice, the film shows Yuki's mother is abducted by a group of three men and a woman, and raped and beaten for three days after her husband has been murdered. Enlisting the assistance of Matsuemon, leader of the beggars, and using the skills learned from Dokai (Ko Nishimura), Yuki strategically tracks down each member of the gang responsible for her mother's rape and kills them. The first of these occurs in a beautiful, highly theatrical night scene with falling snow, and it is in this same environment that Yuki is herself murdered after she kills the last of her intended targets. (Ironically, Yuki is killed by the daughter of one of the men she has previously murdered who has undertaken her own mission of vengeance). As the avenger of her mother's rape, Yuki is very much a protagonist in keeping with rape-revenge traditions.

Meiko Kaji had appeared in an earlier rape-revenge film, Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion (Joshuu 701: Sasori, Shunya Ito, 1972). Unlike Lady Snowblood, here it is not her mother's but her own rape that Kaji's character seeks to avenge. But both films manifest a spectacular fusion of low-brow (exploitation) and high-brow (art-house) elements in a film that attaches an overarching raperevenge narrative trajectory to what is widely considered one of the best offerings of the "Women in Prison" subgenre, made famous by films such as The Big Doll House (Jack Hill, 1971). In Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion, Kaji plays Nami Matsushima ("Matsu the Scorpion") who is jailed for attempting to murder police detective Sugimi (Isao Natsugagi). From the bleak, cruel world of Nami's prison cell, a flashback provides the back-story: deeply in love with Sugimi and blind to his corruption, Nami is used as bait by Sugimi to trap a Yakuza gang, who gang-rape her. In prison, Nami suffers at the hands of both sadistic guards and vicious fellow prisoners, and the film follows a series of violent vignettes, including Nami being burned by scalding soup, hung up from the ceiling and beaten, and enduring excruciating and deliberately pointless physical tasks like digging a large dirt hole that other inmates are simultaneously re-filling. At the same time, Nami has to outsmart a plan by Sugimi and other corrupt officials to have her murdered in prison. A riot at the end of the film allows Nami her opportunity to seek her revenge against both the Yakuza who raped her and Sugimi himself. Wearing a large floppy black hat and a long flowing black trench coat, Nami is dressed almost identically to the protagonist in Bo Arne Vibenius' Thriller: A Cruel Picture, made in Sweden two years later. She returns to her prison garb for the film's final shot as she walks back to jail.

Meiko Kaji in Lady Snowblood (Toshiya Fujita, 1973) [Toho/Kobal Collection].

Filmed from below Kaji's body through a glass floor the rape sequence in Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion, suggests Schubart, shot like this "to enhance the theatrical setting."74 But it is more than stylistic pizzazz - this unusual formal device places the spectator within the rape itself. This is not the only significant stylistic choice during this flashback, however. In the scene where Nami loses her virginity to Sugimi, a circle of blood (assumedly from her broken hymen) appears as a red circle on a pure white sheet, replicating the Japanese flag. This allusion is made literal at the end of the film when she kills Sugimi. He pulls the knife out of his stomach and throws it up in the air, and a close up shows it passing a Japanese flag. These two shots are crucial. Firstly, it suggests that Sugimi's taking of Nami's virginity with such a malign motive is in itself an act of sexual violence. Even more importantly, however, it links that symbolic rape directly to the state. In the context of the film's broader thematic focus on power and corruption, Nami's search for vengeance is therefore about much more than her own body-it is about the much broader metaphorical "body" of those mistreated by Japanese society as a whole. While this in itself may not single-handedly demonstrate an earlier movement towards James R. Alexander's "maturation" of the Japanese rape-revenge film, Kaji's powerful performances in both the FemalePrisoner75 and Lady Snowblood films are significant.

Both Nami and Yuki are marked by their almost total silence throughout these films, but in the manga upon which the movies are based, this is not the case. Kaji herself felt that the original version of Female Prisoner #701. Scorpion in particular was filled with "obscenities."76 and it was her insistence that the directors of both the Lady Snowblood and Female Scorpion films decided to make her characters predominantly silent. This silence may be seen as part of what James R. Alexander identifies as the broader social convention for women in Japanese society to be submissive. In the case of Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion at least, this silence may therefore be linked to Nami's refusal to physically resist her rapists:

Rarely in pink films did a rape victim struggle throughout the ordeal of her rape ... but rather always reverting to a resigned catatonic waiting for the ordeal to be over and her attackers to leave. That passivity then became her permanent state, signifying her shame, and resignation to it reflected an overt acceptance of the presence of rape aggression as a random act in the public world!

But like Madeleine in Thriller: A Cruel Picture and Thana in Ms. 45, Nami and Yuki's silence ultimately grants them the status of what Schubart identifies in Female Prisoner #701. Scorpion as "a mute image of female mystery [and] dark sensualism."78 While neither Yuki nor Nami finish the first films of each series as particularly victorious (one dies, and one goes to prison), that they appear (however briefly) to "empower" themselves to some degree through the socially expected norms of the polite, unspeaking woman precisely to assist in their "spooking" of their prey suggests an important comment on the relationship between women, violence and power in Japan at the time.

In terms of contemporary Japanese rape-revenge film, Colette Balmain, Frank Lafond,7' and James R. Alexander all turn to the work of writer and director Takashi Ishii. While Balmain provides a long overdue critical evaluation of Ishii's pivotal involvement in the earlier Angel Guts series,80 Lafond and Alexander examine Freeze Me, a film that received exposure through the international festival circuit at the time and has since been released on DVD with English subtitles. All three critics observe a shift in Ishii's work among all of these films away from more traditional Japanese considerations of rape, although Balmain is to be commended for her exhaustive analysis of the less critically acclaimed Angel Guts series of pink films that have been too readily dismissed (as she points out, Lafond himself is guilty of such neglect81). It is in this spirit that this section will conclude with a nod towards Ishii's raperevenge thriller A Night in Nude (1993), a film made while Ishii was also involved in bringing the last three Angel Guts films to the screen. Doubtlessly, the absence of significant critical discussion on this movie has less to do with neglect than it does with access to legitimate English-language copies of the film, but its merger of neo-noir aesthetics with rape-revenge and supernatural elements (its ending is a direct reference to Herk Harvey's 1962 horror classic Carnival ofSouls) make it a prime candidate for further critical evaluation in terms of how it "fits" into an understanding of Ishii as a "rape-revenge auteur." That so many of the other films Ishii has written and/or directed feature rape (either with or without an associated act of and Snake (Hana to Hebi, 2004), Flower and Snake II (Hana to Hebi 2: Pari/Shizuko, 2005), Evil Dead Trap (Shiryo no wana, Toshiharu Ikeda, 1988), Black Angel (Kuro no tenshi, positions him as a key figure warranting further critical attention in regard to the representation of rape and its relationship to Japanese cinema more broadly. As more of these films become available outside of Japan, work in English on this director and his films hopefully will continue to grow.

Spain

The most immediately recognizable instances of rape in Spanish cinema to international audiences no doubt appear in the work of two of that country's most famous directors. Scenes that can be understood as attempted rape appear in Luis Bunuel's Viridiana (1961) and Un Chien andalou (1929); and rape, attempted rape and sexual abuse more generally appear throughout many of Pedro Almod6var's films including Pepe, Luci, Bom (Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montdn, 1980), Labyrinth ofPassions (Laberinto depasiones, 1982), Matador (1986), Kika (1993), Talk to Her (liable con ella, 2002), Bad Education (La mala educacidn, 2004) and Volver (2006). As Susan Martin-Marquez suggests, the depiction of rape in films such as I'm the One You're Looking For (Yo soy el que to buscas, Jaime Chavarri, 1988) and Almodovar's Kika in particular "might have led some movie-goers to conclude that, in the context of Spain, the phrase `feminist cinema' could only be considered an However, she argues, the international beatification of directors like Almodovar distracts critical attention from films less well-known outside of Spain.

This is not to say that these directors do not offer significant examples of the diversity of rape-revenge, and in this regard Pepi, Luci, Bom in particular is certainly worth mentioning. The narrative stems from Pepi's (Carmen Maura) attempt to seek revenge against a policeman who raped her at the beginning of the film. In doing so, she meets his masochistic wife Luci (Eva Siva), whom she introduces to her friend, teenage punk singer Bom (Olvido Gara). While narratively essential, Pepi's rape is far from traumatic. In fact, Pepi's desire for revenge stems not from the fact that she was raped as such, but rather that the rape now made it impossible for her to "sell" her virginity for a substantial amount of money (there is also a second "comedy" rape scene in the film where the to be his twin Luci's best friend). While rape may have a historical legacy of being a property crime between men, in Pepi, Luci, Bom's punk-scene Madrid it is the same to Pepi herself: Despite its focus on female friendship, one of the film's first real comic gags is the suggestion that rape was not as much traumatic for Pepi as much as it was more fiscally inconvenient.

As Martin-Marquez observes, I'm the One You're Looking For also replicates key structural elements of the rape-revenge film as it follows a woman's search for the man who raped her at the beginning of the movie. But again, the film deviates from the traditional rape-revenge model because the woman does not seek to avenge her rape as such, but rather to satiate a perverse romantic obsession with her rapist. The film appears to shift its audiences view "from a condemnation of rape as a heinous crime against women to an acceptance of rape as, simply, a more stimulating variety of romance."83 Because of this shift, Martin-Marquez dismisses I'm the One You're Looking For as little more than "exploitation expertly packaged as art cinema."84 She also offers the example of Luis Alcoriza's Tic-tac (Han violado a una mujer, 1982) as more characteristically fitting the model of the U.S. rape-revenge film of the 1970s and 1980s, though it lacks the "stomach-churning violence" she considers typical of that model.85

At first glance, Paul Grau's Mad Foxes (Los violadores, 1982) may appear a more typical exploitation instance of the rape-revenge film produced in a Spanish context. This brazenly incoherent melange of kung fu, softcore porn, Nazi fetishism and biker film is pegged loosely to a rape-revenge structure, albeit one caught in a garbled narrative loop. Mad Foxes begins with Hal (Jose Gras) joyriding in his expensive sports car with his young girlfriend, Babsy (Andrea Albani). They are harassed by a motorcycle gang at an intersection and speed off, causing one of the gang to crash. The gang confront Hal and Babsy as they leave a nightclub after an evening of drinking and dancing, and the beaten Hal is forced to watch as the screaming Babsy is raped, losing her virginity. Hal telephones a friend who is part of a kung fu gang and tells them that Babsy has been hospitalized, and that he wishes them to take revenge on the motorcycle gang. They readily agree, and a lengthy fight scene ensues. Not only are the kung fu gang victorious, but they also castrate the leader of the gang and force his detached penis into his own mouth. When the motorcycle gang murders all the kung fu gang in retaliation, Hal becomes their final target. Attempting to hide at his parent's country house, he inadvertently exposes them to danger; and with the discovery of his elderly, wheelchair-bound mother's murdered body, Hal embarks upon a final mission of vengeance. With all but the gang's castrated leader killed, the two men face off in the final scene. Here, the gang leader brandishes a remote control explosive device; telling Hal, "We're all going to hell together!" he detonates a bomb, killing them both as the end credits roll. The film ends as illogically as it had started, and while it is easy to dismiss Mad Foxes as typical exploitation fodder, its excessiveness is inflated to such a level as to make it a truly bizarre viewing experience. Although not pertinent to the film's narrative trajectory, much of the screen time is taken up by softcore scenes of Hal's many casual sexual encounters that occur during his mission of vengeance. Babsy is never mentioned or shown again, despite Hal's initial determination (and success) in avenging her rape.

Not all Spanish rape-revenge films are intended to play to such comic, lighthearted or exploitative affect as Mad Foxes, Pepe, Luci, Bom, or I'm the One You're Looking For. Carlos Saura's Outrage (i Dispara.! 1993) is a SpanishItalian co-production starring Antonio Banderas at a period when he was establishing himself in Hollywood after his breakthrough performance in Almodovar's Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (iAtame.! 1990). Saura is also a prolific figure in Spanish cinema and rose to prominence during the 1960s when he built an international reputation stemming from award-winning films such as The Hunt (La caza, 1966) and Peppermint Frappe (1967). While today Saura is most immediately recognized for dance films like Flamenco (1995) and Tango (1998), Outrage was produced shortly after the huge critical and commercial success of his civil war film iAy Carmela! (1990), demonstrating the range of his output.

Marco (Banderas) is a journalist writing an article for his newspaper on a visiting circus. Although initially not interested in the assignment, his attitude changes when he sees the glamorous horse-riding sharp shooter Ana (Francesca Neri). Ana is initially tentative, but warms to Marco when she teaches him to shoot, and they begin a romance. The smitten Marco tells Ana he is prepared to join her in her nomadic circus life, and that he'd follow her "to hell." Marco is suddenly sent to Madrid on an overnight assignment, and Ana is gang-raped by three local mechanics that she had met earlier while they were repairing one of the circus vehicles. After a brief shower, a numb Ana takes her rifle and her ammunition, looks up the details for the garage where the three men work, and drives there, waiting for them to arrive. She executes them swiftly and coldly, and then, shocked by both the rape and her response, she drives out of the city. Ana tries to call Marco, but he is not at home, so she leaves a teary, incoherent message on his answering machine. She visits a doctor who tells her she is in need of hospitalization because of severe internal bleeding, and the doctor reports the crime to the police, despite Ana's request for her not to. Meanwhile, Marco returns home and, hearing Ana's hysterical message and seeing both the news reports about the murders and the evidence of the attack in her lodgings, pieces together what has happened. With her physical condition deteriorating, Ana takes a family hostage in their deserted country house, and the police, Marco and his editor (who encourages Marco to use his personal connection to the story to his advantage) locate the property. A lengthy siege ensues, and the police finally agree to let Marco into the house. He reminds Ana that he said he would follow her to hell, and she dies in his arms.

Outrage is the product of an experienced director, and while the film's visual flair is inescapable, deciphering the significance of these stylistic choices is a more complex task. Most immediately, the film makes it explicit (both through dialogue and form) that the circus represents a nostalgic view of an old-fashioned world beyond the realities of contemporary living. It is depicted in terms of childhood hopes and dreams, and of tales of true love (not only of Marco and Ana, but of other circus folk). It is a romantic image that Marco succumbs to wholly, not only in terms of his affection and attraction to Ana herself, but also in regard to a cliched "running away to join the circus" fantasy. While never presenting the circus elements of the story as excessive or overthe-top, Saura fills these scenes with color and life, particularly in the evening scenes with the other circus members, and in the intimate scenes between Ana and Marco. But in the scenes of Ana's captivity, rape and subsequent revenge, the color is dramatically and suddenly desaturated, leaving a noirlike palate of black, white and blue. This sudden shift to a dark, shadowy aesthetic allows the visual allusion to extreme violence (including Ana being raped with a wine bottle) without actually showing it. The affect is still shocking and revolting, and combined with the highly stylized manner in which Ana's rape and revenge are presented, it is difficult not to share her dazed, trance-like state as she seemingly floats from scene to scene from this point onwards. When Marco returns, the color palate is restored to its original one, suggesting a Wizard of Oz-like chasm between the color world of fantasy and romance (coded as masculine/Marco) and the harsh, brutal reality of a realm stripped to a raw black and white (coded as feminine/Ana).

That Ana and Marco are kept physically apart for all but the final few moments after the attack suggests that while the rape transforms her into an avenger, more crucially it transforms her into something more symbolic to Marco, whose story this ultimately is. Formally and narratively, there is a sharp tension in the film between its narrative focus on Ana and its refusal to let this be "her" story. The reference to film noir is therefore thematic as well as stylistic, as demonstrated in Christopher Perriam's summation of the film: "Banderas finds himself in a classic, older Hollywood position as the man who should never have tangled with the fascinating, dangerous woman and who finds his life and career perverted."86 To read rape only as the process by which Ana is rendered dangerous to Marco and his career necessarily diminishes the importance of its effect on her, but it is a reading the ularly in its stylistic attempts to paint her as a femme fatale- appears to actively encourage. Despite both her experience and screen time warranting far more of the spectator's sympathy than Marco, Outrage ultimately falls on the side of his naive romantic vision. This is telling of the film's broader difficulties regarding masculine constructions of gender and nostalgia.

An even more complex configuration of rape-revenge in Spanish cinema manifests in writer and director Jorge Sanchez-Cabezudo's debut film, Night of the Sunflowers (La noche de los girasols, 2006). Opening on a field of its eponymous flowers, a man is seen walking towards a car on the edge of the plantation and driving away. A series of as-yet-unidentified characters are then introduced, as snippets of information through background television and radio reports and conversations build a story: The body of Elena Martos, a 22-year-old local girl who had fought with her father about her curfew before going nightclubbing, was found, raped and murdered, lying among the sunflowers. None of the characters shown appear to pay anything but vague attention to the news, engrossed as they are in their own lives. From this point onwards the film is divided into six separate chapters that introduces these characters more fully, and demonstrates how and where their stories intersect.

The first part, "The Man in the Hotel," follows the banal details of this seemingly ordinary man in a rented room. The as-yet-nameless figure (played by Manuel Moron) is an industrial vacuum cleaner salesman, and he engages in lackluster conversation with what is assumed to be his wife on the telephone as he eats chocolate and watches a news story on his hotel room television about Elena Martos' death. He is shown eating, working and driving in a matter-of-fact, documentary-style tone, emphasizing the apparent dullness of his life. This changes suddenly when he decides to turn off a country road and follow on unidentified woman, who, without any reason, he approaches and rapes in some deserted bushland. Her car rolls away as she attempts to escape from him, and crashes into a tree. When he hears voices approaching, he panics and runs away. Part two is called "The Potholers," and tells the story of geologist Esteban (Carmelo Gomez), who has come to the sparsely populated village of Angosto to investigate a newly discovered cave in the hope that it may provide the village with a much-needed tourist attraction. His colleague Pedro (Mariano Alameda) and girlfriend Gabi (Judith Diakhate) soon join him, and it is immediately apparent that this action is occurring simultaneously alongside the previous story, as Gabi is the woman who we just saw raped. This section follows both Pedro and Esteban's adventures investigating the cave, and shows Gabi's version of the rape. Pedro and Esteban find Gabi, hurt and hysterical, in the crashed car. They drive away frantically, and Gabi identifies a man walking along the road in a white shirt as the man who raped her.

The third section, "The Man on the Road," makes it clear that this is not the man who raped Gabi, but is instead the elderly Cecilio (Cesareo Estebanez), who lives in a nearby abandoned village with little contact beyond his squabbling with his mentally challenged neighbor, Amos (Walter Vidarte). In a lengthy sequence, Pedro and Esteban murder Cecilio, but the old man puts up a strong fight as he struggles to survive. Part four introduces Tomas (Vicente Romero), a lazy, dishonest policeman who is married to his commanding officer's daughter. On his way home from seeing his mistress, he comes across Esteban, Pedro and Gabi, who tell him their story and add that Gabi has confirmed that they killed the wrong man. Tomas decides to blackmail them, and disposes of the body in the cave Pedro and Esteban had earlier investigated for a large sum of money that he hopes to use to build a new life away from his wife. In part five, Amos confesses to the police that he had seen Cecilio's dead body before it was removed, and believes that he must have murdered his antagonistic neighbor. In part six, Tomas' boss and father-in-law, Amadeo (Celso Bugallo), has growing suspicions about Cecilio's disappearance, despite Tomas' insistence that Amos is insane. He follows Tomas to the place where the money is to be exchanged, and tells Esteban, Gabi and Pedro that he does not want to know what they are doing, and throws the money in the fire. Knowing that his daughter is pregnant, he silently returns a devastated Tomas home. The final scene of the film shows the man from the hotel returning to his home, and a voice off-screen calls out to him using his name for the first time in the film: "Miguel?" Sadly removing a child's squeaky toy that he has accidentally sat on, the credits roll as he watches a documentary about bees.

Structurally, the influence of both Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon and Gaspar Noe's Irreversible are evident in Night of the Sunflowers, but this is a significant film in its own right. Like Rashomon, it presents the same event - the rape of a woman - from both the rapist's and the victim's perspectives. But it is in regard to the rapist himself that this film is most intriguing. Most obviously, he is not punished; there is no moment of catharsis, and there is not even a vague suggestion that moral order can be seen to return. This is a sophisticated rendering of how the lives of strangers can intersect through random acts of violence. The observation by the documentary's voice-over that Miguel watches at the end of the film that "bees don't sting if you don't bother them" appears to comment on Miguel's violent future. But even more importantly, that Tomas' return home to the news that his wife is pregnant parallels so neatly with Miguel's depressed homecoming to TV and children's toys is too specific to be accidental. The linking of these two men this way implies the possibility that Tomas, too, may end up like Miguel. Does the film therefore suggest that men like these become rapists because of unhappy domestic lives, and therefore that it's the wives who are in at least some way to blame? While Night of the Sunflowers offers a remarkable insight into the experiences of all of the "players" of its rape-revenge drama, its final chilling impact stems not from bees, but from this ambiguous link between the two misogynists, Miguel and Tomas.

Turkey

Rape has been far from invisible in Turkish cinema, but in the specific context of rape-revenge, there is a notable diversity in how sexual violence is configured in relation to the narratives it propels. As Gonul Donmez-Colin suggests, the figure of the rapist in Turkish culture is considered an irz durmann (enemy of honor), but such dishonorable conduct is often deployed in an erotic context to exploit the commercial market to its fullest example, in such films as Kocero (Umut Utku, 1964) and Iffet (Kartal Tibet, 1982). In terms of rape-revenge specifically, Donmez-Colin claims that "in film after film," rural melodramas in particular often focus on the rape of innocent village girls by wealthy and powerful men, only to have their honor avenged by a courageous village boy.87

Rape and revenge is also pivotal to Metin Erksan's The Well (Kuyu, 1968), described by Donmez-Colin as "one of the masterpieces of Turkish cinema." Here, a woman is stalked and raped by a man obsessed with making her his wife. She seeks revenge against his endless assaults, but the intensity of her vengeance is so great that she commits suicide at the end of the film. Although celebrated, responses to the film are divided. Erksan himself said at the time that the film was inspired by a verse from the Koran about not mistreating women,88 and many considered the film to be a sensitive reflection on the plight of Turkish women. For some feminists, however, the film is little more than "the sexual fantasies of a macho man."89

The year before The Well, another Turkish rape-revenge movie was Tunc Basaran's The Great Hate (Biiyiik kin, 1967). Starring popular actor Ayhan I,sik as Omar, the film is told in flashback from a house where he is trapped by police and surrounded by dead bodies. Events begin happily enough at his son's wedding, where Omar's younger son and his parents join in the celebrations. That evening, three thugs invade the house where the young couple and the grandparents are. They murder the grandfather and the groom, and rape and kill the grandmother and the bride. The criminals do not see the young boy, who witnesses the attack and then rushes the next morning to Omar. Arriving at the scene, Omar is shocked and devastated at the carnage. He declares a "hunt" and tracks down each of the men, sadistically torturing them to their death. The leader of the group is discovered attending a wedding of his own, and his father pulls a gun on Omar and tells him to leave before publicly whipping his son in front of the wedding guests. Omar captures the man and returns him to the house where his family were slain. After killing him, Omar is trapped in the house by police. Returning to the opening moment where his flashback began, Omar is finally lured out by his young son; after the two embrace, Omar surrenders to the police.

The Great Hate is a remarkable film for a number of reasons, the most immediate of which is its striking stylistic construction. Despite (or perhaps because of) its budgetary limitations, Basaran uses high-contrast black-andwhite photography to great effect. The film's mise en scene is also noteworthy, and some of the movie's most memorable images are the most simple (such as a shot of a small black kitten walking nonchalantly around the corpses of Omar's dead family at the beginning of the film). This is a beautiful movie to look at, but this is not to detract from the brutality and ugliness of its content. Most immediately, unlike the majority (if not all) of U.S. raperevenge films in particular, The Great Hate downplays the rape of Omar's beautiful young daughter-in-law, which happens completely off-screen, and instead opts to focus on the assault of the elderly grandmother (aside from the Australian film Shame, this may be one of the rare rape-revenge films that features potential are not deemed young and attractive in a traditional sense).90 The violence in this scene is overwhelming and appalling, and to a contemporary viewer its sadism may come as an extreme shock. Not only is the aged victim tied up and raped, but her clothes are also ripped off and her chest is burned with a cigarette before she is stabbed in the stomach and left to die. But even placing this horrific sequence aside, the scene where Omar tortures and kills one of the rapists in a bathtub bears striking similarities to its parallel scene in Meir Zarchi's I Spit on Your Grave that appeared eleven years later. The victim is not castrated as such, but Omar shoots him, and the victim grabs his crotch as he screams in agony. The creative manner with which Omar approaches the torture and destruction of his prey certainly foreshadows the bizarre and flamboyant techniques that would mark the American rape-revenge films of the 1970s in particular.

It would be erroneous to suggest that all Turkish rape-revenge films are as intriguing as The Great Hate, and like many other national instances, there is no lack of examples that wear their exploitative intent on their sleeves. Osman F. Sedan's The Stigma (Damga, 1984) is typical of this, and despite featuring Turkish superstar Tank Akan as the male protagonist, there is little about this tale of a man avenging the rape of his fiance to separate it from American rape-revenge films of the same period. Those familiar with Turkish genre cinema, however, will be aware that the American influence is far more explicit than this. With its notorious disregard for issues of copyright, the Turkish film industry is renowned for its brazen, unauthorized remakes of popular Hollywood films that lift plot and dialogue, and often simply reenact entire scenes or even whole films. To international paracinematic audiences, the most famous of these would be The Return of Superman (Supermen donuyor, Kunt Tulgar, 1979)-often just referred to as Turkish Superman- and Kelepce (Cetin Inanc, 1982), or Turkish Dirty Harry. Even The Wells celebrated director, Metin Erksan, participated in this adaptation culture with his 1974 film Seytan, a close to scene-by-scene unauthorized remake of The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), simply referred to in cult shorthand as Turkish Exorcist. Successful American rape-revenge films were not spared from this form of cross-cultural adaptation, as demonstrated in The Executioner (Cellat, Memduh On, 1975), or Turkish Death Wish. Sharing a near-identical moustache to Charles Bronson, Orhan (Serdar Gokhan) is this film's Paul Kersey figure, an architect whose wife and sister are attacked by a group of thugs. When the wife is murdered and the sister raped and left in a catatonic state, the previously liberal Orhan turns to a life of vigilantism that closely resembles Kersey's, right down to his use of a coin-filled sock as a weapon. But there is a crucial difference in the way the two films end: while Kersey is finally confronted by the police and moves to Chicago, in The Executioner, a series of coinci the men who raped his sister and murdered his wife, and dispatches them accordingly. Kersey does not get the opportunity to do this until Michael Winner's Death Wish 2 in 1982.

The differences between Woman of Vengeance (Intikam Kadini, Naki Yurter, as it is informally known, Turkish I Spit on Your Graveand the original are even more pronounced. As both Kaya Ozkaracalar and Ian Robert Smith indicate in their insightful analyses of Erksan's Seytan, however, it is unwise to dismiss these Turkish remakes as offering no insight into Turkish culture specifically." While Woman of Vengeance shares a similar structure to I Spit on Your Grave, unlike The Executioner it does not replicate specific scenes as much as it implies loosely shared foundations. The film begins as a car containing a group of middle-aged men breaks down, and they enter the house of an elderly man and his daughter for assistance. The played by Zerrin Dogan, who wears a traditional headscarf and a simple them food and drink, and the father offers them lodgings until they can get their car repaired. The leader of the group spies on the daughter, and then beats and rapes her. She lies still in a near-catatonic state as the other men also violate her; after the attack, the men panic and beat her father to death. After the men have left, she removes her headscarf and discovers her father's body. She stands on the edge of a cliff and contemplates suicide, but changes her mind. Like in the original I Spit on Your Grave, she then prays for what she is about to do (this time at her father's grave). After a lengthy makeover montage where she replaces her traditional clothing with seductive, Westernstyled attire, she tracks down the men responsible for her rape and her father's death and executes them. Luring the leader of the group to a deserted barn after she seduces him and the two have embarked upon a lengthy sexual encounter, she changes back into her more traditional clothing and kills him with a pitchfork. With her vengeance complete, she leaves sadly but calmly, and is captured by the police.

Both Zerrin Dogan and director Yurter worked together on one of Turkey's earliest adult films, A Woman Like That (Oyle Bir Kadin Ki, 1979), and their teaming up again on Woman of Vengeance perhaps goes some way to explain the thematically inappropriate sex scenes that litter it (most problematic, of course, is the lengthy sex scene near the end of the film between Dogan's rape-avenging protagonist and the man who raped her). While far from symbolically sophisticated, the use of costume offers insight into the tensions between the categories of East and West, and their relationship to female power and sexuality. As Laurence Raw has indicated, one of the central concerns of Turkish cinema is "the social, personal or by people caught between two cultures, European and Islamic."92 Dogan's character makes this tension explicit through her wardrobe. The Western style of dress that she adopts in vengeance mode can be considered overt: wigs, sunglasses, heavy make-up, bikinis, blue jeans and high-heeled shoes. This strikes a dramatic contrast with her traditional outfit at the beginning and ending of the film, and her transformation from rape victim to vampish avenger is coded explicitly through this wardrobe shift from "East" to "West." That she returns to her more traditional outfit to kill the last of the rapists signifies a return to her "true" self. Her calm surrender to the police is therefore an act allied with traditional values, simultaneously acknowledging that her role as vengeful vamp was a deviation from these values and therefore necessarily coded as explicitly "Western."

A similarly curious relationship between traditional Islamic and "Western" influences appears in Shattered Soul (Beyza'nin kadinlari, Mustafa Altioklar, 2006), a tale of a schizophrenic rape survivor whose personality is split between a "Western" femme fatale figure, a traumatized rape victim, and a strict Muslim. The opening ten minutes of the movie expose its clear debt to American genre film and television, particularly films like Saw (James Wan, 2003) and forensic-based investigative television franchises such as NCIS and CSI. Hollywood aesthetics also permeate these opening moments, with their strong glossy finish and liberal application of music video cinematography and editing techniques. Shattered Soul opens with a torture scene of a man being boiled, drowned and graphically butchered by an unidentified figure in a white lab coat. Soon a dismembered leg is discovered by the authorities. In a morgue, Police Lieutenant Fatih (Tamer Karadagli) and psychiatrist Doruk (Levent Ozumcu) discuss the mysterious body part as the investigation is launched. However, much of this investigation takes a back seat when Doruk's wife, Beyza (Demet Eygar), is introduced. Beyza is deeply troubled, and struggles to maintain a normal life, as she contends with multiple personalities: the promiscuous Dilara, the strict Muslim Rabia, and the infantile Ayla.

The bizarre murders continue, and more body parts continue to surface. Beyza becomes increasingly frightened that she is involved, as her different personae begin to surface more regularly, with her only having a vague memory of them. Fatih becomes aware of Rabia and Dilara's involvement in the killings, and Beyza overhears her husband explain to the policeman that the person they seek is suffering from multiple personality disorder because of trauma resulting from sexual assault: "The kid starts thinking that the abuse actually happened to somebody else ... it becomes `I wasn't raped, Ayla was.' When her femininity is dominant, it's Dilara. When it's her guilt, then it's Rabia." Shocked and convinced she is a killer, Beyza tries to throw herself off a building, but Doruk stops her. They talk about her newly discovered memory of being digitally raped as a 4-year-old by her caregiver at the Rabia Orphanage, Mother Pakize (whose remains have also been recently found, she being one of the serial killer's earlier victims). Beyza slips further and further into insanity, believing herself guilty of the crimes; but when Dilara is taken in for questioning, she provides Fatih with a solid alibi for one of the murders. When Doruk leaves with Beyza, Fatih realizes that it is, in fact, her husband Doruk who is the guilty party. Doruk takes Beyza out of the city and slowly nurses her back to health, and as a final act of therapy he confesses the murder to her and asks her to help him kill a pedophile he has captured. They are interrupted by Fatih, who shoots and injures Doruk. In an act of mercy, Beyza kills Doruk herself so as to stop him from being arrested, despite Fatih begging her to let justice take its course.

Due to the practical limitations of space, this book is forced to primarily focus upon rape-revenge in the context of male perpetrators and female survivors. Shattered Soul is therefore one on the few examples that falls outside of these self-enforced textual limitations in its focus of child sexual assault. The reasons for this are easily justified, however, considering how explicitly Shattered Soul refers to itself in terms of rape and revenge, as demonstrated in a conversation between Fatih and Doruk during their investigation. It is also noteworthy that most of the film focuses solely upon Beyza's trauma. While the serial killer storyline provides the narrative foundation for the film, that most of the first hour is dedicated so completely to constructing Beyza's "personalities," paying painstaking attention to the confusion and pain that she suffers, make it clear that it is very much a film about her trauma. The depiction of schizophrenia in the film is at best sensational, but Shattered Soul places the trauma of sexual assault in a unique cultural context that plays out the tension within her fragile psyche as a literal battle between Islamic and Western identities. Although it is her husband who executes violent revenge, Shattered Soul is always Beyza's story. Shattered Soul is a formally adventurous film which offers moments that, despite the obvious American influences, still remain specific to its Turkish context. Most memorable of these is a sequence where Beyza "meets" her other three "personalities," and the "Western" Dilara and traditional Islamic Rabia clash over the response to rape that the other has chosen. This film warrants more in-depth analysis than can be offered here, and hopefully this brief analysis will encourage such investigation.

As noted at the beginning of this chapter, the focus on these ten national case studies is in no way intended to suggest that these are the only national contexts where rape-revenge films have appeared. Having produced both The Virgin Spring and Thriller: A Cruel Picture, Sweden may be recognized as a significant producer of rape-revenge films, but they are not the only examples the Scandinavian region has offered. Aside from the internationally acclaimed Dogville (Lars Von Trier, 2003) and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Man som hatar kvinnor, Niels Arden Oplev, 2009) (both of which will be discussed in the next chapter), films like Jorn Donner's Manrape (Man kan inte valdtas, 1978) and Whore (Nora, Reinert Kiil, 2009) offer strikingly diverse takes on rape-revenge that demonstrate its variety in this region.

Italian rape-revenge films in this book thus far have been mentioned only in the context of spaghetti Westerns and horror (particularly the proliferation of The Last House on the Left-inspired films), but as films such as Vittorio De Sica's Two Women (La ciociara, 1960) and Giuseppe Tornatore's The Unknown Woman (La sconosciuta, 2008) demonstrate, to glean a singular or cohesive treatment of rape from this national context may prove more difficult than this small selection of films may suggest (Dario Argento's 1996 film The Stendhal Syndrome [La sindrome di Stendhal] will also be discussed in the Afterword to this book).

Rape is not uncommon in Russian cinema, and rape-revenge films like The Day of Love (Den Iyubyi, Aleksandr Polynnikov, 1991) demonstrate how it has manifested in this national context. More recently, politician and filmmaker Stanislav Govorukhin made The Rifleman of Voroshilov Regiment (Voroshilovskiy Strelok, 1999), about an elderly man avenging the rape of his granddaughter, and in the context of both Govorukhin's political and filmmaking career, it demonstrates the intensity of his personal vision of the individual's relationship to socially acceptable notions of order and justice.

Rape appears in many well-known British films as well, as most notoriously demonstrated by films such as No Orchids for Miss Blandish (St. John Legh Clowes, 1948), A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971), The Baby ofMacon (Peter Greenaway, 1993) and Naked (Mike Leigh, 1993). While the British rape-revenge film may be most immediately associated with Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (an American-British co-production set in Cornwell), Sidney Hayer's Revenge (1971) was made in the same year and is also worthy of comment. Here, Joan Collins" stars as the stepmother of a family whose young daughter has been raped and murdered. The family capture the man they believe responsible and hold him captive in the basement of their pub. When the family reach a point where they believe they may, in fact, have the wrong man, their moral collapse has occurred already (the peak of horror being a scene where Collins' Carol is raped in front of the captured man by her violent and frustrated step-son). Other British rape-revenge films include Killer's Moon (1978), directed by Alan Birkinshaw, with dialogue rumored to be written by famous feminist author Fay Weldon. Rape-revenge continues to be a site of interest for British filmmakers, as demonstrated in Dan Reed's 2007 film Straightheads, which will be discussed in the next chapter.

As this chapter has already demonstrated, rape-revenge films are not a solely North American or European fascination. While better known for his more straightforward horror genre offerings, Brazil's Jose Mojica Matins (aka Coffin Joe) made a rape-revenge film in 1979 called Perversion (Estrupo), which, although strange and violent, pales in comparison to the brutal explicitness of the rape-revenge porn film The Girl of Diabolical Sex (A Menina do sexo diabdlico, Mario Lima, 1987). The Nollywood movie Deadly Emotion (Afe Olumowe, 2009) provides an example of rape-revenge from Nigeria's robust film industry, while the Pashto film Haseena Atom Bomb (Saeed All Kahn, 1990) paves the way for Pakistan's inclusion in this global snapshot of raperevenge's scope and diversity. Although not perhaps immediately identifiable as a filmmaking area, even Cambodia has utilized a supernatural horror raperevenge framework for the Khmer film Lady Vampire (NiengArp, Kam Chanty, 2004). Filipino cinema may have a reputation among paracinematic audiences as a site of "badfilm" demonstrated by rape-revenge movies such as Clouds (Alapaap, Tata Esteban, 1984), or even later in the comedyhorror hybrid Oh My Ghost! (Tony Y. Reyes, it is erroneous to suggest all rape-revenge film from the Philippines has been critically dismissed. In The BFI Companion to Crime (1997), Paul Willemen celebrates Lino Brocka's Angela Markado (1980) as "one of the most intense rape-revenge films ever made," as it "transcends the genre's exploitative conventions."94 Raperevenge films appear from all around the world, and this vast range of movies demonstrates its diversity. As the next chapter will continue to argue, that diversity has continued well into the present day, long after its supposed heyday of the United States in the 1970s.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Contemporary

Rape-Revenge Film

As we have now seen, to suggest that the rape-revenge film can be generically, historically or regionally defined ignores the broad range of movies that fall under the rape-revenge heading. Jacinda Read's suggestion in 2000 "that there have been no new articulations of the rape-revenge structure since Eye for an Eye and A Time to Kill would seem to suggest that the cycle has run its course"' warrants some reflection. While the previously explored international and cross-generic manifestations of rape-revenge demonstrate that the scope of rape-revenge is broader than either Read or Clover may have credited, even to those aware of its scope the recent spike of rape-revenge films is striking. This resurgence is demonstrated in a range of texts, including blockbusters, such as Law Abiding Citizen (F. Gary Gray, 2009) and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Niels Arden Oplev, 2009); horror films, including Teeth (Mitchell Lichtenstein, 2007) and Shutter (Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom, 2004/Masayuki Ochiai, 2008); art films, like Irreversible (Gaspar Noe, 2002) and Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003); and remakes of classic '70s and '80s raperevenge titles currently being released or in production, including The Last House on the Left (Dennis Iliadis, 2009), I Spit on Your Grave (Steven R. Monroe, 2010), Straw Dogs (Rod Lurie, 2011) and Mother's Day (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2010). While this book focuses specifically on film, the scope of rape and revenge across a range of contemporary television examples is vast enough to justify its own volume.' Although by no means an exhaustive list, Beverly Hills 90210, Home andAway, Law and Order: SVU, The Bold and the Beautiful, Coronation Street, the recent version of Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Sopranos, This Is England '86, The Shield and Dexter have all engaged with the intersection of rape and revenge (or, at least, the expectation of revenge) in some way. The current ubiquity of sexual violence and retribution puts an end to any suggestion that rape-revenge is historically or generically specific.

For Read, the rape-revenge cycle is suggested to have ended with what she defined as the maternal rape-revenge film typified by Eye for an Eye. Ignoring earlier instances of maternal rape-revenge films that fall outside of her narrow generic notably, Mrs. Collingwood's famous dispatch of the man who raped and killed her daughter in Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left suggests that films like Eye for an Eye are specific to the mid-1990s, and thus "articulate a backlash politics,"3 as "the narrative trajectories of these films is towards reversing ... transformations and relocating women as mothers in the home."4 For Schubart, the maternal rape-avenger transcends the need for sexual violence in the rape-revenge structure altogether, such as in the case of the Jennifer Lopez vehicle Enough (Michael Apted, 2002), which she describes as "only partly a rape-revenge film, since it has no rape. Instead ... an abusive husband substitutes for the male assault on a woman."5 While Enough is undeniably centered on a female avenger fighting back against horrific male violence, the centrality of this film and Sleeping with the Enemy (Joseph Ruben, 1991) to Read and Schubart's analyses obscures critical vision from the broad range of more clear-cut rape-revenge films that have been made since the 1990s.

Pastiche and Beyond

This does not mean that rape-revenge films must contain rape, of course, and nowhere is this clearer in contemporary film than postmodern darling Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol. 1(2003) and Death Proof(2007). Renowned for his signature gleeful intertextuality, Tarantino's films are not so much artefacts that exist alongside the exploitation films he celebrates, as they are instead a "theme park ride version"6 of those texts. Kill Bill Vol. 1, for example, may not be a rape-revenge movie as the Bride does kill the men who raped her while she pretended to be in a coma early on in the it references them heavily, most notably with Daryl Hannah's eye patch nod to Christina Lindberg in Thriller: A Cruel Picture, and the reconstruction of Lady Snowblood in the final showdown between the Bride (Uma Thurman) and O-Ren (Lucy Liu). Death Proof engages even more explicitly with raperevenge traditions. As Tarantino's "road rage opus,"7 Death Proof is divided into two stories about Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), an outwardly pleasant but deranged and sadistic stunt driver who torments women on the road with the indestructible car of the film's title. The first part begins as three female (Vanessa Ferlito), Shanna (Jordan Ladd) and "Jungle Julia" (Sydney Tamiia a number of bars to celebrate Julia's birthday. Stuntman Mike follows the women to The Texas Chilli Parlor, where he approaches the women and flirts with Arlene. The up-until-now pleasant Stuntman Mike then offers a stranded Pam (Rose McGowan) a ride home, but once in his car he becomes insane and sadistic, and drives the car recklessly. With no safety harness, Pam is violently hurled around the cabin until she dies (he tells her that the car is "death proof," but only in his seat). He then locates Arlene, Shanna and Jungle Julia on a deserted road and crashes into them to deliberately cause their deaths, which are shown in graphic detail. At the hospital, Sheriff Earl McGraw (Michael Parks, who appeared as this same character in Kill Bill and Rodriguez's 1996 movie From Dusk Til Dawn) voices his suspicion that Stuntman Mike deliberately caused the girls' deaths, and believes there is a sexual motivation behind the crime. Being unable to prove it, however, he resigns himself to making sure that Stuntman Mike does not commit the same act in Texas again.

The movie then restarts some time later. Again, it opens with three women, Lee (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), Abernathy (Rosario Dawson) and Kim (Tracie Thorns), who all work in the film industry. Stuntman Mike sees them at a convenience store, where he tickles Abernathy's feet, and he follows them as they pick up New Zealand stuntwoman Zoe (played by Zoe Bell as was Uma Thurman's stunt double in the Kill Bill films). Zoe directs her friends to a farm where there is a vintage Dodge Challenger she wishes to test drive. Leaving Lee as collateral with the car's owner,' Kim drives the car with Abernathy as a passenger as Zoe crawls onto the moving car's hood to play "ship's mast": She intends to stand on the speeding car's hood while hanging onto two belts coming from inside the vehicle. With Zoe in this dangerous position, Stuntman Mike appears and torments the women during the film's lengthy action climax. The tables are turned on his violent harassment of the women when they decide to return the attack. The women cause his car to crash, and Zoe, Abernathy and Kim beat him mercilessly as the film ends.

Kurt Russell in the Death Proofsection of Grindhouse (Quentin Tarantino, 2007) [Dimension Films/A Band Apart/Kobal Collection].

Considering Death Proof does not include scenes of rape or attempted rape as such, it is therefore perhaps surprising how explicitly it references rape-revenge traditions. Death Proof is unambiguous in its linkage of sexual violence with vehicular homicide (both attempted and otherwise). In the first part of the film, Sheriff McGraw makes it clear that he views Stuntman Mike's behavior as "a sex thing," observing to a colleague that the sexual nature of the crime stems from the erotics of the car crash, with its "high velocity impact, twisted metal, busted glass, [and] all four souls taken at exactly the same time." Later in the film, as Kim, Zoe and Abernathy chase Stuntman Mike and seek their revenge, this is explicitly sexual: "Fuck this bastard," they declare, and Kim mockingly says, "I'm the horniest motherfucker on the road!." Tarantino has openly acknowledged the influence of Clover's writing about the "final girl" in the slasher film on Death Proofs first half in particular,' but its specific reference to rape-revenge stems from its reconstruction of the memorable scene from the Australian rape-revenge movie, Fair Game (discussed in the previous chapter). In Mark Hartley's documentary Not Quite Hollywood (2008), Tarantino speaks at length about this "classic moment in genre history":

If you like outrageous cinema, you live ... and breathe to wait for those weird moments that happen every once in a while in genre cinema where you can't believe you are seeing what you're seeing. Fair Game has one of those moments, man, and that's where after fucking the girl over like crazy, they strip her nude, tie her to the front of their monster truck, and then they just proceed to drive down the road at a hundred miles an hour with her tied naked to the front of the truck.... She's a human hood ornament. Who in the fuck thought of that? What brain thought of it, who let them do it, and then when as they did it, what the fuck was going through their minds when as they're shooting this sequence? To me, that is the reason you watch exploitation cinema, is to have a moment like that: Is this actually happening? Am I actually seeing this? Am I actually having an acid flashback or is this actually going on?

In terms of the logic of the Tarantino universe and how the film responds specifically to Fair Game in particular, it is clear that much thought has gone into its reversal of the earlier film's vision of the relationship between women, cars and violence. Tarantino's description of Fair Game captures the excessiveness of the image, and it is in light of such an impact that his reconstruction of the scene (this time with Zoe Bell as the "human hood ornament" instead of Cassandra Delaney) can be re-thought in terms of rape-revenge. Sharing a monster-car-as-male-sexuality metaphor, Death Proof reconfigures Fair Game's gender relations. In the Australian film, the woman is strapped to the front of the car as an act of sexual violence, symbolizing her complete powerlessness in the face of male aggression, power and misogyny. But in Death Proof, Zoe not only asserts her power over the car and finds pleasure in doing so, but ultimately therefore rejects the notion of the car as being an inherently "masculine" object at all. She chooses to play "ship's mast" voluntarily, and Stuntman Mike's intrusion seeks to control the activities that she may find pleasurable. The relationship between Stuntman Mike and these female protagonists is therefore more than a case of the latter seeking revenge for thinly disguised metaphorical sexual violence. It is about them reconfiguring the entire symbolic language of gender in relation to car culture, so commonly ascribed as a masculine domain.

Tarantino's particular mode of engagement with rape revenge-traditions should not suggest that this is the only way they have manifested in recent cinema. The title of Law Abiding Citizen, for example, refers to Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler), a family-loving everyman who deploys an elaborate, hightech system of vengeance not only against the man who raped and murdered his wife and young daughter, but against the prosecutor (Jamie Foxx), the legal system, and ultimately the entire society who allowed the rapist and killer to go unpunished. The film begins with the invasion of Clyde's family home and the allusion to the rape and murder of his wife and child (shown from Clyde's perspective, he passes out before the details can be shown). Clyde's revenge frequently delves into torture-porn aesthetics, and much of the film's action hinges upon complicated, tech-based torture. In many ways Law Abiding Citizen is little more than a standard crime thriller, but Butler's performance as Clyde adds gravitas to his many speeches concerning the failure of the law (referring to it at one point as "this broken thing"). Perhaps inescapably, Clyde is punished for taking the law into his own hands, but the supposed victory of the legal system is bitterly framed, particularly as Foxx's prosecutor Nick seems ambivalent at best about the initial crime committed against Clyde's family. On the whole, Law Abiding Citizen departs little from male-centered raperevenge traditions where men act as agents of vengeance for violence committed against female loved ones. This places the ethical logic of the film within the traditions regarding rape as a property crime between men rather than acknowledging the subjective trauma of the female experience of sexual violence.

As Death Proof suggested, however, female rape-avengers are far from invisible in contemporary rape-revenge movies. In the same year that she starred in Death Proof, Rosario Dawson also played the protagonist in a strikingly different rape-revenge film, Descent (2007). In this independent film made on a low budget by Dawson's childhood friend Talia Lugacy, Dawson plays quiet university student Maya, who goes to a party one night as she recovers from an unspecified heartbreak. Here she meets Jared (Chad Faust), an odd but strangely charismatic footballer with whom she agrees to have dinner. After their date, Maya accompanies Jared home where they drink wine and he date-rapes her. What begins as consensual making out escalates suddenly into a vicious assault, complete with him hurling racist remarks at her while the camera stays upon her crying, pleading face.

Unlike many rape-revenge films, Maya's fallout from the assault is not narratively is no single moment of transformation, and she does not "decide" upon revenge as much as a series of coincidences lead her to the point where she feels it is her only possible option. After the rape, she becomes withdrawn and depressed, and falls into a sex and drug-riddled club scene where she befriends the DJ Adrian (Marcus Patrick). Returning to college and acting as a teacher's aide, Jared is enrolled as a student in one of her classes. Seemingly unaware of the impact of the rape on Maya, Jared says he thinks she is "hooked" on him. Without blinking, she tells him she wishes to see him again. That evening they drink wine as Maya flirts with him. She demands that he strip naked, and she ties him to a bed. When Maya tells Jared of her trauma, he realizes that what he was reading as kinky seduction is, in fact, a revenge scenario. She rapes him with a dildo, and Adrian enters the scene and also rapes Jared, calling him a "maggot," a "stupid fuck," and asking, "You like raping smart girls, huh?" During Adrian's rape of Jared, Maya sits on the bed with her back towards them. Hoping the rape of Jared satisfies her desire for revenge and thus will end her trauma, Adrian asks Maya, "Everything's OK now, right?" The weeping Maya responds by looking directly into the camera; she turns her head away as the film ends.

Descent is noteworthy if only for the confronting first rape scene. As noted earlier in the case of Handgun, date rape is uncommon in rape-revenge films (most opting instead for stranger or home-invasion themed assaults). Here, however, Lugacy confidently demonstrates the terrifying ease with which a scene of consensual romance can "tip" into rape, as the soft music and candlelight that set the romantic tone earlier in the scene before Maya asks Jared to stop far too easily and quickly becomes vicious and ironic when his attempted seduction becomes violent, forced and ugly. The strength of the film is this ability to depict the simple process of how rape "happens" in this context; and Dawson's performance as the detached Maya after the rape is to be commended for its quietude. Maya does not withdraw because she is plotting revenge for rape, she withdraws because she is traumatized by rape. Unfortunately, the random reappearance of Jared later in the film disrupts this convincing and compelling character study, and seems to overcompensate a little too eagerly for its slower middle act by tacking on a stylistically contradictory and thematically nonsensical ending. The "revenge raping" of Jared by both Adrian and Maya herself is presented in a hypersexualized manner (in terms of both the mise en scene features of the set design and Maya's wardrobe, and the soft, warm lighting), defying the rest of the film that appears to argue against exactly this kind of fetishization of rape onscreen. What is significant in this last scene, however, is that final, fourth wall-crumbling glare that Maya gives the camera. This is a telling moment, as her look actively implicates the viewer in the spectacle of both her rape and her revenge. That stare confirms that Maya knows we are there, and suggests she is aware that the preceding only her rape, but Jared's as a show performed for an audience. It is in this context that the sad, accusing nature of her look addresses the viewer directly, and her tears silently answer Adrian's earlier question: "No, everything is not OK now." While stronger in some places than in others, Descent's powerful final shot demands we reflect upon our complicity as viewers in the actions just witnessed.

This final image is similar to that in another rape-revenge film made in the same year, Straightheads (Dan Reed, 2007). Starring X-Files star Gillian Anderson, it is a dramatically different role for the woman who reached international stardom through her performance as down-to-earth FBI agent Dana Scully in the long-running television series. This British film is the first feature directed by documentary maker Dan Reed, and his unflinching treatment of the rape-revenge material, combined with the shock of seeing Anderson perform a role so different to Scully (right down to her English accent), is compelling viewing. The film opens as 23-year-old Adam (Danny Dyer) is installing surveillance equipment in the London apartment of the glamorous and professional 40-something Alice (Anderson). After some preliminary flirting, Alice invites Adam to a sophisticated party in the country that evening. Here, they have sex in a garden, and, on the drive back to the city, Adam tells Alice it has been the greatest night of his life. Caught up in the excitement of the moment, Adam mindlessly heckles a passing car. This unthinking act backfires, however, when Alice crashes her car, and both she and Adam are violently assaulted by the men whom Adam had previously mocked. Adam is beaten viciously, and Alice is gang-raped on the hood of her car in a powerful sequence. This is followed by a detailed study of Adam and Alice's mental and physical injuries as they return to Alice's apartment in the city to recover. During this period, Alice sees one of the rapists near the house of her recently deceased father. Deciding upon revenge, she demands Adam join her, and they begin to track down the other men. While Adam is less convinced that revenge is a good idea, Alice's desire for vengeance is strong, and she arms herself with her father's sniper rifle and shoots the dog of one of the rapists. This man, Heller (Anthony Calf), has a troubled daughter called Sophie (Francesca Fowler), who looks for the dog. Although Alice is moved by the girl's plight, she continues her plan of revenge against Sophie's father. Adam's behavior becomes increasingly confused, and he attempts to rape Sophie in her bedroom after Alice forces him to break into Heffer's house to install surveillance equipment. With Adam's wiring well and truly askew, he is further confused when Alice rejects his new brutal and aggressive persona. Adam retreats angrily into the forest, and returns to discover that Alice has confronted Heller in his house. She has learned that on the night she was raped, Heller diverted his friends' attention onto Alice to stop them from raping Sophie. Unmoved, Alice ties Heller to the kitchen table and anally rapes him with her rifle. Shocked by her own actions, Alice flees and picks up Sophie who she sees walking aimlessly along the road. Back at Heffer's house, Adam does not share Alice's realization of the futility of vengeance and continues on his rampage. He shoots the two other rapists who arrive to see Heller. After the last man is dispatched, Adam walks towards the camera, staring at the audience directly.

Because of its subject matter (or perhaps because it works so dramatically against supposed type for Anderson), the few critics who paid any attention to Straightheads remained largely unmoved. Derek Elley sums up the typical critical response, stating, "At the end of the day, [it] ... has no message about either random violence or the ethics of revenge. But as a gritty genre exer than a slice of socially aware pretty much works."" Much of the ambivalence towards the film no doubt stems from its more excessive moments, particularly the sudden and unexpected scene where Alice rapes her rapist with the rifle (an act as shocking as it is "faintly ridiculous""). As Anderson herself has pointed out, however, the attention on the last rape seemed to distract attention from the vicious first rape.12 In terms of the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of representing sexual violence on film, this earlier rape is worthy of note.

As this book has demonstrated, rape can be formally represented in a variety of different ways. What Straightheads does, however, is relatively unique. As the bashing of Adam precedes Alice's rape, the film focuses on that preliminary act in gory, visceral detail. It then only briefly shows the beginning of Alice's assault. The result of this is what can be best described as "intensity-by-association": It is assumed, by proximity alone, that Alice's rape is at least as violent and horrific as Adam's beating. This is solidified even further by the following scene, which shows Alice sitting on a nearby tree stump the next morning with her back to the camera. As Adam approaches her, she stands up, and it is only when she stumbles (and blood is shown running down her leg) that the ferocious brutality of her assault is confirmed. Arguably, however, the care and consideration taken in the execution of this opening rape is not repeated in the "revenge rape" that Alice executes at the film's conclusion. Clumsy, graphic and sadistic, the "faintly ridiculous" nature of this assault to some degree undermines what had taken place previously. This is not to say that rape-as-revenge can only be critically understood in this way; mirroring the broader arguments of this book, there is a diverse range in which this configuration has been adapted. Rape-as-revenge is a notable trend particularly common in contemporary rape revenge films like One Way, Straightheads and Descent, and as will be discussed shortly, also appears in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the I Spit on Your Grave remake.

In retrospect, Straightheads hinges thematically on Adam far more than it does on Alice. He is a young man destroyed by both the violent assault on his body and his proximity to Alice's rape and consequent emotional and psychological fallout. He does not share her vengeful drive, her experience, her income, or her intelligence, and consequently-as a newly-formed couple forged in the fire of random and extreme very notion of masculinity is guided by what he views as Alice's dominant hand ("You're so soft!" she tells him at one point when he attempts to smoke marijuana to cope with his physical and emotional distress). Consequently, when Alice begs Adam to stop the violence after she has raped Heller, he is confused and angry because she had previously encouraged him to be more aggressive and vengeful. Simply, he turned to violence because Alice wanted him to. Adam struggles to articulate his trauma, and he looks to Alice for guidance, but she has her own emotional issues to contend with. By the end of the film, Adam resorts to violence by almost child-like default: "Shut up!" he tells Alice, "You've had your fucking go!" Like Maya in Descent, when Adam collapses the imaginary fourth wall and looks directly at the camera, he acknowledges the "presence" of the spectator with a cool yet accusing glare. While both films aim to blur the ethical distinctions between "victims" and "villains," their similar final images openly accuse the audience of being a willing participant in the action that has preceded it. The contexts are different, however; Maya and Adam both give looks that not only acknowledge the presence of the audience, but also ultimately accuse us of wanting ethically simple solutions that the reality of rape and its associated trauma simply cannot provide.

European Extremes

As illustrated in the last chapter, rape-revenge films are by no means solely a Hollywood fascination. In fact, some of the most notorious, and critically and commercially successful, recent instances hail from Europe. In 2004, James Quandt coined the phrase the "New French Extremity" in his review of Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms (2003), observing "the growing vogue for shock tactics in French cinema over the past decade" and a "recent tendency to the willfully transgressive."" Films such as Martyrs (Pascal Laugier, 2008), High Tension (Haute Tension, Alexandre Aja, 2003), Frontier(s) (Frontiere[s], Xavier Gens, 2007), Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis, 2001) and Inside (A l'interieu, Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, 2005) all involve sexuallythemed violence to some degree. But it is Baise-moi (Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, 2000) and Irreversible (Gaspar Noe, 2002) that have earned the reputation of being two of the most controversial rape-revenge films made in recent years. Baise-Moi-whose English translation has ranged the ideological spectrum from Kiss Me to Fuck Me to Rape co-directed by Coralie Trinh Thi and Virginie Despentes, and adapted from the cult novel by the latter (itself based upon her diaries). Both Despentes and Trinh Thi had worked previously in the sex as a prostitute and Trinh Thi as an actress in pornographic the film was cast with porn actresses Karen Bach and Raffaela Anderson in the lead roles. The inclusion of unsimulated sex (including during its graphic rape scene15) combined with the film's excessive violence to garner it international notoriety. Right wing and religious groups in France rallied against the film upon its release, leading the government to place its first ban on a film in the country since 1973.16 The movie also met with censorship scandals around the world; in Australia the police were even called in to shut down screenings.

While the tabloid press rushed to bestow their polarized, antiBaise-moi sentiment, more reputable film critics also found their opinions split. For Gavin Smith, the film was "a genuinely primitive mongrel movie" that "is either pointlessly degrading Eurosleaze or a profound vision of nihilism and social transgression. Or both. "17 Eric Monder was equally divided, declaring, "The film is both bravely effective and undeniably repellent."18 Some critics readily identified what Despentes described as her and Trinh Thi's shared "feminist warrior vision."19 For Colin Nettelback, "The film is driven by an energetic feminist determination both to subvert the existing male dominance of explicit sexual imagery and to shift what society defines as pornography from the margins to the cultural mainstream"20; while Phil Powrie suggests, "Baise-moi turns the tables on gender and genre, taking neo-noir to a feminized hyper-space where the narrative matters less than a new kind of energy: the black whole of hyper-noir."21 It is this "energy" that both Powrie and Nettelback identify that appears to be the one element of Baise-moi that critics agreed upon, captured most simply by Linda Ruth Williams in her observation that "Baise-moi itself is actually rather fun, and refreshingly inno cent in its cinematic strategies. If it's sensationally confused, it's also energetically driven. "22

Nadine (Bach) is a prostitute with a nagging housemate whom she kills in a fit of anger, while Manu (Anderson) is gang-raped with a friend by a group of men while they are drinking and talking in a park. Manu's friend struggles and screams during the attack, but Manu herself remains frozen and blank, her lack of shock suggesting that she is more than familiar with this type of violence. (As she explains to her friend, who is confused by her passivity, "If you park in the projects, you empty your car `cause someone's gonna break in. I leave nothing precious in my cunt for those jerks.") When he finds out about the rape, Manu's brother gets a gun to avenge the assault, but she refuses to give him the information necessary to identify the perpetrators. He interprets her refusal as meaning she enjoyed the rape and calls her a slut. Manu snaps instantly and kills him with a nearby gun. Manu and Nadine meet near a train subway while wandering around aimlessly after their respective murders, and become friends. They embark on a self-destructive road trip where they kill random strangers (both men and women, although the killing of men is certainly privileged and tends to be provided with more their female victims). During their killing spree, Manu and Nadine engage in a range of less vicious pleasures than their sadistic murders: They dance in their underwear, they drink, they have sex with strangers," but most of all they enjoy each other's company. When Manu is shot at a roadhouse, their adventure ends as suddenly and as inexplicably as it began. A devastated Nadine disposes of Manu's body, and just before she is able to commit suicide herself, the police locate and arrest her. In this final moment, Nadine returns instantly to her submissive role in a violent and misogynistic patriarchal social order, as the policemen scream, "Bitch! Freeze! Where's your friend? Where's the other bitch?"

As Nettleback and Judith Franco have both observed'24 from the opening moments of the film-with its lengthy close-up of Nadine's unbroken stare in her dominatrix-styled collar -Baise-moi seeks to actively defy the normative "male gaze" of Hollywood narrative cinema as identified by Laura Mulvey in 1972. Its combination of road movie elements with feminist fantasy have perhaps unsurprisingly garnered Baise-moi comparisons to Thelma &Louise, but the French film has a number of crucial differences. As Franco observes, "While Thelma & Louise and other American feminine road narratives privilege the psychological emotional process of self-discovery in a predominantly melodramatic mode, Baise-moi ... attempt[s] to co-opt the road movie's masculinist ideals."25 When asked if it is a rape-revenge film, Despentes has answered that while her and Trinh Thi consider it more a female friendship film, "obviously it can be considered as a rape-revenge movie, and why not?"26 The revenge Nadine and Manu seek, of course, is not specifically in regard to the rape shown at the beginning of the film. As Manu makes clear in the killing of her brother when he suggests she enjoyed the rape because she was not "properly" traumatized, the film's depiction of violence against women is much broader and insidious than this one sexually explicit and harrowing assault. It is in this sense that the film gains its most perversely charming and bleakly comic motifs, as Manu and Nadine continually joke about how they do not fit the "typical" image of the female avenger, acknowledging an awareness of their own heritage as mythological female avengers. "Fuck, we're hopeless," says Manu at one stage. "Where are all our witty lines?" "We've got guns," answers Nadine, "at least that's something." Later they discuss committing suicide so that it can "end as good as it began ... with a good punchline."

Karen Bach in Baise-moi (Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, 2000) [Le Studio Canal/Take One/Kobal Collection].

The strength of Baise-moi, however, is not its knowing subversion of rape-revenge traditions, its punk verite aesthetic, or even the remarkable performances of its two lead actresses. Rather, it is about the randomness of both the violent and pleasurable aspects of these women's lives, and that the film allows its female characters to be irrational, confused and unable to easily fit into the pre-decided role of the female action avenger they so openly mock. "I think what is important in our movie is that to me, for the first time, you can see a girl having sex and being a slut and then laughing and then having fun and then being violent and angry and then being stupid," Despentes has said.27 Baise-moi is a unique artifact that consciously lets its female characters rape, violence and anger, as well as to pleasure, joy, and friend ways that make sense to them before they fit into the preconceived assumptions that dominate film history. Like Nadine and Manu, Trinh Thi and Despentes feel they do not owe anyone an explanation, and this (combined with the film's explicit depiction of sex and violence) makes for a difficult but unforgettable viewing experience.

Trinh Thi and Despentes' friend and fellow New French Extremity auteur Gaspar Noe is also no stranger to controversy, and has actively engaged with the rape-revenge traditions to present his notorious vision of violence and retribution. With a reputation for shocking and extreme cinema confirmed by his debut feature I Stand Alone (Seul contre tous, film Nadine watches on a television in her apartment at the beginning of Baise-moi in a nod to Noe- the elements of rape and misdirected vengeance that appear briefly in his earlier movie take center stage in Irreversible (2002). The blistering formal conceit of the film is immediately apparent in the first few seconds of the opening credits, which show words rolling backwards, beginning with the copyright information that normally ends a movie. Less than a minute in and the angle of these reversed credits begins to skew so much so that when the film's title is revealed, it is not only backwards but on its side. From the outset, Irreversible seeks not only a temporal reversal in its structure, but to turn a whole range of assumptions on their side. Played in with the last scene of the story and working its way toward its the film begins with violent revenge, is followed by a rape, and then focuses on the acts leading up to the rape. In this context the rape is inevitable for no other reason than it has already happened when the film begins.

Opening with Philippe Nahon as the same character he played in I Stand Alone-Irreversible deliberately places itself in the same sexually violent, racist and homophobic universe of Noe's previous film, giving those familiar with the earlier work some idea of the intensity of what is to follow. But even with that warning, the shift to a vicious assault in the seedy underworld of The Rectum (a gay S&M club) is deeply shocking. Although the characters have yet to be identified, Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and his friend Pierre (Albert Dupontel) are shown leaving the club, with Pierre in handcuffs and Marcus being driven away in an ambulance. Cutting back to the scene that took place previously, Marcus and Pierre search for a man called le Tenia ("The Tapeworm," played by Jo Prestia), who has viciously raped and beaten Marcus' girlfriend, Alex (Monica Belluci). Marcus mistakenly identifies a man as le Tenia and has his arms broken, but Pierre interrupts before Marcus is raped and graphically beats the culprit's skull in with a fire extinguisher (in doing so, it can be linked to a diverse range of films like Night of the Sunflowers, The Bravados, and Act of Aggression, where mistaken identity results in the wrong person being punished for a rape). Again, there is a dramatic cut to the previous scene, and Marcus and Pierre discover that Alex has been brutally raped and is in a coma, even though in the film's chronology thus far that event has yet to happen. Marcus and Pierre are encouraged by a group of strangers who observe the scene to take justice into their own hands. Marcus and Pierre make enquiries as to the rapist's identity and steal a taxi to go to The Rectum. Next, Alex is shown leaving a party where Marcus is drinking and flirting with other women. She tries to get a taxi but fails and instead walks through an underground tunnel, where she sees le Tenia beating a transvestite. She interrupts them, and le Tenia turns his attack on Alex, embarking on a lengthy and violent sexual assault. The film then cuts to Pierre, Alex and Marcus traveling to and arriving at the party, followed by an earlier scene which focuses on Marcus and Alex happily discussing her possible pregnancy after they have had sex (when Marcus leaves, she does another test and confirms her condition). The final scene of the the first scene of the a blissful Alex lying in the sunshine in a park, ironically reading J. W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time (1927) as young children play happily around her.

While this book illustrates the diversity of how the rape-revenge trope has manifested, when played in linear order, rape-revenge films tend to share a basic structural trajectory. Generally, a film begins with a rape (or an attempted rape), and that rape will often be followed by an act of revenge (or an attempt at revenge). Even if the specific details of what will happen around those two key points of action are up for grabs in terms of who/how/where/ when/why, on a fundamental level there is a preconfigured raw structural blueprint in place for audiences with even the barest familiarity of it, despite its myriad possible variations. By reversing this process from rape-revenge to revenge-rape, however, the bulk of Irreversible that occurs after Alex's rape is by contrast almost banal. Because the film has its two climactic acts of violence in the opening section of the film, everything after these events grants the spectator a strange sense of amnesia. As Noe himself has joked, the film actually has a "happy ending"28 because of this structural subversion, but the impact of the film's two opening scenes of extreme violence load that "happy ending" with bitter irony.

The rape scene in Irreversible is arguably unchallenged in its visceral intensity, shown in an unedited single 9-minute-long take where for the first time in the film the camera is held statically (a sudden stylistic contrast to the wildly roaming camera that dominates the film up until that point). This change in camera movement effectively "locks" the spectator in place, the synthetic illusion of movement so aggressively constructed up until then abruptly halted for dramatic and grotesque affect. While few can dispute the intensity of this grueling scene, its ideological status is less clearly defined. For Noe himself, that the scene is at no point shot from the subjective perspective of the rapist automatically vindicates it from claims of glorifying rape.29 But Elvis Mitchell maintains that Alex's flimsy dress and her decision to walk into a dangerous area mean "Mr. Noe is inadvertently saying that she's inviting the rape."30 Nick James agrees, suggesting that the dress sexualizes her and therefore "undermines [the film] ... as sincerely feminist," especially considering that the scene itself is "lit like a strip club."" Even more striking, however, is the sheer length of the scene its sudden rejection of the flamboyant editing and cinematography strategies that mark the film up until that point, this suffocatingly long take implies that Irreversible has moved into a real-time domain as it unflinchingly focuses upon the ferocious attack. While by no means verite as such, the sheer impact of this dramatic temporal shift combines with the graphicness and viciousness of the scene to make it one of the most horrifying and memorable rape scenes ever committed to film.

Noe has noted that Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs was the first film he ever walked out of because of its shocking impact.32 There is no doubt that he consciously sought to engage with the issues surrounding the rape-revenge film and its traditions, and Mark Kermode offers the most well thought-out reflection of the relationship between Irreversible and the broader rape-revenge category. Considering it in some part to continue the legacy of the original The Last House on the Left, Kermode suggests that Noe's film "is a realization of Wes Craven's dream of recreating a movie in which violence is seen as a wholly corrupting force, reducing everyone to their basest level." He continues:

What we are left with ... is a breathtakingly efficient exploitation flick that uses a barrage of incendiary sights and sounds to beat its audience up, then ends ironically with an upbeat opening that serves only to reinforce the sense of tragedy to come. The true meaning of the film's title lies ultimately in its depiction of the damage of violence as being utterly irreversible, suggesting that (contrary to generic law) a rape-revenge movie can only have a genuinely happy ending if you play it backwards. While directors as diverse as Wes Craven and Abel Ferrara have wrestled with this concept in the past, it is Noe, with his unashamedly simple and derivative narrative device, who manages most succinctly to reveal this basic truth without betraying the visceral thrills for which his audience are ultimately playing.33

The idyllic image of a maternal Alex that ends the film may seem a cliched, even reactionary vision of female contentment, but despite its ideological nuances, it is a lot less ambiguous than the supposed "victorious" rape avenger who appears in the final scenes of less controversial films such as The Accused. As Kermode notes, this stems not so as much from Irreversible's depiction of rape, as from its narrative placement of it. Both Ms. 45 and the original The Last House on the Left end with their protagonists either dead or forever sunk in an ethical quagmire, trapped by their own self-righteous lust for vengeance. The reversal of the rape-revenge story ultimately concludes in a celebration of a past that both rape and revenge destroys any possibility of returning to (hence the film's opening and closing statements, "Time destroys all things").

Although Lars von Trier's Dogville (2003) appears to less consciously engage with rape-revenge traditions, there are enough narrative and thematic elements present to easily place it in this category. To boil its plot down to its barest narrative bones, it is the story of a woman who destroys an entire town for raping and tormenting her. In typical von Trier style, the manner in which this story plays out is far more complex than this skeleton suggests. Narrated by John Hurt, the film is divided into nine separate chapters that tell "the sad tale of the town of Dogville." Frightened and beautiful stranger Grace (Nicole Kidman) wanders into the remote eponymous town in the Rocky Mountains of the United States seeking protection from ominous gangster figures that are searching for her. Under the strong recommendation of Tom Edison Jr. (Paul Bettany), the townspeople agree to let Grace stay in Dogville; and at Tom's suggestion, she offers herself to do a variety of tasks for the town's residents as a sign of good will. As Tom and Grace fall in love, their happiness is disrupted when police visit Dogville and post a notice that says Grace is a dangerous woman wanted for her involvement in a number of bank robberies. Because of the added dangers involved in letting her stay in Dogville, the townsfolk cut her pay but increase her workload.

There is a distinct turn in Grace's treatment about an hour into the film. What begins as veiled discomfort and mistrust towards her escalates rapidly into rape and cruelty, trying to escape Dogville (and being raped as large heavy wheel is chained to Grace via a collar around her neck. All the men in the town participate in the regular rape of Grace except for Tom. Upset that she still refuses to have sex with him (their romance was unconsummated), Tom decides to notify the gangsters who were looking for Grace of her whereabouts. The gangsters arrive, and Tom tells them magnanimously that he cannot accept a cash reward, but his understanding of the situation changes when it is revealed that the gang's leader (played by James Caan, referred to only as the Big Man) is Grace's father. After Grace and her father have a lengthy discussion about the ethics of violence, punishment and goodness, Grace announces, "I want to make the world a better place.... If there is any town this world would be better without, this is it." At her order, the town is burned to the ground, and all of Dogville's residents (except for the dog) are shot. She shoots Tom at point blank range, telling her father, "Some things you have to do yourself."

Sexual violence or power struggles where women are placed in positions of weakness by men are not uncommon in von Trier's films, as typified by Dancer in the Dark (2000), Breaking the Waves (1996) and most recently in the controversial Antichrist (2009). The man once described as "the P.T. Barnum of modern cinema"34 has often met with accusations of both in his films themselves and in regards to his alleged mistreatment of Bjork during the making of Dancer in the Dark. In Dogville, von Trier attempted to distance himself from such claims by stating in the film's press kit, "I would say that these characters are not so much females as they are a part of me. It's very interesting to work with women. They do my character well. I think that they portray me in a good way."35 The film also received criticism for its perceived anti-Americanism, with its view of small-town ethics read as especially judgmental (particularly in respect to its concluding use of David Bowie's song "Young Americans" as it shows vintage photographs of poor Americans). These accusations von Trier also dismissed,36 and as Jack Stevenson has noted, the film can just as easily be considered a response to the political climate in his own country (during the period of the film's production, von Trier had expressed vocal outrage at "a general swing of Danish politics to the right"37).

At first glance, such debates pale in comparison to Dogville's most striking immediate feature - its stark, minimalist formal construction. Inspired by the theater of Bertolt Brecht, the film is shot in a large empty space with only white chalk-drawn outlines and writing on the floor to denote spatial boundaries. While there is some furniture, not all props are provided (the gooseberry bushes tended by Lauren Bacall's Ma Ginger, for example, are indicated simply by the word written on the floor where the plants should be). Von Trier chose this striking stylistic approach to place more emphasis upon the characters themselves, but at his bluntest there is an implication that the shock of such a formal choice stems from his love of provocation: "There's a black floor, it takes three hours, nothing happens, the outcome is terrible. Nobody should say that they were not In light of such a challenge, von Trier's utilization of a basic rape-revenge structure should be considered par for his broader authorial course. While the film is rarely discussed in such terms, Bryant Frazer offers one of the few instances that link Dogville to rape-revenge explicitly, noting that it "plays like the ultimate rape revenge flick -it's as if the ghosts of Bess from Breaking the Waves and Selma from Dancer in the Dark are wandering through Dogville, too, having come to kick some serious fucking ass."39 But despite its obvious structural crossover with rape-revenge traditions, can Grace's total destruction of Dogville be so easily understood as the kind of pop feminist victory that Frazer suggests? The discussion Grace has with her father before she decides to annihilate Dogville places her decision in a far more complex conceptual terrain that concerns not only ethics and subjectivity, but also, more opaquely, the issue of Grace's survival in her life after Dogville. As Caroline Bainbridge suggests, Grace's circumstances at the end of the film are far from "happily ever after":

Once again, Grace is left no room in which to exist as a subject on her own terms-her choice in the ending of Dogville is a stark one: she must either bear the brunt of rejection by the father or inflict punishment on those who have treated her so badly in order to properly enter the symbolic domain of paternal law and take up her properly feminized position. Grace's decision at the end of the film is arguably as much about survival as the one she makes at the beginning.4o

Despite the undeniable catharsis granted through Grace's demolition of the town that raped and tortured her, this act, too, can be considered a symbolic negotiation as she enters into yet another complex gendered power relationship with her father. Just as Grace offered to do chores for the people of Dogville as a sign of good will, so too her annihilation of the town at the film's conclusion may be seen as a sign of good will towards her father (according to his own ethical logic, at least). Consequently, like many of the rapeavenging women in this book, Grace's spectacular and climactic moment of violent retribution against her abusers is far from a simplistic victory or defeat in the broader context of her status as an abused and victimized woman.

A more mainstream manifestation of rape-revenge in contemporary European cinema can be readily identified in the blockbuster success of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Man som hatar kvinnor, Niels Arden Oplev, 2009) and its sequels, The Girl Who Played with Fire (Flickan som lekte med elden, Daniel Alfredson, 2009) and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Luftslottet som sprangdes, Daniel Alfredson, 2009). The international success of late Swedish investigative journalist Stieg Larsson's "Millennium trilogy" novels spawned an equally successful film franchise, the first in the series ranking as the second highest earning independent movie of 2009.41 By itself, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo appears to be a relatively straightforward crime story that combines a rape-revenge plot concerning its central female protagonist, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), with its central investigative enigma revolving around the unsolved disappearance of a young woman in Sweden in 1966 (itself a plot that explicitly incorporates incest and the search for a serial rapist and murderer). The rape-revenge component appears initially to be relatively self-contained: Lisbeth, a young computer hacker with a troubled past, is required to have a lawyer act as her guardian because of earlier psychiatric problems. With only a year remaining of her guardianship, the corrupt and sadistic Nils Bjurman (Peter Andersson) is given the job, and he forces Lisbeth to fellate him to gain access to her own bank account. Bjurman's sexual abuse of Lisbeth becomes even more vicious and graphic when she visits him at his home to request access to her money; there he ties her up and violently rapes her. He does not realize, however, that tech-savvy Lisbeth has videotaped the entire brutal assault. Believing he would only force her to fellate him again, she accidentally gains powerful visual evidence proving that she was raped. Returning to his house once more, Lisbeth sprays Bjurman's eyes with mace, ties him up and anally rapes him with a dildo while beating and kicking him. She then crudely tattoos the phrase "I am a rapist and a sadistic pig" on his stomach, and after playing him the DVD of her rape, she tells him that if he does not authorize her remaining reports and allow her full access to her own money, she will send the DVD to the police and the press.

Noomi Rapace in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Man som hatar kvinnor, Niels Arden Oplev, 2009) [Nordisk Film/Kobal Collection].

In the context of the first film alone, this plot line adds greatly to the development of Lisbeth's character development, and provides a neat parallel to the main narrative focus concerning her association with investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist). At the beginning of the film, Blomkvist is sentenced to three months in jail for libelling powerful Erik Wennerstrom (Stefan Sauk). Blomkvist insists that he was set up, and the security company Lisbeth works for is hired to investigate Blomkvist's credibility. The client is wealthy Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube), who hires Blomkvist to investigate the disappearance of his beloved niece Harriet upon receipt of Lisbeth's positive report. While only ostensibly a lesbian in the first of the Swedish film franchise, Lisbeth is fascinated by Blomkvist and assists him with his investigations remotely by hacking into his computer. The two eventually team up, begin a sexual relationship, and determine that a serial rapist and murderer is behind both Harriet's disappearance and the violent deaths of a number of other women, spanning decades. Identifying the neo-Nazi tendencies of the rapist and killer, they discover the perpetrator is Vanger's nephew, Martin (Peter Haber). Lisbeth rescues Blomkvist when Martin captures him, and Blomkvist discovers that Harriet (Martin's sister) did not die but fled to Australia after murdering her father, Gotfried. Harriet explains that both Martin and her father had raped her since she was fourteen, and she fled in fear that Martin's abuse would escalate in the face of their father's death. In the film's coda, Lisbeth supplies the now-jailed Blomkvist with the evidence to properly convict Wennerstrom, and, when released, Blomkvist sees a disguised Lisbeth on the television news enjoying Wennerstrom's money in the Cayman Islands.

The parallels between these two rape-revenge plot regarding Bjurman, and the serial rapes and murders by Martin and Got made explicit as Martin explains to Blomkvist that his crimes were committed "mainly for the sex. When I put them down, it's only a logical consequence of the rape." In Swedish, both the book and the film's title Man som hatar kvinnor translates to Men Who Hate Women, and this sentiment links Lisbeth and Harriet's stories. But even with its more romantically titled English-language moniker, Lisbeth makes this connection explicit when she tells Blomkvist that Martin "was a killer and a rapist and he enjoyed it. He had the same chances as everyone else. You choose who you want to be. He wasn't a victim. He was an evil motherfucker who hated women." Although the next two films do not as explicitly contain the overt rape-revenge scenario of the first movie, this focus on "men who hate women" begins with the micro (private) example in the first film and expands film-by-film to address the macro (public): first on an individual level between Bjurman and Lisbeth, then by examining gendered power imbalances in the institution of the family (in The Girl Who Played with Fire), and finally within the government itself (The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, where the action plays out in a courtroom). Considered as a whole, these films reflect a world where violence against women is culturally ingrained, permeating every facet of society.

By no means do the Millennium films represent a particularly feminist enquiry into power, although critical treatments of the books upon which they are based may reach different conclusions. As Blomkvist himself states so frequently in the last movie, it is specifically about Lisbeth herself, not against any broader institutionalized view of women as a whole. In fact, this individualized, unique status of Lisbeth as a one-off is made nowhere clearer than in her appearance. With her spikes, black leather, patent leather buckle-boots, body piercings and eponymous tattoo, Lisbeth is visually marked as different. With her fishnet and PVC, she is literally fetishized in the film through her fetish wear. Unlike the books, where she has her own "scene," in the films not only is Lisbeth someone whose gender distinguishes her from myriad "men who hate women," but her tomboyish, aggressively alternative style also separates her from the other women in the film. This even includes her girlfriend Miriam (Yasmine Garbi), who, while also styled so as to represent "alternative" identity, is much more feminized and classically "retro" than Lisbeth's androgynous, Deathrock-infused look. Again in contrast to the novels, Lisbeth's punk/goth aesthetic is crucially not one that unites her to any subcultural community or movement and there is no subcultural value to her striking style beyond it casting her as a lone outsider. In the films Lisabeth is excluded from the community-building processes that Gothic style actively encourages, and her identity does not link her to like-minded subcultural Others,42 but simply alienates her from a mainstream that marks her as different. This cinematic construction of Lisbeth as Other exoticizes her experience and makes her story diegetically "different" to the experience of "normal" women by default. While other women help her in the film (most notably Blomkvist's colleague Erika, and his sister who acts as Lisbeth's lawyer), they frequently express an inability to understand Lisbeth. The Millennium trilogy films offer a web of raperevenge scenarios regarding Lisbeth that peel back to expose yet another layer: she punishes Bjurman for raping her, and she avenged her mother's abuse (including sexual abuse) at the hands of her father when she was a child by throwing gasoline on him and setting him alight. Ultimately, though, it is Blomkvist who facilitates the real victory in the third film when he provides evidence proving a government conspiracy against Lisbeth (and exposes the corruption of the sinister rapist psychiatrist Teleborian), one that allowed her near life-long victimization at the hands of institutionalized misogyny. Despite her unrelenting literal and figurative battles against "men who hate women," by the end of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest it appears that Lisbeth is just as reliant upon men as ever for her freedom and safety.

The Shock of the New

The success of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels demonstrates that rape-revenge continues to be adapted and re-adapted into genre films as much as it is a more conceptual point of reference for art films like Irreversible, Baise-moi and Dogville. The current spate of rape-revenge remakes, such as The Last House on the Left (2009), I Spit on Your Grave (2010) and the Mother's Day (2010), offer horror as a useful final example in this chapter's examination of contemporary rape-revenge. Over thirty years after the original I Spit on Your Grave, Meir Zarchi took the role of executive producer on Steven R. Monroe's remake of his controversial 1978 movie. Although Zarchi was initially more partial to the idea of a sequel, he was both happy with and a major collaborator on the recent version. The screenplay was penned by Adam Rockoff,43 who had previously co-written the script for the comparatively silly supernatural rape-revenge film Wicked Lake (Zach Passero, 2008). Just as Zarchi had based his original on his experience of discovering a beaten gang-rape victim on the street, so did Monroe channel his own personal experience into the project. In an interview with Sean Decker on the horror website Dread Central, Monroe discussed the effect the rape of his ex-girlfriend had on him at the time, admitting that "there were times when I saw him [the victimizer] and I wanted to take a baseball bat and bash his head in."44 It was this intensity that both Zarchi and Monroe brought to the new project; Zarchi has said that when "Steven told me, `Your movie pushed the envelope,' I told him that the remake should shove the whole mailbox."45

The 2010 I Spit on Your Grave deviates from the original in a number of significant ways. Most obvious is the addition of Sheriff Storch (played by Andrew Howard), who Jennifer (Sarah Butler) goes to for help during her assault. Rather than assisting her, however, his presence was planned all along. The corrupt Storch is therefore in many ways the most villainous of the only does he direct the actions of the less-intelligent rednecks after the crime, he demonstrates chilling hypocrisy by returning after the rape to his church-going wife (played by Mollie Milligan) and loving daughter (whose presence is central to the film's climax). Far from protecting Jennifer, the representative of the law participates in her humiliation and abuse, and he too viciously rapes her (as part of her later revenge, Jennifer rapes him in retaliation)." The addition of Sheriff Storch marks a crucial shift from the original, as it answers a question not fully addressed in the 1978 version: Why doesn't Jennifer go to the police after the rape instead of seeking revenge herself? The law cannot be trusted, and its representative has actively used her faith in the legal process to violate and torture her even further. This provides a more watertight logic behind her decision to execute revenge on her own, and to some degree accounts for the increased intensity of her post-rape violence.

The remake of I Spit on Your Grave includes many affectionate references to the original. The famous bathtub castration scene from the earlier version, for instance, is here adapted to a scenario where instead of being in the bath naked with her rapist, a fully dressed Jennifer instead ties him over the bath as she tortures him. But one of the most striking differences between the films is that while Camille Keaton's Jennifer used seduction and the promise of sex to catch her prey, Butler's Jennifer executes scenes of violence such as this in jeans and plainly cut tops. Unlike the rape-avenging Keaton, there are no floral bikinis for this Jennifer as she slices and dices her way through those who wronged her. Monroe has insisted that Jennifer's seduction of her rapists in the original was one of the major features he wished to change. While he claims this change was based on issues of realism rather than ideology as such,46 this decision echoes Barbara Creed's concern that in the original version, "The scenes in which Jennifer carries out her revenge are deliberately eroticized."47 Although Butler's Jennifer does not use her sexuality to seduce her rapists in the same way Keaton's does, it is still important to note that from the audience perspective at least, the new Jennifer is still "eroticized." In the bathtub scene in the recent version, for example, she wears simple, unisex-styled jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt. But this top is thin and lightcolored, allowing her erect nipples to be clearly visible at times. Keaton's Jennifer is far more "girly" than her 2010 counterpart, but although Jennifer here may not be feminized, she is certainly still "eroticized."

Monroe's rejection of vengeful-Jennifer-as-feminized-seductress reflects his broader determination to avoid two-dimensional characters or "cartoons."48 The rape scene in particular is shot predominantly with hand-held cameras, and the slick editing and director of photography Neil Liks' polished digital imagery place it in a stylistic universe well beyond Zarchi's raw original. Less crude than aiming for an aesthetic of contemporary horror verite, the 2010 I Spit on Your Grave is formally closer to Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008) than the 1978 I Spit on Your Grave or Craven's The Last House on the Left. Obviously, the economic realities of releasing a film in 2010 are notably different to those at the time when Zarchi's film was originally released, and access to film production equipment is far greater than it was thirty years ago. One of the more interesting features of the remake is its awareness of these technological factors and the notion of remediation. Early in the film, Jennifer is videoed by Stanley (Daniel of the rednecks who later rape her-through her window. This camera also appears during the assault itself, where at times the perspective shifts to the rapist's "rougher" handy-cam footage. This articulates a sense of distance between the men and the action taking place before them, and also adds a degree of self-awareness to the film as a whole. This I Spit on Your Grave is consciously aware that it is at a literal technological distance from Zarchi's raw, rough original.

However, this issue of distancing lies at the heart of some of the more complex issues surrounding the remake. As discussed in Chapter One, Linda Ruth Williams has highlighted the importance of a kind of ethical symmetry between the impact of the rape itself and the revenge component. If the revenge has less impact than the rape, there is the suggestion that the film may be siding with the rapists because they have not been justly punished. At the same time, however, if the revenge is more intense than the rape, it risks making that revenge potentially "less defensible."49 This sense of equilibrium does not readily appear in the remake, and while the rape is undeniably harrowing, brutal and nasty to watch, it is much shorter and stylistically more contrived than in Zarchi's original. The revenge, however, is far more explicit, gory and flamboyant than in the 1978 version, and "Grand scenes where Jennifer employs pliers and fishhooks no doubt led some critics to claim Monroe had turned I Spit on Your Grave into an informal addition to the Saw franchise.51 This is not to say that the 2010 version should have necessarily had a longer or more vicious rape scene, but this turn to "torture porn" aesthetics in the revenge section render the remake a more clear-cut horror film than the original. This is also embedded in the film's narrative structure. Like Mari in the recent The Last House on the Left, Jennifer here also appears to return from the dead: She throws herself off a bridge into a river in a spectacular scene after the rape, and the events surrounding her reappearance are shrouded in mystery, alluding that her return for vengeance may be almost vaguely supernatural (Ronnie Scheib from Variety even describes her as a "zombie-like avenger"52). Monroe's I Spit on Your Grave and the 2009 The Last House on the Left have strengths and weaknesses both as films in their own right and in how they compare to their influential originals. They were created in a very different cultural climate from the films that inspired them, and these later movies reflect the differences in these contexts clearly. That both recent versions add these more traditional horror elements is a similarity that may speak to contemporary film style as much as to their politics.

In a contemporary horror context, rape-revenge has found itself far closer to the mainstream than the origins of the I Spit on Your Grave remake may suggest; even the tween blockbuster The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (David Slade, 2010) features a rape-revenge subplot in its back-story of vampire Rosalie (Nikki Reed). As films like The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002), The Eye (David Moreau and Xavier Palud), The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, 2004) and Dark Water (Walter Salles, 2005) indicate, there has been a strong trend in Hollywood to remake successful Asian horror films, and Masayuki Ochiai's 2008 remake of Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom's Thai horror blockbuster Shutter offers a contemporary example of a supernatural raperevenge film.53 Both versions share the same basic plot. In the original Thai film, Jane (Natthaweeranuch Thongmee) and her boyfriend, photographer Tun (Anada Everingham), hit a woman on the road one dark night and drive away. In the Hollywood film, Jane (Rachael Taylor) and her new husband Ben (Joshua a a mysterious woman on the road on their arrival in Japan, where they have moved for Ben's work (unlike the Thai couple, Jane and Ben get out of their car to investigate but do not find a body). Both couples soon begin to be haunted by strange events, and the mysterious woman begins to appear in photographs. Jane in each film decides to investigate, and is introduced to the notion of spirit photography. As they look further into it, they receive clues in photographs that lead to the identification of the woman: In the Thai film it is Natre (Achita Sikamana), and in the Hollywood film it is Megumi (Megumi Okina), the ex-girlfriends of Tun and Ben respectively. Their partners (who are also tormented by the appearance of the ghosts) tell the two Janes that Natre/Megumi were possessive and inexperienced in love, and took their break-ups badly. In each film Jane therefore believes that a jealous, spawned lover is haunting them. But the couples continue to be tormented, particularly Ben and Tun when they discover that their best friends (who also knew Megumi and Natre) have died in strange and violent circumstances.

Both Jane and Ben and Jane and Tun journey to Megumi and Natre's homes, and learn that the respective women had committed suicide. After putting their bodies to rest, they believe their hauntings will end. Returning to what they hope is a normal life, Jane in both films unthinkingly gets some photographs developed that lead her to the discovery of visual evidence (film in the Thai version, and a camera's memory stick in the Hollywood one) of Natre and Megumi being raped by Ben and Tun's friends, and that Ben and Tun photographed each assault. Devastated, the women confront their partners who defend themselves by claiming their friends forced them into it, and that they did not realize that their harassment of Natre and Megumi would escalate into sexual violence. Disgusted and horrified, both women leave their partners. A furious and frantic Ben and Tun take photographs with a Polaroid camera to try and locate Megumi and Natre in their homes, and it is only when they drop the camera and it accidentally takes a photo of themselves that they discover the women are clamped around their necks, explaining the two men's mysterious neck and shoulder pain that had been mentioned throughout the film. The final shot of each film shows Ben and Tun hospitalized in psychiatric institutions after having seriously injured themselves trying to remove the vengeful spirit from their bodies. A reflection in the window of each hospital room shows Megumi and Natre still in place, sitting on Ben and Tun's shoulders.

Despite lead actress Rachael Taylor's claim that the U.S. remake of Shutter has "very cerebral aspects to it,"54 the film made little impact critically or at the box office, with both filmgoers and reviewers widely dismissing it as an unimaginative rehash of the earlier film. The Thai version -which was a financial phenomenon and one of the most successful Thai films to date - for some may appear to simply rehash the same terrain as J-horror success stories such as Ringu (The Ring, Hideo Nakata, 1998) and Ju-on (The Grudge, Takashi Shimizu, 2000). Despite condemning most of the movie as a pedestrian Asian genre entry, Jamie Russell identifies its rape-revenge elements as its strongest feature. "Once it shows its hand," he says, "Shutter transforms into a supernatural footnote to the rape-revenge cycle, a kind of I Spit on Your Grave from beyond the grave." He continues, "While much of its running time insipidly retreads other movies, it's final reel is dark enough to be memorable after the credits roll."55 The subgeneric alchemy that converts both versions of Shutter from being horror films about the returned spirit of a spawned lover to being more explicitly supernatural rape-revenge films "from beyond the grave" is where each film gains the impact of its twist ending.

The two films deviate in a small but crucial way regarding their overall treatment of rape and revenge, however. In the Thai film the image of Tun in the hospital room is shown from Jane's perspective. But in the Hollywood film, Ben's identical predicament is not shown from Jane's perspective, simply because she is not there. Thus, when Jane in the Hollywood Shutter walks out on Ben at the discovery of his grotesque involvement in Megumi's rape (an attack that led to her suicide), her decision is final - there is no chance of reconciliation with a man involved in such a revolting act. But in the Thai film, Jane is there. This does not necessarily imply reconciliation between her and Tun, but, more than in the Hollywood version, it suggests that her severing of ties with Tun is not as complete as American Jane's is with Ben. Combined with the fact that the Thai film implies that Natre's motivations for harassing Tun do have at least something to do with her romantic obsession with him, Thai Shutter's Tun seems to come out slightly less ethically scathed than Hollywood Shutter's Ben, despite both of them physically ending up in identical places.

Not all contemporary horror-themed rape-revenge films are remakes, of course, and one of the most critically celebrated recent entries into the category is Mitchell Lichtenstein's Teeth (2007). This black comedy/horror tells the story of Dawn (Jess Weixler), who the film introduces as a young child in a wading pool on the front lawn of a suburban house near a nuclear power plant. Her mean stepbrother Brad shares the pool with her, and after a series of harassing comments he exposes his hand from below the water to reveal his bleeding finger. Moving forward to the present day, Dawn is a key figure in her high school's Christian Abstinence movement, but after meeting the attractive Tobey (Hale Appleman) she finds her vow of chastity challenged. With her feelings reciprocated, Tobey and Dawn kiss at a deserted swimming area. Tobey's arousal intensifies, and when Dawn asks him to stop, he rapes her. To Dawn's much as is castrated as he penetrates her. Shocked at what has happened, Dawn's research leads her to believe she has teeth in her vagina (vagina dentata). She seeks the advice of a gynecologist to confirm her diagnosis, and she severs his fingers when she senses an inappropriate pleasure on his behalf during her internal examination. Returning home, she finds her ill mother dying on the floor of their house while her brother (John Hensley) has sex with his girlfriend and ignores her mother's condition. With her mother in the hospital and close to death, Dawn turns to her friend Ryan (Ashley Springer) and consents to have sex with him. Initially, as the act is consensual, Ryan is not castrated. But when Dawn realizes he had placed a bet on her willingness to have sex with him, she engages him in coitus once more and this time castrates him with her vaginal teeth. In the film's climactic scene, she confronts the lecherous and selfish Brad, knowing that he had always been sexually attracted to seduces him. At the same moment that Brad remembers that the cause of his cut finger in the film's opening scene was a bite from Dawn's vagina when he molested her in the wading pool, Dawn castrates him as an act of revenge for her mother's death. The film concludes as Dawn hitchhikes out of town. She is picked up by an elderly man who demands sexual payment, and Dawn looks toward the camera. Descent and Straightheads- the film finishes with a look toward the audience. Here, however, the intent is comical: "Oh-oh!" Dawn seems to be thinking, "Here we go again!"

Jess Weixler in Teeth (Mitchell Lichtenstein, 2007) [Teeth/Kobal Collection].

In The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993), Barbara Creed has noted that "the myth about woman as castrator clearly points to male fears and fantasies about the female genitals as a trap, a black hole which threatens to swallow them up and cut them into pieces." Additionally, it "also points to the duplicitous nature of woman, who promises paradise in order to ensnare her victims."56 Creed offers a range of metaphorical and literal instances of vagina dentata in pre-1993 horror films that support her central claim of a dominant "monstrous-feminine." Re-evaluating Laura Mulvey's identification and analysis of a sadistic male gaze that dominates the cinematic apparatus, Creed contends that while "the presence of the monstrous-feminine in the horror film speaks to us more about male fears than about female desire or feminine subjectivity ... this presence does challenge the view that the male spectator is almost always situated in an active, sadistic position and the female spectator in a passive, masochistic one."57

Creed's theory about vagina dentata and the horror film comes to life in Teeth, which presents the flip side to the male fears of castration and feminine duplicity that vagina dentata represents. Dawn's ability to punish her rapists at the point of penetration is presented as a blackly comic feminist fantasy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this raises some complications for Teeth. While many critics praised its sense of fun and Jess Weixler's natural and sympathetic portrayal of Dawn, Lichtenstein's undeniable talents for getting an ironic laugh in many instances overshadow the simple fact that Dawn is horrified as even her own body as she is by the sexual assaults themselves. Yes, her biting vagina is a rape-avenging weapon, but the rapes themselves do not appear to be so much her real problem as the fact that her vagina has teeth at all. Consequently, that the one time that Dawn consents and finds sex pleasurable goes so horribly wrong renders her discovery of sexual pleasure as tainted. As Kyle Buchanan points out, considering the film seems to support Dawn's sexual awakening (many of its funniest scenes are those that openly mock the abstinence ideals at the start of the film), that the one time Dawn is able to enjoy sex turns into yet another scene where she is forced to castrate means that "for a movie that purports to celebrate female sexuality, scenes like that really bite."58 Dawn's look-to-camera in the film's final scene implies that she is reconciled with both her unusual talent and its particular utility in protecting herself against sexual predators. That it comes with an acceptance of herself as "the monstrous-feminine" and at the expense of her being able to enjoy sex in its own right, however, renders Teeth far from unproblematic.

The slick production values of Teeth and the comparatively polished The Last House on the Left and I Spit on Your Grave remakes should not suggest that the horror rape-revenge film's assumed low-budget exploitation aesthetics have vanished completely. In 2000, Gavin Smith commented that the newfound accessibility to filmmaking technologies meant that now "practically anyone can make a film." He suggests the notoriety of Baise-moi could potentially "spawn legions of DIY no-budget imitators," and warned that anyone "who owns or can borrow a DV camera, is qualified by definition. The floodgates may be about to open on a new breed of film."59 While the technologies required to make movies may now be more accessible, when watching recent low-budget rape-revenge horror films it may be surprising how similar this "new breed" is to earlier examples. As demonstrated by films such as Gutterballs (Ryan Nicholson, 2008), Sweet Karma (Andrew Thomas Hunt, 2009) Run! Bitch Run! (Joseph Guzman, 2009), I'll Never DieAlone (No Morire Sola, Adrian Garcia Bogliano, 2008) and The Whore (Hora, Reinert Kiil, 2009), many films in this current hyper-violent, low-budget wave of rape-revenge films are self-aware and reference-heavy, in many cases wearing their postmodern credentials as Tarantino-inspired badges of honor. To that end, Jeff Leroy's Hunting Season (2000) was even released in 3D.

Despite its awareness of rape-revenge traditions, Jim Hemphill's Bad Reputation (2005) is played straight in a number of ways, and its raw formal construction is less like The Blair Witch Project (Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, 1999) than it is simply an indicator of its obvious budgetary and technical limitations. Throughout the film's first half in particular, however, this is concealed by the powerful and commanding performance of lead actress Angelique Hennessy. She plays shy, bookish Michelle, a teenage girl with a mean-spirited, alcoholic mother, who finds refuge in her studies. Flattered and excited when popular Aaron (Jerad Anderson) invites her to a party, Michelle's evening becomes a nightmare when he drugs her with a spiked drink and gang-rapes her with his friends Jake (Mark Kunzman) and Steve (Chris Basler). Aaron's jealous ex-girlfriend Debbie (Dakota Ferreiro) and her friend Heather (Kristina Conzen) discover the passed-out Michelle, and in a fit of jealous rage they tape her to a tree in Aaron's backyard and write "slut" on her forehead "to teach this slut a lesson." Debbie's friend Wendy (Danielle Noble), who has earlier spoken kindly to Michelle, tries to stop them, but is told there will be social consequences for her if she does so. Devastated by both the rape and the consequent harassment by Debbie and her friends, Michelle returns to school and is subjected to a systematic barrage of teasing, humiliation and abuse as she is branded the school slut - not only by fellow students but also by the hostile and lecherous school counselor whom she visits, seeking assistance. Reaching the end of her tether, Michelle decides to convert her weakness into her strength, and returns to school dressed sexily in a micro-mini, knee-high boots and a see-through top, while seductively sucking a lollipop. One by one she seduces and kills her rapists, then Debbie and Heather, until the film climaxes with a final confrontation between Wendy and Michelle. Although Wendy finally kills Michelle, she feels sorry for her, and Wendy gently holds Michelle's hand as the latter lies dying.

As both a filmmaker and a critic for prestigious publications including Film Quarterly and American Cinematographer, director Jim Hemphill's film literacy has been amply demonstrated. Thus, despite its budgetary restraints, the first half of the movie delivers with remarkable clarity and sensitivity the story of Michelle's trauma, both during the night of the rape itself and in the intolerable aftermath as she is terrorized at school. Hemphill has flagged Emily White's book Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut (2002) as a central influence, particularly in regards to the "high school slut" figure he describes as "an archetype that Americans have created to perpetuate all kinds of prejudices and double standards about gender and sex."" Hemphill's insight into this material is embodied in Hennessy's sensitive performance, whose reactions to the sexual nature of teen bullying garnered the film's most positive critical responses.

Rather than developing this central focus, however, Bad Reputation falls into the trap of many debut simply tries to do too much. As Hemphill has freely admitted, "I was kind of insanely influenced by every film I ever loved,"" and he has identified a range of influences, including I Spit on Your Grave, The Accused, Thriller: A Cruel Picture, Terror Train (Roger Spottiswoode, 1980), the work of Wes Craven and Larry Cohen, and teen films like She's All That (Robert Iscove, 1999) and Pretty in Pink (Howard Deutch, 1986). This instinct to overstuff the film manifests most obviously, however, in Hemphill's desire to combine the Emily White book with Clover's Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Deciding "that I could use the rape-revenge genre as a sort of vessel" for his ideas about the "high school slut" phenomenon, Hemphill said that from the moment he decided to combine them, "the movie just kind of wrote itself."62 But Hemphill's love of Men, Women, and Chain Saws manifests in what plays onscreen as little more than Clover fan-fiction:

I wrote Bad Reputation with the idea that I wanted it to be the kind of movie that would be featured and praised in that chapter [of Clover's book on raperevenge film]! I wrote Dr. Clover a letter and she and her publisher gave me permission to use the book in the film, but I don't know if she's seen Bad Reputation yet or what she thought of it. Truly, I'm terrified to ask because I would be heartbroken if she hated it.63

While Clover's opinion of the film is unknown, that Hemphill's way of paying his respects to Men, Women, and Chain Saws is to have Michelle literally bludgeon a rapist to death with a copy of the book after she has raped him with a handful of pencils does not at first suggest a particularly rigorous intellectual engagement with Clover's central arguments about cross-gender identification and the horror film. In stark contrast to the perceptive opening half of the film, the point where Michelle decides to use being a "slut" to her murderous, vengeful advantage is where Bad Reputation takes a sudden, disappointing turn.

By merely including a physical copy of Men, Women, and Chain Saws in the film, it is implied that this somehow vindicates it from the cliches that riddle its second act. Most notable of these is the cartoonish depictions of its villains (both the rapists themselves, and their bitchy, two-dimensional girlfriends) and the gleeful manner in which Michelle embraces her hypersexualized avenger persona. The latter in particular shows a shift in her character that lacks the nuance and insight into her character that that the film's strongest feature. As Michelle slashes her way through those who wronged her (wearing a Jason Voorhees-styled hockey mask, no less), Angelique Hennessy's earlier subtle performance remains but a distant memory.

In its defense, Bad Reputation does have an impressive first act, and not all low-budget horror rape-revenge films produced recently can claim such an honor. Rape Is a Circle (Bill Zebub, 2006),64 for instance, is loaded with softcore lesbian sadism and what can be best described as director Zebub's heavy metal-infused flair for the hyperbolic, revolting and ridiculous (his earlier films include the provocatively titled 2004 effort Jesus Christ: Serial Rapist). In terms of production values, script quality and the ideological treatment of its subject matter, Bad Reputation beats Rape Is a Circle on every count. The film follows two young hitchhikers, Kern (Yelena Sobolevski) and Isabelle (Niki Notarile), who are picked up by Kat (Natalie LaSpina), who drugs the girls, ties them up, and then tortures and sexually abuses them while wearing cheap lingerie and playing with Barbie dolls. Kat introduces a man to the proceedings who is bound, blindfolded and bleeding, and explains that he was a serial rapist whom she was punishing. Kern and Isabelle escape, and it transpires that they were on their way to avenge a rape themselves before Kat captured them. Kerri and Isabelle return to Kat's house, and Kat kills Kern. In retaliation, Isabelle drugs Kat, and in a vicious and brutal scene, cuts off her eyelids and symbolically rapes her with a Barbie doll (a marker of Kat's delusional and twisted vision of female identity). The film ends as Isabelle leaves and again hitchhikes; proving that "rape is a circle," she is picked up by another rapist, but she shoots him at point blank range before he can assault her.

So depleted are both the production values and ethical aspirations of Rape Is a Circle that the few reviews that appear online outside of trash film circles have been so daunted at the prospect of reviewing it that they have obviously not seen it (most notably, the Allmovie.com review by Perry Selbert assumes that the sadist who picks up the two hitchhiking girls at the start of the film must be a man65). The film is overt in its intent to use rape and sexual torture to titillating effect, and it would be a stretch to find anything of value to say about the film beyond its sharing the same fundamental thematic premise as other films mentioned in this book where rape survivors literally become rapists themselves, such as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Bad Reputation, Descent, Straightheads and One Way. But the one thing that Zebub's film must be credited with - a factor so striking that it alone justifies its inclusion in this book-is its powerful title. In terms of the film, its relevance is obvious: Victims become perpetrators who in turn become victims. But perhaps inadvertently, Zebub's title also captures one of the most fundamental truths about rape-revenge films that this book has sought to discuss: it is a circle. This is supported by a number of facts. Rape-revenge films get remade, rape survivors regularly return to the scene of their attack (or reconstruct the context of their attack) and tropes, motifs and character types are recycled almost endlessly. More crucially, as this chapter has demonstrated, audiences return to raperevenge films. The rape-revenge film is not specific to the United States in the 1970s, even though that is where it unarguably experienced its greatest period of popularity and visibility. Its origins have a long history, and its global reach is broad. In recent years this category has experienced a resurgence with the remaking of a number of canonical rape-revenge films. The reasons these films have demonstrated such longevity cannot be reduced to one simple answer because the films themselves are so diverse in their reworking and revising of rape-revenge traditions. As Diane Wolfthal argued in her examination of rape imagery in medieval and early modern art, "Only by understanding the complex legacy of the past, can we begin to change the future."66 Rather than dismissing rape-revenge as a single, unified phenomenon, it is time to ask what the significance of these films is - not despite but because of their complexities and contradictions.

Afterword

Long before this project began, I had a passing interest in rape-revenge films going back to my teenage years that was based on an awareness of more well-known examples like I Spit on Your Grave and Ms. 45 (and, of course, more mainstream instances such as The Accused and Thelma & Louise). But it was only with Dario Argento's The Stendhal Syndrome (La sindrome di Stendhal, 1996) that I discovered how much more deserving of critical attention rape-revenge was as a whole. This arises in part from a long love of this particular director's work, including films like The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (L'uccello dallepiumpe di cristallo, 1970), Suspiria (1977) and Tenebrae (1982). I was not alone in sensing a decline in the quality of his films around the early 1990s, however, due to what has been viewed as their increasing "Americanization," typified by the broadly maligned Trauma (1993).' Although The Stendhal Syndrome had been originally set in the U.S. and was to star Brigitte Fonda, Argento was frustrated by the Hollywood system and returned to Italy to make what he described as a "high-concept European movie."2 While both fan and critical opinion on the film was divided when it was released, upon further inspection The Stendhal Syndrome is a sophisticated and deeply complex text. The more I thought about what Argento was trying to do with this film, the more the rape-revenge category opened up to me as a powerful and important area that had too often fallen prey to critical generalization. It is by no means a perfect film, and its depiction of sexual violence is confronting, violent and harrowing. What makes The Stendhal Syndrome so endlessly fascinating, however, is Argento's focus on the relationship between rape and its very representation from within the diegesis of the film itself.

Argento is renowned for his hypertheatrical and excessive horror films, both as visceral and visually spectacular as they are seemingly indifferent to complex plotlines and character development. Clover-among many-has quoted his controversial statement "I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and a good figure, I would much rather watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man."3 But Argento's films potentially offer far less simplistic representations of gender and sexuality that such a statement would suggest, and the blurring of traditional binaries between "male" and "female" is one of the more intriguing elements of his earlier work in particular.4 While The Stendhal Syndrome features graphic scenes of the rape and murder of beautiful women, it also follows, with immense sympathy and compassion, the plight of its central female protagonist, described as his "first three-dimensional heroine ... [who] makes the film work on both an emotional and stylistic level."5 For Louis Paul, Argento's casting of his own daughter Asia in the grueling role of a rape-survivor pushed beyond sanity by her trauma was "the pinnacle of unsavouriness,"6 but it can just as easily be argued that it was their close relationship that granted Asia's performance such a remarkable level of intimacy and intensity.

Asia Argento in The Stendhal Syndrome (La Sindrome di Stendhal, Dario Argento, 1996) [Cine 2000/Medusa Produzione/Kobal Collection].

The Stendhal Syndrome follows the story of Inspector Anna Manni (Asia Argento), a police investigator for the "anti-rape squad" in Rome. Anna suffers from the Stendhal syndrome, a psychological condition named after the nineteenth century French author who described the physical and psychological symptoms of being overwhelmed by great art. The movie begins as she visits the Uffizi gallery in Florence, where she is following up on a mysterious phone call offering information on her current investigation. As she walks around the Uffizi, Anna fixates on the representation of rape in great art, including Sandro Botticelli's 1492 painting Primavera (1492), where she focuses on the wind-breathing Zephyrus seizing the nymph Chloris. Anna also looks at Caravaggio's Medusa (1597), and again focuses upon the representation of mythological rape victim in art. When Anna reaches Pieter Brueghel's 1558 painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (a painting where mythological tragedy is exposed as insignificant in the face of the toil of everyday life), her condition causes her to faint and she imagines herself drowning until she is revived by a giant fish. She comes around, unaware that she is being assisted by the rapist and killer she is hunting, Alfredo (Thomas Kretschmann). He follows her back to her hotel where, after she has another hallucination (this time triggered by Rembrandt's 1642 painting The Night Watch hanging on the wall of her hotel room), he brutally rapes her and cuts her face with a razorblade.

Devastated by the assault, Anna withdraws and becomes increasingly isolated. Her boyfriend, fellow police officer Marco (Marco Leonardi), does not understand her iciness, and when he pushes her for an emotional connection, she threatens him with sexual assault. In an attempt to recover, she begins counseling, cuts her hair short, and spends time with her father and brothers at her family home. There, Anna tries painting as a way of self-treating her sensitivity to the Stendhal syndrome. Over and over again she paints large canvases of the same figure: a face with a large, black, abyss-like mouth. When this does not appear to help, Anna paints her own body; but her creative endeavors are interrupted when Alfredo, the rapist, locates her once again. Knowing about her extreme psychological reaction to art, Alfredo holds Anna captive in a deserted building with large, terrifying graffiti figures drawn on the wall. Here he rapes her repeatedly until she stabs him in the eye with a mattress spring. After disposing of his body in a nearby waterfall, Anna attempts recovery once again. She changes her appearance, donning a long Veronica Lake-style wig that hides the facial scars left by Alfredo, and begins a romantic relationship with Marie (Julien Lambroschini), a young French art student. Despite her efforts to find peace, she becomes increasingly fixated on Alfredo, convinced he is still alive. When Marie is found dead, her worst fears are apparently confirmed. However, when both Marco and her counselor are also killed, it is revealed that it is not Alfredo who is the killer but Anna herself, believing that she is Alfredo. The final image of The Stendhal Syndrome, compositionally reminiscent of the film's earlier rape scenes, shows her, hysterically screaming, being surrounded and carried away Pieta-style by her male colleagues.

Argento has constructed a rape-revenge film about a woman literally trapped within the apparatus of artistic representation. In a meta-mirroring of the Stendhal syndrome condition itself, the film contrasts Anna's status as a fictional depiction of a rape survivor with the representational traditions that surround her both diegetically and only in regard to the Renaissance and Baroque rape imagery she sees in the Uffizi, but also in terms of the options film history has made available to her as either a tough tomboy or a vampish femme fatale. She cannot move, and in the scenes where she literally paints her own body, she explicitly from within the diegesis of her own rape-revenge her body is simply a forum (a canvas, if you like) for the historical representation of rape, from painting to cinema, to play out on yet again. When Anna collapses at the end of the film, she is crushed by a combination of both diegetic and non-diegetic weight. It is not just a case of her suffering from rape trauma, she was aware of right back in the early scenes in the Uffizi even before the first rape - there is the added knowledge that she cannot escape the historically entrenched patterns of how rape (and rape victims) have been represented. Anna tries all the options this history allows her, and none work. Flailing wildly in the film's heartbreaking final scene, she is literally trying to break out of the frame. She is policemen, figures that represent nothing less than institutionalized patriarchal authority itself, who are compositionally presented in exactly the same way Alfredo was when he assaulted her.

By no means can The Stendhal Syndrome be considered a perfect film, and I do not in any way wish to suggest that it is unambiguously the kind of rape-revenge movie to which all should aspire. However, The Stendhal Syndrome is both valuable and unique in that it puts the traditions surrounding the representation of rape to the test. In this context, the revenge compo satisfying at the moment of its execution for both the spectator and Anna exposed as trivial, redundant and almost irrelevant when compared to Anna's real battle against the representational apparatus against which she fights so fruitlessly. In the face of that history, Anna's struggle is not just against Alfredo, but against a long, unrelenting history that allows the rape survivor only a limited number of choices regarding how she can be artistically configured. These options all fail Anna, and she goes insane. She pays the price for the troubled and often contradictory history of how rape has been represented both in film and in the visual arts more broadly.

Filmography

The Accused (William Dieterle, 1949)

The Accused (Jonathan Kaplan, 1988)

Act of Aggression (L'agression, Gerard Pires, 1975)

'nigma (Lucio Fulci, 1987)

All Night Long (Ooru naito rongu, Katsuya Matsurama, 1992)

Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger, 1959)

Angela Markado (Lino Brocka, 1980)

Angel Guts: High School Co-Ed (Jokousei Tenshi no Harawata, Chusei Sone, 1978)

Angel Guts: Nami (Tenshi no Harawata: Nami, Noboru Tanaka, 1979)

Angel Guts: Night Is Falling Again (Yoru Ga Mata Kuru, Takashi Ishii, 1994)

Angel Guts: Red Classroom (Tenshi no Harawata: Akai Kyoshitsu, Chusei Sone, 1979)

Angel Guts: Red Lightning (Tenshi no Harawata: Akai Senko, Takashi Ishii, 1994)

Angel Guts: Red Porno (Tenshi no Harawata: Akai Inga, Toshiharu Ikeda, 1981),

Angel Guts: Red Rope- "Until I Expire" (Akai Nawa Hateru Made, Junichi Suzuki, 1987)

Angel Guts: Red Vertigo (Tenshi no Harawata: Akai Memai, Takashi Ishii, 1988)

Angel Guts: Rouge (Tenshi no Harawata: Rouge, Hiroyuki Nasu, 1984)

Angel of Fury (David Worth, 1992)

The Animals (Ron Joy, 1970)

Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009)

Assault! jack the Ripper (Bokd Kirisaki jakku, Yahsuharu Hasebe, 1976)

Attack! (Osou! 1978 Yahsuharu Hasebe)

Audition (Odishon, Takashi Miike, 1999)

Avenging Disco Godfather (J. Robert Wagoner, 1979)

iAy Carmela! (Carlos Saura, 1990)

The Baby of Mdcon (Peter Greenaway, 1993)

Babycart in Peril (Kozure Okami: Oya no kokoro ko no kokoro, Buichi Saito, 1972)

Bad Education (La mala educacion, Pedro Almodovar, 2004)

Bad Reputation (Jim Hemphil, 2005)

Bad Romance (performed by Lady Gaga, dir. Francis Lawrence, 2009)

Baise-moi (Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh-Thi, 2000)

Bandit Queen (Shekhar Kapur, 1994)

Batman Returns (Tim Burton, 1992)

Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999)

Belle Star (Irving Cummings, 1941)

Belle Star's Daughter (Lesley Selander, 1946)

The Belle Starr Story (Lina Wertmuller and Piero Cristofani, 1976)

Betty Blue (37°2 le matin, jean-Jacques Beineix, 1986)

The Big Doll House (Jack Hill, 1971)

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Luccello dallepiumpe di cristallo, 1970)

Birth ofa Nation (D.W Griffith, 1915)

Blackrock (Steven Vidler, 1997)

Black Alley Cats (Henning Schellerup, 1973)

Black Angel (Kuro no tenshi, Takashi Ishii, 1997)

Black Caesar (Larry Cohen, 1973)

The Black Gestapo (Lee Frost, 1975)

Black Heat (Al Adamson, 1976)

Blackjack (Gianfranco Baldanello, 1968)

Black Sister's Revenge (Jamaa Fanaka, 1976)

The Blair Witch Project (Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, 1999)

BloodRayne (Uwe Boll, 2005)

Blood Sisters (Senketsu no kizuna: Kichiku reipuhan o shinkan saseta shimai, Daisuke Yamanouchi, 2000)

Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)

The Blue Gardenia (Fritz Lang, 1953)

Blue Steele (Kathryn Bigelow, 1989)

The Book of Revelation (Ana Kokkinos, 2005)

The Boys (Rowan Woods, 1998)

Boys Don't Cry (Kimberly Peirce, 1999)

The Bravados (Henry King, 1958)

The Brave One (Neil Jordan, 2007)

Breaking the Waves (Lars von Trier, 1996)

Breeders (Tim Kincaid, 1986)

Broken Blossoms (D.W. Griffith, 1919)

The Burning Bed (Robert Greenwald, 1984)

Camille Claudel (Bruno Nuytten, 1988)

Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980)

Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962)

Carnival of Souls (Adam Grossman and Ian Kessner, 1998)

A Case of Rape (Boris Saga], 1974)

Chaos (David DeFalco, 2005)

Chato's Land (Michael Winner, 1972)

Chicken with Two Ears (Zweiohrkuken, Til Schweiger, 2009)

Un Chien Andalou (Luis Bunuel, 1929)

Christiane F (Uli Edel, 1981)

Click (Sangeeth Sivan, 2010)

A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)

Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008)

Clouds (Alapaap, Tata Esteban, 1984)

Cole Justice (Carl Bartholomew, 1989)

Cotton Mill (On est au cotton, Denys Arcand, 1970)

Court-Martial (George B. Seitz, 1928)

The Crow (Alex Proyas, 1994)

Cut Throats Nine (Joaquin Luis Romero Marchent, 1972)

Damini: Lightning (Rajkumar Santoshi, 1993)

Dancer in the Dark (2000)

Dark Water (Walter Salles, 2005)

Daughter of Darkness (Mie men can an zhi nie sha, Kai Ming Lai, 1993)

The Day of Love (Den Iyubyi, Aleksandr Polynnikov, 1991)

Dead Girl (Marcel Sarmiento, 2008)

Deadbeat (Harry Kerwin, 1977)

Deadly Emotion (Afe Olumowe, 2009)

Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007)

Death Rides a Horse (Da uoma a uomo, Giulio Petroni, 1967)

Death Weekend (William Fruet, 1976)

Death Wish (Michael Winner, 1974)

Death Wish II (Michael Winner, 1982)

Death Wish IV The Crackdown (J. Lee Thompson, 1987)

The Decline of the American Empire (Denys Arcand, 1986)

Defenceless: A Blood Symphony (Mark Savage, 2004)

A Degree ofMurder (Mord and Totschlag, Volker Schlondorff, 1967)

Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972)

Demented (Arthur Jeffreys, 1980)

Demon Seed (Douglas Cammell, 1977)

The Demoniacs (Les demoniaques, Jean Rollin, 1974)

Deranged (Chuck Vincent, 1987)

Descent (Talia Lugacy, 2007)

Diabolique (Jeremiah S. Chechik, 1996)

Dirty Weekend (Michael Winner, 1992)

Django Does Not Forgive (Mestizo, Julio Buchs, 1966)

Dogville (Lars Von Trier, 2003)

Elizabeth (Shekhar Kapur, 1998)

Elizabeth: The Golden Age (Shekhar Kapur, 2007)

Emanuelle in America (Joe D'Amato, 1977)

Emanuelle'sRevenge (Joe D'Amato, 1975)

Enough (Michael Apted, 2002)

Enter the Dragon (Robert Clouse, 1973)

The Entity (Sidney Furie, 1981)

Entrails of a Beautiful Woman or Guts of a Virgin 2 (Bijo no harawata, Kazuo "Gaira" Komizu, 1986)

Eva-Peron- (Juan Carlos Desanzo, 1996)

Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1981)

Evil Dead Trap (Shiryo no wana, Toshiharu Ikeda, 1988)

The Executioner (Cellat, Memduh On, 1975)

The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973)

Extremities (Robert M. Young, 1986)

The Eye (David Moreau and Xavier Palud, 2008)

Eye for an Eye (John Schlesinger, 1996)

Fair Game (Mario Andreacchio, 1987)

Fascination (Jean Rollin, 1979)

Female Demon Ohyaku (Yoen dokufuden hannya no ohyaku, Yoshihiro Ishikawa, 1968)

Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion (Joshuu 701: Sasori, Shunya Ito, 1972)

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable (/oshu Sasori-Kemono Beya, Shuya Ito, 1973)

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Grudge Song (joshu Sasori - 701 Go Urami Bushi, Yasharu Hasebe, 1973)

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (Joshu Sasori-Dai 41 Zakkyobo, Shuya Ito, 1972)

Fight for Your Life (Fred Williamson, 1977)

Firefox (Clint Eastwood, 1982)

A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964)

Flamenco (Carlos Saura, 1995)

Flower and Snake (Hana to Hebi, Takashi Ishii, 2004)

Flower and Snake II (Hana to Hebi 2: Pari/Shizuko, Takashi Ishii, 2005)

For a Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone, 1965)

For Scent-imental Reasons (Chuck Jones, 1949)

Forced Entry (Shaun Costello, 1973)

Foxy Brown (Jack Hill, 1974)

Freeze Me (Furiizu Mii, Takashi Ishii, 2000)

Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980)

Friday the 13thPart2 (Steve Miner, 1982)

From Dusk tilDawn (Robert Rodriguez, 1996)

Frontier(s) (Frontiere(s), Xavier Gens, 2007)

The Fury (Brian De Palma, 1978)

Germany, Pale Mother (Deutschland, Bleiche Mutter, Helma SandersBrahm, 1979)

Ghetto Revenge (Wendell J. Franklin, 1971)

Gina (Denys Arcand, 1975)

Girl Boss Revenge: Sukeban (Sukeban, Norifumi Suzuki, 1973)

Girl from Hunan (Xiangnu xiaoxiao, Xie Fei, 1986)

The Girl of Diabolical Sex (A Menina do sexo diab6lico, Mario Lima, 1987)

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Luftslottet som sprangdes, Daniel Alfredson, 2009)

The Girl Who Played with Fire (Flickan som lekte med elden, Daniel Alfredson, 2009)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Man som hatar kvinnor, Niels Arden Oplev, 2009)

Go, Go, Second Time Virgin (Yuke, Yuke, Nidome No Shojo, Koji Wakamatsu, 1969)

The Grapes of Death (Les Raisins de la Mort, Jean Rollin, 1978)

Grease (Randal Kleiser, 1978)

The Great Hate (Buyuk kin, Tunc Basaran, 1967)

Grotesque Perverted Slaughter: Present Day Bizarre Sex Crime (Gendai ryoki sei hanzai, Giichi Nishihara, 1976)

The Grudge (fu-on, Takashi Shimizu, 2000)

The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, 2004)

A Gun for Jennifer (Todd Morris, 1996)

Gutterballs (Ryan Nicholson, 2008)

Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978)

Handgun (Tony Garnett, 1983)

The Handmaid's Tale (Volker Schlondorff, 1990)

Hannie Caulder (Burt Kennedy, 1971)

Happy Birthday to Me (J. Lee Thompson, 1981)

Hardcore (Paul Schrader, 1979)

Haseena Atom Bomb (Saeed Ali Kahn, 1990)

The Haunted (Robert Mandel, 1991)

Her Vengeance (Xue mei gui, Ngai Kai Lam, 1988)

High Heeled Punishers (Oshioki haihiiru, Takashi Kodama, 1994)

High Kicks (Ruta K. Aras, 1993)

High Plains Drifter (Clint Eastwood, 1973)

High Tension (Haute Tension, Alexandre Aja, 2003)

The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977)

The Hills Have Eyes (Alexandre Aja, 2006)

His Name Was King (Giancarlo Romitelli, 1971)

Hitch Hike (Autosop rosso sangue, Pasqueale Festa Campanile, 1977)

Hollow Man (Paul Verhoeven, 2000)

Honkytonk Man (Clint Eastwood, 1982)

The Horseman (Steven Kastrissios, 2008)

House on the Edge of the Park (La casa sperduta nelparco, Ruggero Deodato, 1984)

Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963)

Humanitd (Lhumanitd, Bruno Dumont, 1999)

The Hunt (La Caza, Carlos Saura, 1966)

The Hunting Party (Don Medford, 1971)

Hunting Season (Jeff Leroy, 2000)

I Don't Want to Be Born (Peter Sasdy, 1975)

I Shall Spit on Your Grave (J'irai cracher sur vos tombes, Michel Gast, 1959)

I Spit Chew on Your Grave (Chris Seaver, 2008)

I Spit on Your Corpse, I Piss on Your Grave (Eric Stanze, 2001)

I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978)

I Spit on Your Grave (Steven R. Monroe, 2010)

I Stand Alone (Seul contre tons, Gaspar Noe, 1998)

I Want Him Dead (Lo voglio morto, Paolo Bianchini, 1968)

Iffet (Kartal Tibet, 1982)

I'll Kill You ... I'll Bury You ... I'll Spit on Your Grave, Too (Thomas R. Koba, 2000)

I'll Never Die Alone (No Morird Sola, Adrian Garcia Bogliano, 2008)

Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

Inseminoid (Norman J. Warren, 1981)

Inside (A l'intdrieur, Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, 2005)

The Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan (Yuen Chor, 1972)

Intruders (Tseng Kam-Cheong, 1997)

The Invasion of the Barbarians (Denys Arcand, 2003)

Irreversible (Gaspar Noe, 2002)

JD. 's Revenge (Arthur Marks, 1976)

Jack Frost (Michael Cooney, 1996)

jessi's Girls (Al Adamson, 1975)

Jesus Christ: Serial Rapist (Bill Zebub, 2004)

Jesus of Montreal (Denys Arcand, 1989)

Johnny Belinda (Jean Negulesco, 1948)

Kelepge (Cetin Inanc, 1982)

Kid Vengeance (Joseph Manduke, 1977)

Kika (Pedro Almodbvar, 1993)

Kill Bill Vol. 1(Quentin Tarantino, 2003)

Killer's Moon (Alan Birkinshaw, 1978)

King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933)

The Kiss of Death (Ho Meng Hua, 1973)

Kogero (Umut Utku, 1964)

Kuroneko (Kameto Shindo, 1968)

Labyrinth of Passions (Laberinto de Pasiones, Pedro Almodbvar, 1982)

The Ladies Club (Janet Greek, 1986)

The Lady Punisher (Tung chong 2 mung, Cheung C. Law, 1994)

Lady Snowblood (Shurayukihime, Toshiya Fujita, 1973)

Last House in the Woods (Gabriele Albanesi, 2006)

Last House on the Beach (La settima donna, Franco Prosperi, 1978)

Last House on Dead End Street (Roger Watkins, 1977)

Last House on Hell Street (Robin Garrels and John Specht, 2002)

The Last House on the Left (Wes Craven, 1972)

The Last House on the Left (Dennis Iliadis, 2009)

The Last of the Mohicans (Michael Mann, 1992)

The Last Seduction (John Dahl, 1994) Last Train from Gun Hill (John Sturges, 1959)

Law Abiding Citizen (F. Gary Gray, 2009)

Legend of the Overfiend (Chojin densetsu Urotsukidoji, Hideki Takayama, 1989)

Lethal Woman (Christian Marhnam, 1989)

Liberators Take Liberties (BeFreier and BeFreite, Helke Sander, 1992)

Lilith (Robert Rossen, 1964)

Lipstick (Lamont Johnson, 1976)

Little Beau Pepe (Chuck Jones, 1952)

The Living Dead Girl (La Morte Vivante, 1982)

Loft (Eckhardt Schmidt, 1985)

The Long Cavalcade of Vengeance (Lunga cavalcata della vendetta, Tanio Boccia, 1972)

Love and Fear (El amor y el espanto, Juan Carlos Desanzo, 2001)

Love Violated (L'Amour viole, Yannick Bellon, 1978)

M (Fritz Lang, 1931)

The Mad Foxes (Los violadores, Paul Grau, 1982)

Mad Max (George Miller, 1979)

A Man Called Django (W Django!, Edoardo Mulargia, 1971)

The Man from Laramie (Anthony Mann, 1955)

The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing (Richard C. Sarafian, 1973)

Maniac (William Lustig, 1980)

Manrape (Man kan inte vdldtas, Jorn Donner, 1978)

Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964)

The Marquise of 0 (Die Marquise von 0, Eric Rohmer, 1976)

Martyrs (Pascal Laugier, 2008)

Matador (Pedro Almodbvar, 1986)

Montana Belle (Allan Dwan, 1952)

Mother's Day (Lloyd Kauffman, 1980)

Mother's Day (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2010)

Ms. 45 (Abel Ferrara, 1980)

Naked (Mike Leigh, 1993)

Naked Killer (Wong Jing, 1992)

Naked Poison (Shou xing xin ren lei, Man Kei Chin, 2000)

Naked Vengeance (Cirio H. Santiago, 1985)

Necromancer (Dusty Nelson, 1988)

Nevada Smith (Henry Hathaway, 1966)

NiengArp (Lady Vampire, Kam Chanty, 2004)

A Night in Nude (Takashi Ishii, 1993)

Night of the Sunflowers (La noch de los girasols, Jorge Sanchez-Cabezudo, 2006)

Night Train Murders (Aldo Lado, 1975)

A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984)

No One Could Protect Her (Larry Shaw, 1995)

No Orchids for Miss Blandish (St. John Legh Clowes, 1948)

Not Quite Hollywood (Mark Harley, 2008)

Oh My Ghost! (Tony Y. Reyes, 2006)

The Old Gun (Le vieux Fusil, Robert Enrico, 1975)

One Deadly Summer (Late meurtrier, jean Becker, 1983)

One-Eyed jacks (Marlon Brando, 1961)

One Way (Reto Salimbeni, 2007)

Onibaba (Kameto Shindo, 1964)

The Outlaw josey Wales (Clint Eastwood, 1976)

Outrage (Ida Lupino, 1950)

Outrage (iDispara!, Carlos Saura, 1993)

Paparazzi (performed by Lady Gaga, dir. Jonas Akerlund, 2009)

Patrick (Richard Franklin, 1978)

Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960)

Pepe, Luci, Bom (Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del mont6n, Pedro Almodbvar, 1980)

Peppermint Frappe (Carlos Saura, 1967)

Perfect Blue (Satoshi Kon, 1998)

Perversion (Estrupo, Jose Mojica Matins, 1979)

Pig Tale (Adrien Van Viersen, 2007)

Planet Terror (Robert Rodriguez, 2007)

Please Rape Me Once More (Mou Ichido Yarn, by Giichi Nishihara, 1979)

Porno Holocaust (Joe D'Amato, 1981)

Positive I.D. (Andy Anderson, 1986)

Possession (Andrzej Zulawski, 1981)

Pretty in Pink (Howard Deutch, 1986)

Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990)

The Proposition (John Hilcoat, 2005)

Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

Pup Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)

Rabbit Without Ears (Keinohrhasen, Til Schweiger, 2007)

Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang, 1952)

Rape Is a Circle (Bill Zebub, 2006)

The Rape of a Sweet Young Girl (Le Viol d'une jeune fille douce, Gilles Carle, 1968)

The Rape of Dr. Willis (Lou Antonio, 1991)

Rape Squad (Robert Kelljan, 1974)

Rape! 13th Hour (B6kan, Yahsuharu Hasebe, 1977)

Raped by an Angel (Xiang Gang qi an zhi qiangjian, Wai-keung Lau, 1993)

Raped by an Angel 2: The Uniform Fan (Keung gaan 2: chai fook you waak, Aman Chang, 1998)

Raped by an Angel 3: Sexual Fantasy of the Chief Executive (Keung gaan: Oi you waak, Aman Chang, 1998)

Raped by an Angel 4: The Rapists' Union (Jiang jian zhong ji pian zhi zui hou gao yang, Jing Wong, 1994)

Raped by an Angel 5: The Final judgement (Billy Tang, 2000)

Raping. (Yaru!Yahsuharu Hasebe, 1978)

Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)

Red to Kill (Billy Tang, 1994)

Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965)

The Return of Superman (Supermen doniiyor, Kunt Tulgar, 1979)

Revenge (Sidney Hayer, 1971)

The Revenge (Pratighat, N. Chandra, 1987)

Revenge for a Rape (Timothy Galfas, 1976)

Revenge of the Nerds (Jeff Kanew, 1984)

Rica the Mixed-Blood Girl (Konketsuji Rika, Ko Nakahira, 1972)

Rider on the Rain (Lapassager de lap luie, Rene Clement, 1969)

The Rifleman of Voroshilov Regiment (Voroshilovskiy Strelok, Stanislav Govorukhin, 1999)

Ring (Ringu, Hideo Nakata, 1998)

The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002)

Rolling Vengeance (Steven Hilliard Stern, 1987)

Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)

Run!Bitch Run! (Joseph Guzman, 2009) - --------- - ---- --

Safe in Hell (William A. Wellman, 1931)

Savage Streets (Danny Steinmann, 1984)

Savage Vengeance (Donald Farmer, 1992)

Saw (James Wan, 2003)

Scales of Justice (Insaaf Kit Tarazu, B. D. Chopra, 1980)

Scanners (David Cronenberg, 1981)

School of the Holy Beast (Seiju gakuen, Norifumi Suzuki 1974)

Scream (Wes Craven, 1996)

The Search (La busqueda, Juan Carlos Desanzo, 1985)

The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)

Secrets of Sweet Sixteen (Ernst Hofbauer, 1973)

Sensitivita (Enzo G. Castellari, 1979)

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (Stanley Donen, 1957)

Sex and Zen (Michael Mak, 1991)

Seytan (Metin Erksan, 1974)

Shame (Steve Jodrell, 1988)

Shane (George Stevens, 1953)

Shattered Soul (Beyza nin kadinlari, Mustafa Altioklar, 2006)

She's All That (Robert Iscove, 1999)

Short Night of Glass Dolls (La corta notte delle bambole di vetro, 1971)

Shutter (Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom, 2004)

Shutter (Masayuki Ochiai, 2008)

Sisters (Brian DePalma, 1973)

Sivi (K.R. Senthil Nathan, 2007)

Sixteen Candles (John Hughes, 1984)

The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999)

Sleeping with the Enemy (Joseph Ruben, 1991)

Snuff (Michael Findlay, 1976)

Something Wild (Jack Garfein, 1961)

Soul Vengeance (Jamaa Fanaka, 1975)

Speak (Jessica Sharzer, 2004)

The Spiral Staircase (Robert Sidomak, 1945)

Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939)

Steel and Lace (Ernest D. Farino, 1991)

The Stendhal Syndrome (La sindrome di Stendhal, Dario Argento, 1995)

The Stigma (Damga, Osman F. Sedan, 1984)

Stir ofEchoes (David Koepp, 1999)

The Story of Temple Drake (Stephen Roberts, 1933)

Straightheads (Dan Reed, 2007)

The Stranger (Fritz Kiersch, 1995)

Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971)

Straw Dogs (Rod Lurie, 2011)

A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951)

The Streetfighter (Gekitotsu! Satsujin ken, Shigehiro Ozawa, 1974)

Subway Serial Rape (Chikatetsu renzoku reipu, Shuji Kataoka, 1985)

Subway Serial Rape: Lover Hunting (Chikatetsu renzoku reipu: Aijin-gari, Shuji Kataoka, 1988)

Subway Serial Rape: Uniform Hunting (Chikatetsu renzoku reipu: Seifuku-ga, Shuji Kataoka, 1987)

Sudden Death (Sig Shaw, 1985)

Sudden Impact (Clint Eastwood, 1983)

Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977)

Swedish Nymphet (Torgny Wickman, 1973)

Swedish Wildcats (Joseph W. Sarno, 1972)

Sweet Karma (Andrew Thomas Hunt, 2009)

Sweet Savage (Ann Perry, 1979)

The Swinging Co-Eds (Walter Boos, 1972)

Switch (Blake Edwards, 1991)

Talk to Her (Hable con ella, Pedro Almodovar, 2002)

The Taking of Christina (Armand Weston, 1976)

Tango (Carlos Saura, 1998)

Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)

Teenage Sex Kitten (Ann Perry, 1975)

Teeth (Mitchell Lichtenstein, 2007)

Telephone (performed by Lady Gaga, Dir. Jonas Akerlund, 2009)

Tenebrae (Dario Argento, 1982)

Terri's Revenge (Zebedy Colt, 1976)

Terror Train (Roger Spottiswoode, 1980)

Thelma & Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991)

Thirteen Women (George Archainbaud, 1932)

Thriller: A Cruel Picture (Thriller: En Grym Film, Bo Arne Vibenius, 1974)

Tic-tac (Han violado a una mujer, Luis Alcoriza, 1982)

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (jAtame!, Pedro Almodbvar, 1990)

A Time to Kill (Joel Schumacher, 1996)

The Tin Drum (Volker Schlondorff, 1982)

Together (Sean S. Cunningham, 1971)

Torched (Ryan Nicholson, 2004)

Trip with the Teacher (Earl Barton, 1975)

Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis, 2001)

Twentynine Palms (Bruno Dumont, 2003)

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (David Slade, 2010)

Twitch of the Death Nerve (Mario Bava, 1971)

Two Women (La Ciociara, Vittorio De Sica, 1960)

Ugly World ((:irkin dunya, Osman F. Seden, 1974)

The Unknown Woman (La sconosciuta, Giuseppe Tornatore, 2008)

Viridiana (Luis Bufiuel, 1961)

The Virgin Spring (jungfrukallan, Ingmar Bergman, 1960)

Volver (Pedro Almodbvar, 2006)

W.A.R.: Women Against Rape (Raphael Nussbaum, 1987)

Wasted on the Young (Ben C. Lucas, 2010)

Water Margin: Heroes' Sex Stories (Shui hui chuen ji ying hiu sik, David Lam, 1999)

The Well (Kuyu, Metin Erksan, 1968)

Who Saw Her Die? (Chi l'ha vista morire?, Aldo Lado, 1972)

The Whore (Hora, Reinert Kiil, 2009)

Wicked Lake (Zach Passero, 2008),

A Woman Like That (Oyle Bir Kadin Ki, Naki Yurter, 1979)

Woman of Vengeance (Intikam Kadini, Naki Yurter, 1979)

The Wrath of Silence (Chen mo de gu niang, Frankie Chan, 1994)

Wrong Way (Ray Williams, 1972)

Xanadu (Robert Greenwald, 1980)

You Have My Heart (Hamara Dil Aapke Paas Hai, Satish Kaushik, 2000)

Young Torless (Der junge Torless, Volker Schlondorff, 1966)

Notes

Introduction

1. Sarah Projansky, Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 60.

2. Philip Green, Cracks in the Pedestal: Ideology and Gender in Hollywood (Amherst: Massachusetts University Press, 1998), 190.

3. Diane Wolfthal, Images of Rape: The "Heroic" Tradition and Its Alternatives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 182. 4. Ibid., 180.

5. Joanna Bourke, Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present (London: Virago, 2008), 18.

6. Sabine Sielke, Reading Rape: The Rhetoric of Sexual Violence in American Literature and Culture, 1790-1990 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

7. Diane Wolfthal, 4-5.

8. Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 295-299.

9. Trudy Govier, Forgiveness and Revenge (New York: Routledge, 2002), 8-9.

10. Ibid., 2.

11. Sarah Projansky,19.

12. Ibid., 95.

13. Tammy Oler, "The Brave Ones," Bitch Magazine: Feminist Responses to Pop Culture (Winter 2009): 30-34, 34.

14. Peter Lehman, "`Don't Blame This on a Girl': Female Rape-Revenge Films," in Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, eds. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, 103-117 (London: Routledge, 1993), 114.

15. Tammy Oler, 31.

16. Madelaine Hron, "Naked Terror: Horrific, Aesthetic and Healing Images of Rape," in Cultural Expressions of Evil and Wickedness: Wrath, Sex, Crime, ed. Terrie Waddell, 127-145 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), 127.

17. Susan Brownmiller, 309.

18. Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver, "Rereading Rape, "in Rape and Representation, eds. Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 3.

19. Tanya Horeck, Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film (London: Routledge, 2004), 4.

20. Sarah Projansky, 2-3.

21. Sabine Sielke, 2.

22. Sarah Projansky, 61.

23. Mieke Bal, "The Rape of Narrative and the Narrative of Rape: Speech Acts and Body Language in Judges," in A Mieke Bal Reader (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006), 339.

24. While examples of the transformative power of rape are abundant, one of the most memorable is Blanche DuBois' (Vivian Leigh) descent into madness after she is raped by her brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando) in Elia Kazan's 1951 adaptation of Tennessee Williams' play A Streetcar Named Desire.

25. Sarah Projansky, 258.

26. Rikke Schubart, Super Bitches andAction Babes: The Female Hero in Popular Cinema, 1970-2006 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007), 95.

27. Jacinda Read, The New Avengers: Feminism, Femininity and the Rape-Revenge Cycle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 71.

28. Ibid., 241.

29. Ibid., 10.

30. Ibid., 12.

31. Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," in Movies and Methods, Volume II, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: California University Press, 1985), 303-14.

32. Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 152.

33. Ibid., 154.

34. Klaus Rieser, "Masculinity and Monstrosity: Characterization and Identification in the Slasher Film," Men andMasculinity 3.4 (2001): 370-392, 337.

35. Tony Williams, "Trying to Survive the Darker Side: 1980s Family Horror," in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant, 164-180 (Austin: Texas University Press, 1996), 170-2.

36. According to Clover, the "final girl" in the slasher film "is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril; who is chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again. She is abject terror personified" (35).

37. Frank Burke, "Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage: Caging Women's Rage," in Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender and Violence, ed. Annette Burfoot and Susan Lord, 197-217 (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2006), 202.

38. Andrew Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 3.

39. Jacinda Read, 241.

40. Ibid., 9.

41. Ibid., 10.

42. Yvonne Tasker, "Review: Reel Knockouts: Violent Women in the Movies (Austin: Texas University Press, 2001), ed. Martha McCaughey and Neal King; The New Avengers: Feminism, Femininity, and the RapeRevenge Cycle, by Jacinda Read (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000)," Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30.2 (Winter 2005): 1700-1702, 1702.

43. Karen Hollinger, "Review: The New Avengers: Feminism, Femininity and the Rape Revenge Cycle, by Jacinda Read (New York: Manchester UP, 2000)," Film Quarterly 55.4 (Summer 2002): 61-63, 62.

44. Jacinda Read, 14.

45. Ibid., 7.

46. James R. Alexander, "The Maturity of a Film Genre in an Era of Relaxing Standards of Obscenity: Takashi Ishii's Freeze Me as a Rape-Revenge Film," Senses of Cinema 36 (2005), accessed 24 August, 2005, http:// www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/05/36/ freeze_me. html.

47. Jacinda Read, 84.

48. Pam Cook, Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema (London: Routledge, 2005), 157.

49. Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 201.

Chapter One: The RapeRevenge Film Canon

1. Neil Fulwood, One Hundred Violent Films That Changed Cinema (London: BT Batsford, 2003), 40.

2. Janet Staiger, "The Politics of Film Canons," in Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism, eds. Diane Carson, Linda Dittmar and Janice R. Welsch, 191-209 (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1994).

3. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2004), xiii.

4. For Sconce, paracinema "includes entries from such seemingly disparate subgenres as `badfilm,' splatterpunk, `mondo' films, sword and sandal epics, Elvis flicks, government hygiene films, Japanese monster movies, beach-party musicals, and just about every other historical manifestation of exploitation cinema from juvenile delinquency documentaries to sof[core pornography." Paracinema is "a particular reading protocol," less a generic categorization than "a counter-aesthetic turned subcultural sensibility devoted to all matter of cultural detritus." The defining function of paracinematic culture is to assign value to films which have fallen outside the purview of so-called "legitimate film culture." See: Jeffrey Sconce, "Trashing the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style" Screen 36.4 (1995): 371-91, 372.

5. Matt Hills contends that the binary opposition between trash and legitimate film as described by Sconce ignores the stratification that occurs within paracinema itself, creating a second-class level of less privileged texts that he calls "para-paracinema." See: Matt Hills, "Para-Paracinema: The Friday the 13th Series as Other to Trash and Legitimate Film Cultures," in Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style and Politics, ed. Jeffrey Sconce, 219-239 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

6. This is a summary of my longer essay "Silence and Fury: Rape and The Virgin Spring," from Issue 28 (2010) of Screening the Past. It can be read online at http://www.la the-virgin-spring.html. Special thanks to Screening the Past for granting permission to use this material in this book.

7. James R. Alexander, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/05/36/freeze_ me.html.

8. Bergman was also heavily influenced by Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1951): "The gimmick of Rashomon was that the events were told from four varying perspectives (which demonstrated that `objective' truth was impossible to ascertain).... [Bergman] makes no such comment on the subjectivity of eyewitness accounts." John Kenneth Muir, Wes Craven: The Art ofHorror (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998), 47.

9. Michael Sicinski, `Review: The Virgin Spring," Cineaste 31.3 (Summer 2006): 69.

10. The Accused is not the only revenge film in which Foster has starred. The intertextual impact of her role in this earlier film had undeniable impact upon her depiction of the vengeance-seeking protagonist in Neil Jordan's The Brave One (2007). Here, radio DJ Erica Bain (Foster) and her fiance David Kirmani (Naveen Andrews) are violently assaulted, leading to Kirmani's death. Bain acquires a gun, and, in her journey to punish his killers, she intervenes in a series of assaults. While she is not sexually assaulted in the initial attack, there are implications throughout the film that revenge for rape and sexual violence are on her agenda, as she shoots two thugs on a train who grab at her breasts and

sexually threaten her, and she later saves a teenage prostitute from a violent assault. Despite the absence of rape from its central narrative core, this movie's most obvious points of reference are Ms. 45 and Michael Winner's Death Wish (1974). The references to Winner do not end here: A sequence where Erica is legally unable to purchase a gun in a store and is assisted by a blackmarket seller who overhears her is almost identical to a similar sequence in Winner's Dirty Weekend (1993).

11. The "rape statistic" coda was also used the year before in the rape-revenge film WA.R.: WomenAgainst Rape (Raphael Nussbaum, 1987).

12. Real-life rape victim Kelly McGillis played Kathryn, and this fact was heavily publicized at the time of the film's release. See: Terry Christensen and Peter J. Haas, Projecting Politics: Political Messages in American Film (M.E. Sharpe, 2005), 207.

13. Carol J. Clover, 147.

14. Jacinda Read, 109.

15. Carol J. Clover, 146.

16. Ibid., 149. In response, Jacinda Read suggests that Clover's criticism of The Accused's "Pollyannaism" can just as easily apply to what Clover herself admits is the "aftermathless" ending of I Spit on Your Grave (26).

17. Carol J. Clover, 138.

18. Ibid., 145.

19. Peter Lehman, 109.

20. Rikke Schubart's suspicion of Gordon is arguably influenced by the luxury of hindsight: "He is not sexy, attractive, or strong, neither is he psychologically `fit.' ... Gordon is not a real man. If we should miss this point he is nervous, manipulative, and psychologically unstable, all `feminine' characteristics. The movie furthermore hints that he is a pedophile; he is only confident with little girls, he jokes in a childish tone with Cathy" (90). While this is true in retrospect, there is no evidence before the first rape that Gordon is anything but a seemingly pleasant young man who is, at worst, simply star struck by his student's famous and attractive sister.

21. Edward Guthmann, "An Assault Victim Turns on Her Attacker: Cinema Rape Parallels Woman's Real-Life Ordeal," San Francisco Chronicle, 17 August, 1986.

22. Ibid.

23. This haziness over what construes rape (as opposed to attempted rape) is summarized by Joanna Bourke as follows: "Commentators often assume that legal statutes decree that rape involves the forced penetration of a vagina by a penis. But this is not the case. Rape sometimes must involve violence; other times, lack of consent alone suffices. Still other statutes refer to sexual acts committed `against a woman's will.' In some jurisdictions proof of penile penetration of a vagina might be required, while others insist on evidence of emission of semen. Yet at other times the law accepts non-penile penetration as evidence of rape: fists, tongues, bottles, and broom handles are some of the ways a person can be violated. And the vagina is not the only part of the body that can be forcibly entered. What about the anus or the mouth?" (8).

24. In the United Kingdom, I Spit on Your Grave played a central role in the "Video Nasties" debate, where the 1984 Video Recordings Bill introduced the requirement of the British Board of Film Censors to base (or deny) classifications for video cassettes available for exhibition in private homes "on the possibility that children might see the video." In practice, this resulted in the Home Secretary and the Director of Public Prosecutions holding the final power to deem what was to be considered obscene, provoking accusations of "state censorship" comparable at the time to that of the Communist USSR. See: Martin Baker, "Introduction," in The Video Nasties: Freedom and Censorship in the Media, ed. Martin Baker, 1-6 (London: Pluto, 1984).

25. Roger Ebert, "Review: I Spit on Your Grave (Dir. Meir Zarchi)," Chicago Sun-Times online, 16 July, 1980, accessed 6 March, 2006. http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll /article?AID=/19800716/REVIEWS/7160301/ 1023.

26. "Interview: Ten Questions with I Spit on Your Grave Director Meir Zachari!" Obsessed with Film, 2 October, 2010, accessed 15 October, 2010, http://www.obsessedwith film.com/interviews/interview-ten-queLions-with-i-spit-on-your-grave-directormeir-zachari.php.

27. See: Joe Bob Briggs' commentary track, I Spit on Your Grave, Dir. Meir Zarchi, 1978, DVD, Force Entertainment, 2004; Philip Green (1998); Marco Starr, "J. Hills Is Alive: A Defence of I Spit on Your Grave," in The Video Nasties: Freedom and Censorship in

the Media, ed. Martin Baker, 48-55 (London, Pluto Press, 1984); Gary Crowdus. "Cult Films, Commentary Tracks and Censorious Critics: An Interview with John Bloom," Cineaste 28.3 (Summer 2003): 32-34.

28. Carol J. Clover, 118.

29. The decision to release the film as I Spit on Your Grave and not Day of the Woman was that of the distributor the director himself has recently emphasized his dislike of the I Spit on Your Grave title. http://www.ob sessedwithfilm. com/interviews/interview rector-meir-zachari. php.

30. Linda Ruth Williams, "Less Rape, More Revenge: I Spit on Your Grave," Sight ea Sound 12.4 (April 2002): 70.

31. Chris Eggersten, "Interview: Original I Spit on Your Grave Director Meir Zarchi!" Bloody Disgusting, 5 October, 2010, accessed 15 October, 2010, http://www.bloody-dis gusting.com/news/21921.

32. John Martin, Seduction of the Gullible: The Truth Behind the Video Nasty Scandal (Liskeard: Stray Cat, 2007), 133.

33. Both this section and the brief analysis of Aldo Lado's Night Train Murders (1975) in Chapter Two are summaries from my longer essay "Last Trope on the Left: Rape, Film and the Melodramatic Imagination," from volume 15 (June 2009) of Limina: A Journal of Cultural and Historical Studies. It can be read online at http://www.limina.arts.uwa.edu.au/ previous/vollltol5 /vo115/hellernicholas.

34. John Kenneth Muir, 46.

35. Michael Brashinsky, "The Spring, Defiled: Ingmar Bergman's Virgin Spring and Wes Craven's Last House on the Left," in Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes, eds. Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal (Berkeley: California University Press, 1998), 162- 171, 167.

36. John Kenneth Muir, 47.

37. Michael Brashinsky, 169.

38. Joseph Maddrey, Nightmares in Red, White and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004), 163.

39. Jan Bruun, "What the Hell Was He Thinking? Interview with Bo Arne Vibenius," Cinema Sewer 15: 13.

40. Ibid.

41. Ibid., 14.

42. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Femi nine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993), 123.

43. See: Xavier Mendik, "Thana as Thanatos: Sexuality and Death in Ms. 45: Angel of Vengeance," in Necronomicon Book One, ed. Andy Black, 168-176 (London, 1996).

44. Carol J. Clover, 124-137.

45. Stephen Prince, Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies (Austin: Texas University Press, 1998), 126.

46. Peter Hutchings, "`I'm the Girl He Wants to Kill': The `Women in Peril' Thriller in 1970s British Film and Television," Visual Culture in Britain 10:1 (2009): 53-69, 54.

47. Carol J. Clover, 153.

48. Christopher Sharrett, "Review: Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971)," Cineaste 28:4 (Fall 2003): 57-59, 57.

49. Ibid., 58.

50. Stephen Prince, 126.

51. David Weddle, "Straw Dogs: They Want to See Brains Flying Out?" Sight eT' Sound 5:2 (February 1995): 20-25, 20.

52. David Andrews, Soft in the Middle: The Contemporary Softcore Feature and Its Contexts (Columbia: Ohio State University Press, 2006), 64.

53. According to a 1993 statistic, "as many as 85% of victims knew the perpetrator." See: Julie A. Allison and Lawrence S. Wrightsman, Rape: The Misunderstood Crime (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1993), 3.

54. Christopher Sharrett, 58.

55. Linda Ruth Williams, "Straw Dogs: Women Can Only Misbehave," Sight eT' Sound 5:2 (February 1995): 26-7, 26.

56. Christopher Sharrett, 57.

57. David Weddle, 23.

58. Ibid., 24.

59. Linda Ruth Williams, 1995, 27.

60. Xavier Mendik, "Urban Legend: The 1970s Films of Michael Winner," in Shocking Cinema of the Seventies, ed. Xavier Mendik, 58-73 (Hereford: Noir, 2002), 66.

61. Deliverance is not totally female free: At Griner's garage, Ed sees an elderly woman with a young girl. There are women among the group of elderly patients Ed and Bobby eat with after their arrival in Ainsey; and Ed's pregnant wife is shown briefly in the film's concluding scenes.

62. Carol J. Clover, 160.

63. Rikke Schubart, 87.

64. Carol J. Clover, 118.

65. Rikke Schubart, 85.

66. Michel Ciment, John Boorman (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 117.

67. Ibid., 117.

68. Ibid., 121.

69. Rikke Schubart, 28.

70. Carol J. Clover, 132.

71. James F. Beaton, "Dicky Down the River," in The Modern American Novel and the Movies, eds. Gerald Peary and Roger Shatzkin, 293-306 (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1978), 293.

72. Sally Robinson, "'Emotional Constipation' and the Power of Dammed Masculinity: Deliverance and the Paradoxes of Male Liberation," in Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture, ed. Peter Lehman, 133-147 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 140.

73. Ibid., 133.

74. Carol J. Clover, 128.

75. Vincent Canby, "Death Wish Hunts Muggers: The Cast Story of Gunman Takes Dim View of City," The New York Times, 25 July, 1974, accessed 27 June, 2010, http:// movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9804 E3DB1131EF34BC4D51DFB166838F669E DE.

76. Travis Dumsday, "On Cheering Charles Bronson: The Ethics of Vigilantism," The Southern Journal of Philosophy 47:1 (Spring 2009): 49-67.

77. Karl French, "Obituary: Charles Bronson: "Acting Is the Easiest Thing I've Ever Done,"' Financial Times (UK, 2 September, 2003): 2.

78. Vincent Canby, http://movies.ny times.com/movie/review?res=9804E3DB1131 EF34BC4D51DFB166838F669EDE.

79. Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 90.

80. Xavier Mendik, 2002, 64.

81. Michael Winner, "Introducing the Shocking Cinema of the Seventies," in Shocking Cinema of the Seventies, ed. Xavier Mendik, 7-10 (Hereford: Noir, 2002), 7.

82. Bill Harding, The Films of Michael Winner (London: Frederick Muller, 1978), 106.

83. William Beard, Persistence of Double Vision: Essays on Clint Eastwood (Edmonton: Alberta University Press, 2000), 19; Vincent Canby, "Review: Sudden Impact," The New York Times, 6 December, 1983, 153.

84. William Beard, 19.

85. Douglas Thompson, Clint Eastwood: Sexual Cowboy (London: Warner Books, 1992), 85.

86. Deborah Allison, "Courting the Critics/Assuring the Audiences: The Modulation of Dirty Harry in a Changing Cultural Climate," Film International 5.5 (2007): 1729, 23.

87. Deborah Allison, 23.

88. Eastwood won Best Director and Best Picture Academy Awards for Unforgiven (1992) and Million Dollar Baby (2004). He was nominated for Best Director for Mystic River (2003) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), and Best Actor for Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby. In 1994 the Academy also presented him with the prestigious Irving G. Thalberg Memorial award, an honor he shares with such industry luminaries as Walt Disney, Ingmar Bergman and Alfred Hitchcock.

89. Kevin Thomas, "Orgy of Violence in Sudden Impact," LosAngeles Times, 9 December, 1983, 233.

90. Vincent Canby, 153.

91. Gary Arnold, "Eastwood and His Stale Impact," The Washington Post, 13 December, 1983, 175.

92. Peter Stack, "Impact: Torn Flesh, Death, and Big Guns," San Francisco Chronicle, 9 December, 1983, 246.

93. Deborah Allison, 25.

94. Ibid.

95. Ibid., 23.

96. Douglas Thompson, 85; Kevin Thomas, 233.

97. Michel Ciment, 124.

98. Alan Casty, Development of the Film: An Interpretive History (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 385.

99. Christopher Sharrett, 58.

100. Bill Harding, 107.

101. Ibid., 108.

Chapter Two: The RapeRevenge Film Across Genres

1. Jocelyn Vena, "Lady Gaga Says `Bad Romance' Video Is About `Tough Female Spirit,"' MTV.com, 9 November, 2009, ac

cessed 31 October, 2010, http://www.mtv. com/news/articles/1625848/20091109/ladygaga.jhtml.

2. Elizabeth Wilson, "Bodies in Private and Public," in Public Bodies/Private States: New Views on Photography, Representation, and Gender, eds. Jane Brettle and Sally Rice, 6-23 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 20.

3. Novotny Lawrence, Blaxploitation Films: Blackness and Genre (New York: Routledge, 2008).

4. Stephane Dunn, "Baad Bitches and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 2008), 126.

5. Ibid.

6. Maria Bevacqua, Rape on the Public Agenda: Feminism and the Politics of Sexual Assault (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000), 126.

7. As discussed again in Chapter Four, while the focus of this book is specifically on rape-revenge film, this by no means undermines its ubiquity on television. In terms of the 1970s and 1980s alone, Lisa M. Cuklanz lists a number of popular series that utilized rape-revenge plots, including Simon & Simon, In the Heat of the Night, The Equalizer, Barnaby Jones, Dallas, Starsky and Hutch, and Hawaii Five-O. See: Lisa M. Cuklanz, Rape on Prime Time. Television, Masculinity, and Sexual Violence (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2000).

8. Sujata Moorti, Color of Rape: Gender andRace in Television's Public Spheres (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 188.

9. Peter Lehman, 109.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid., 110.

12. Using rape as revenge is not specific to High Plains Drifter, and again there is some diversity in how this particular trope has been deployed on film. One of the most dramatic applications of this is in the art film The Baby of Macon (Peter Greenaway, 1993), where a woman who fakes an immaculate conception and a subsequent virgin birth is gang-raped in a symbolic deflowering. Notably, the playwithin-a-play structure allows one of its "internal" audience members to devise this mode of vengeance; thus the film places the responsibility of this abomination squarely upon its "audience."

13. James R. Lewis, "Images of Captive Rape in the Nineteenth Century," Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 15:2 (June 1992): 69-77, 75.

14. Ibid., 72.

15. Ibid., 75.

16. Elliott Gruner, "Rape and Captivity," Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 39 (June 1994): 51-56, accessed 3 December, 2006, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/on linessays/JC39folder/RapeandCaptivity.html.

17. Barbara Mortimer, Hollywood's Frontier Captives: Cultural Anxiety and the Captivity Plot in American Film (New York: Garland, 2000), 29.

18. Linda Colley, "Perceiving Low Literature: The Captivity Narrative," Essays in Criticism 53.3 (July 2003): 199-218, 200.

19. Jacinda Read, 223.

20. Philip Green, 192.

21. Jerrold S. Greenberg, Clint E. Bruess and Sarah C. Conklin, Exploring the Dimensions of Human Sexuality, Fourth Edition (Sudbury: Jones and Bartlett, 2011), 551.

22. Commentary track for the 2004 Force Entertainment DVD of Zarchi's I Spit on Your Grave.

23. Carol J. Clover, 164.

24. Barbara Mortimer, 4-6. There is almost no music in I Spit on Your Grave, and there is minimal dialogue also. It is gesture and action, emphasized by the dominant muteness of the text, that most wholly signifies the supposed "virtue" and "villainy" of the film's characters.

25. Ibid., 21.

26. Will Wright, Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study ofthe Western (Berkeley: California University Press, 1975), 59.

27. Ibid., 69.

28. Ibid.

29. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Champaign: First Illinois Paperback, 2000), 44.

30. Susan Brownmiller, 18.

31. Women in Django's life seem particuIarly at risk - not only is his sister raped here, but his wife is also raped in A Man Called Django (WDjango.!, Edoardo Mulargia, 1971).

32. Jacinda Read, 129.

33. Ibid., 125.

34. Ibid., 133.

35. Ibid., 141.

36. Ibid., 134.

37. Ibid., 139.

38. Ibid., 129.

39. Lisa M. Cuklanz, 37.

40. Linda Badley, Film, Horror and the Body Fantastic (Westport: Greenwood, 1995), 10.

41. Carol J. Clover, 11.

42. Linda Williams, "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess," Film Quarterly 44.4 (Summer 1991): 2-13, 5.

43. Carol J. Clover, 32.

44. Diane Wolfthal, 81.

45. Anchor Bay Films, I Spit on Your Grave (Steven R. Monroe, 2010) Press Kit, 2010.

46. In fact, Keaton has three different aliases credited to her performance in the film. She is called "Linda Lehl" in the opening credit sequence and "Vickie Lahl" in the end credit sequence, while IMDB.com lists her as "Vickie Kehl."

47. There are parallels between Demented and the similarly named Deranged (Chuck Vincent, 1987), where a crazy, heavily-pregnant woman murders a masked home invader who beats her viciously (causing her to miscarry) and attempts to rape her. While it is revealed later in the film that the intruder was, in fact, her husband who did not want the baby and was having an affair with the woman 's sitter, the film is determined to blur "reality" with her hallucinations, thus making it difficult to distinguish what is "deranged" fantasy and what is not.

48. Roger Ebert, "Evil in Film: To What End?" Chicago Sun-Times, 19 August, 2005, accessed 30 February, 2010, http://rogerebert. suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20 050818/COMMENTARY/508190304.

49. Eric Somers, "Down the Block from Bergman: The Last House on the Left and Beyond," Video Watchdog 151 (September 2009): 14-27.

50. The Haunted (Robert Mandel, 1991) is a TV movie that focuses on the real-life Smurl family, whose story is notably similar to that of The Entity's Carla Moran. However, in The Haunted it is the husband, Jack (Jeffrey DeMunn), who is raped.

51. Norman Bryson, "Two Narratives of Rape in the Visual Arts: Lucretia and the Sabine Women," in Rape: An Historical and Social Enquiry, eds. Sylvana Tomaselli and Ray Porter, 152-173 (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 153.

Chapter Three: The RapeRevenge Film Around the World

1. E. Ann Kaplan, "Problematizing CrossCultural Analysis: The Case of Women in the Recent Chinese Cinema," in Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide, eds. Dimitris Eleftheriotis and Gary Needham, 156-167 (Honolulu: Hawai'i University Press, 2006), 157.

2. Ibid., 164.

3. Ibid., 166.

4. Diane Wolfthal, 182.

5. Alice Allan, Islamophobia in Australia (Glebe: Agora Press, 2009), 98.

6. Stuart Cunningham, Framing Culture: Criticism and Policy in Australia (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992), 149; Rose Lucas "Shame," in Australian Film 1978-1992: A Survey of Theatrical Features, ed. Scott Murray (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1993), 257.

7. Kathi Maio, Popcorn and Sexual Politics (Freedom: The Crossing Press, 1991), 124.

8. Rose Lucas, 257.

9. The U.S. TV movie remake of Shame (Dan Lerner, 1995) resituates the Australian original to the Pacific Northwest of the United States. The basic plot structure, many key scenes and much of the dialogue are retained in the U.S. Shame from the original, but the two films deviate crucially in many ways: There is no mobilization of the towns women after the gang attack Lizzie's home (thus their unity remains at the discursive level only), and there is no attempted rape of the grandmother (rape is therefore implied to be an issue facing attractive young women). The ending is also not as problematic in the American version, as an additional coda establishes Lizzie as a martyr for the feminist cause. Unlike Furness' Asta, Donohoe's Diane is hailed unambiguously as a heroine as she tells another rape victim, "Things are going to change; this is where it starts." Combined with its final textual rape statistic coda, the American Shame is a straightforward "social issue" drama, whereas the original Australian version emphasizes the ethical nuance of Asta's position as bourgeois outsider casting her own brand of "feminism" of women of a much different socio-economic status.

10. In an unusual original casting deci

sion, Olivia Newton-John from Xanadu (Robert Greenwald, 1980) and Grease (Randal Kleiser, 1978) -was originally considered for the role of Jessica. See: "Olivia Seeks Film Role," Truth (Australia), July 7, 1984, 3.

11. Not Quite Hollywood (Mark Hartley, 2008).

12. Fair Game is by no means the only rape-revenge film revolving around a monstrous automobile. See, for example, Rolling Vengeance (Steven Hilliard Stern, 1987).

13. A.H. Weiler, "House by Lake Sinks in Blood," New York Times, 12 May, 1977, 70.

14. Clive Denton, Cinema Canada, 3:33 (December 1976-January 1977): 57-58, 57.

15. Canuxploitation.com Review: Death Weekend, accessed 6 October, 2009, http:// www.canuxploitation.com/review/deathweek end.html.

16. Clive Denton, 57.

17. Canuxploitation.com, http://www. canuxploitation.com/review/deathweekend. html.

18. Christina Stojanova, "Denys Arcand," in Contemporary North American Film Directors: A Wallflower Guide, eds. Yoram Allon, Del Cullen and Hannah Patterson (London: Wallflower Press, 2002), 19.

19. Pierre Veronneau, "Denys Arcand: A Moralist in Search of His Audience," in Great Canadian Film Directors, ed. George Melnyk, 67-77 (Edmonton: Alberta University Press, 2007), 69. The Cotton Mill was finally released in its fully uncut version on DVD in 2004.

20. Ibid., 71.

21. Christina Stojanova, 20.

22. Alain Dubeau, "Denys Arcand," in Guide to the Cinema(s) of Canada, ed. Peter Rist (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001), 6- 7,7.

23. Guy Austin, Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996).

24. Ibid., 60.

25. Obviously there is also a strong legacy of films that make clear connections between women, gender and insanity beyond France. These include, but are not limited to, Sisters (Brian DePalma, 1973), Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965), Lilith (Robert Rossen, 1964) and Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964), four films that also frame this relationship explicitly through sexuality and desire.

26. Like One Deadly Summer, both The Story ofAdele H and Camille Claudel also star Isabelle Adjani. Along with the films Possession (Andrzej Zulawski, 1981) and Diabolique (Jeremiah S. Chechik, 1996), Adjani has a strong body of work where she plays mentally frail or disturbed women, suggesting a degree of intertextuality.

27. Aristides Gazetas, An Introduction to World Cinema (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), 275.

28. A similar subject was to become the central topic of Helke Sander's 1992 documentary BeFreier and BeFreite (Liberators Take Liberties), which focused on the rape of German women after the war by soldiers in the Red Army.

29. Hans-Bernhard Moeller and George Lellis, Volker Schlondorffs Cinema: Adaptation, Politics, and the "Movie-Appropriate" (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), 46.

30. Ibid., 43.

31. Ibid., 46.

32. Ibid., 42.

33. This view of Boll is typified in the CinemaBlend.com article "Uwe Boll: Money for Nothing: The Awful Truth Behind the Worst Director in the World," accessed 10 January, 2010, http://www.cinemablend. com/features /Uwe-B oll-Money-For-No th ing-209.html.

34. Sally Stockbridge, "Rape and Representation: The Regulation of Hong Kong Films in Hong Kong and Australia," Asian Studies Review 17:3 (1994): 43-49, 43.

35. Ibid., 44.

36. Darrell W. Davis and Yeh Yeh Yuehyu, "Warning! Category III: The Other Hong Kong Cinema," Film Quarterly 54:4 (Summer 2001): 12-26, 14.

37. Andrew Grossman, "Against Pleasure, Against Identification: Feminism, Cultural Atheism, and the Tragic Subject," Bright Lights Film journal 47 (February 2005), accessed 10 July, 2009, http://www.brightlights film.com/47/47rape.php.

38. Darrell W. Davis and Yeh Yeh Yuehyu, 14-18.

39. Linda Ruth Williams, The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 386.

40. Andrew Grossman, http://www.bright lightsfilm.com/47/47rape.php.

41. James Mudge, "Review: Red to Kill," Beyond Hollywood, 17 September, 2004, accessed 6 October, 2009, http://www.beyond hollywood.com/red-to-kill-1997-movie-re view/.

42. Michael Atkinson, "Taboo Ya!" Village Voice, 5 November, 2002, accessed 6 October, 2009, http://www.villagevoice.com/ 2002-11-05/film/taboo-ya/1.

43. Julian Stringer, "Category 3: Sex and Violence in Postmodern Hong Kong," in Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media, ed Christopher Sharrett, 361-378, 364.

44. Ibid., 362. Darrell W. Davis and Yeh Yeh Yeuh-yu also share this critical approach in their treatment of the Category III film Intruders (Tseng Kam-Cheong, 1997), a movie that emphasizes the monstrosity of "ruthless mainlanders" and thus acts in part as "an allegory of the reunion with China' where "cast as body snatchers, mainland Chinese seize the resources, lives, and very limbs of their vulnerable Hong Kong neighbours" (14).

45. Ibid., 367.

46. Gregory D. Booth, "Traditional Content and Narrative Structure in the Hindi Commercial Cinema," Asian Folklore Studies 54:2 (1995): 169-190, 172.

47. Ibid., 180-181.

48. Ibid.

49. Urvashi Butalia, "Women in Indian Cinema," Feminist Review 317 (August 1984): 108-110, 108.

50. Leela Rao, "Women in Indian Films: A Paradigm of Continuity and Change," Media, Culture and Society 11:4 (1989): 443- 458, 455. Jyotika Virdi's article "Reverence, Rape -and Then Revenge: Popular Hindi Cinema's `Woman's Film"' offers a fascinating historical overview of the rape threat and how it was coded in Hindi "women's films." See: Screen 40:1 (Spring 1991): 17-37.

51. Jyotika Virdi, 28. Virdi also notes that this public discourse was not focused solely on rape, but upon the status of women more broadly: "The nation underwent a long consciousness-raising process as women challenged and rewrote discriminatory laws on domestic violence, rape, dowry, and the growing number of `dowry deaths"' (28).

52. For example, see: Urvashi Butalia, 109.

53. Jyotika Virdi, 29.

54. Ibid., 32.

55. Uryashi Butalia, 109.

56. Jyotika Virdi 33.

57. Ibid., 30.

58. Udayan Prasad, "Woman on the Edge," Sight & Sound 1:2 (February 1995): 14-17, 16.

59. Lalitha Gopalan, Cinema ofInterruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (London: BFI, 2002), 59.

60. Leela Fernandes, "Reading `India's Bandit Queen': A Trans/national Feminist Perspective on the Discrepencies of Representation," Signs 25:1 (Autumn 1999): 123-152, 128.

61. Ibid., 141.

62. Colette Balmain, Introduction to japanese Horror Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 95.

63. According to James R. Alexander, "The so-called pink films (pinku eige) of the 1970s offer(ed) ... a steady diet of violent mayhem, including shootings, beatings, stabbings, torture, mutilation and rape. In fact, pink films dominated the domestic market into the early 1980s, and, in the process, productions became more viscerally sophisticated and textually more `splatter' and torture-oriented. Prototypical of these were gangster (yakuza) films, films about roving gangs of alienated youth (the staple text of the nihilistic period of the Japanese New Wave), and films that featuring the rape of young girls," http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/ 05/36/freeze_me.html.

64. Pete Tombs, Mondo Macabro: Weird and Wonderful Cinema from Around the World, New York: St. Martins Griffin, 1998, 160.

65. Gregory Barrett, Archetypes in Japanese Film: The Sociopolitical and Religious Significance of the Principal Heroes and Heroines (Cranbury: Associated University Press, 1989), 98.

66. Colette Balmain, 95.

67. James R. Alexander, http://www.sens esofcinema.com/contents/05/36/freeze-me. html.

68. These films include Rape! 13th Hour (Bokan, 1977), Assault! jack the Ripper (Boko Kirisaki Jakku, 1976), Attack! (Osou!, 1978), and Raping! (Yarn!, 1978), all directed by Yahsuharu Hasebe.

69. The Hanzo films are based on the title character, a kind of "rapist superhero." The trio of films consist of Hanzo the Razor: Sword

of Justice (Kenji Misumi, 1972); Hanzo the Razor: The Snare (Yasuzo Masumura, 1973); and Hanzo the Razor: Who's Got the Gold? (Yoshio Inoue, 1974).

70. Subway Serial Rape (Chikatetsu renzoku reipu, 1985), Subway Serial Rape: Uniform Hunting (Chikatetsu renzoku reipu: Seifuku-ga,1987), and Subway Serial Rape: Lover Hunting (Chikatetsu renzoku reipu: Aijin-gari, 1988), all directed by Shuji Kataoka.

71. Based on a Shintaro Miyawaki's manga of the same name, the Rapeman film series was produced between 1993 and 1995, and parts 1 to 7 were directed by Takao Nagaishi.

72. James R. Alexander, http://www.sens esofcinema. com/contents/05/36/freeze_me. html.

73. Rikke Schubart, 107.

74. Ibid., 111.

75. Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion is the first of four films in this series, the others being Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (Joshuu Sasori-Dai 41Zakkyobo, Shuya Ito, 1972), Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable (Joshuu Sasori-Kemono Beya, Shuya Ito, 1973), and Female Prisoner Scorpion: Grudge Song (Josh Sasori-701 Go Urami Bushi, Yasharu Hasebe, 1973). Meiko Kaji starred in all these films.

76. Chris Desjardins, Outlaw Masters of the Japanese Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 68.

77. James R. Alexander, http://www.sens esofcinema.com/contents/05/36/freeze-me. html.

78. Rikke Schubart, 116.

79. Frank Lafond, "Case Study: Ishii Takashi's Freeze Me and the Rape-Revenge Film," in Japanese Horror Cinema, ed. Jay McRoy, 77-85 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006).

80. There are nine Angel Guts films in all. While Takashi Ishii only directed the last three, the whole series is based on a manga series he wrote. The films are: Angel Guts: High School Co-Ed (Jokousei Tenshi no Harawata, Chusei Sone, 1978), Angel Guts: Red Classroom (Tenshi no Harawata: Akai Kyoshitsu, Chusei Sone, 1979), Angel Guts: Nami (Tenshi no Harawata: Nami, Noboru Tanaka, 1979), Angel Guts: Red Porno (Tenshi no Harawata: Akai Inga, Toshiharu Ikeda, 1981), Angel Guts: Rouge (Tenshi no Harawata: Rouge, Hiroyuki Nasu, 1984), Angel Guts: Red Rope-"Until I Expire" (Akai Nawa Hateru Made, Junichi Suzuki, 1987), Angel Guts: Red Vertigo (Tenshi no Harawata: Akai Memai, Takashi Ishii, 1988), Angel Guts: Red Lightning (Tenshi no Harawata: Akai Senko, Takashi Ishii, 1994), and Angel Guts: Night Is Falling Again (Yoru Go Mata Kuru, Takashi Ishii, 1994).

81. Colette Balmain, 98.

82. Susan Martin-Marquez, Feminist Discourse and Spanish Cinema: Sight Unseen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 2.

83. Ibid., 27.

84. Ibid.

85. Ibid., 22.

86. Christopher Perriam, Stars and Masculinities in Spanish Cinema: From Banderas to Bardem (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 65.

87. GonUl Donmez-Colin, Women, Islam and Cinema (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 76.

88. "Erksan has stated that the film takes its inspiration from An-Nisa, Sura IV-ayet (verse) 19 of the Koran, which states that it is not lawful for men to possess women by force. They should consort with them in kindness because if they hate them, they hate the thing wherein Allah has placed much good" (GonUl Donmez-Colin, 80).

89. Ibid.

90. In popular representations, "the rapist is usually portrayed as a stranger, his motivation is entirely sexual, and the victim is always female, young, and physically desirable" (Julie A. Allison and Lawrence S. Wrightsman, 3).

91. Kaya Ozkaracalar, "Between Appropriation and Innovation: Turkish Horror Cinema," in Fear Without Frontiers: Horror Cinema Across the Globe, ed. Steven Jay Schneider, 204-217 (Gottalming: FAB Press, 2003); Ian Robert Smith, "The Exorcist in Istanbul: Processes of Transcultural Appropriation Within Turkish Popular Cinema," Portal journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 5:1 (January 2008), accessed 1 July, 2010, http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index. php/portal/article/view/489/584.

92. Laurence Raw, "Review: GonUl Donmez-Colin, Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance and Belonging," Turkish Cinema Screen 50.3 (Autumn 2009): 362.

93. Along with Revenge and The Bravados,

Joan Collins also starred in another unusual rape-themed film called I Don't Want to Be Born (Peter Sasdy, 1975). Collins plays Lucy, a woman who escapes an attempted rape by a dwarf named Hercules (George Claydon) whom she performs with in a nightclub act. Humiliated, Hercules swears revenge and curses her by saying that she will grow a demon in her womb. She has a child and believes it is demonic. When she looks at the baby after it commits an act of violence (propelled by its supernatural growth and strength), it morphs into the dwarf's face for a brief moment - much to Lucy's horror.

94. Paul Willemen, "Angela Markado," in The BFI Companion to Crime Volume 2, ed. Phil Hardy, 34-35 (Berkeley: California University Press, 1997), 35.

Chapter Four: The Contemporary Rape-Revenge Film

1. Jacinda Read, 235.

2. Lisa M. Cuklanz's Rape on Prime Time: Television, Masculinity and Sexual Violence includes many examples of rape and revenge on TV before 2000.

3. Jacinda Read, 207.

4. Ibid.

5. Rikke Schubart, 98.

6. Maximillian Le Cain, "Tarantino and the Vengeful Ghosts of Cinema," Senses of Cinema 32 (July-September 2004), accessed 29 September, 2009, http://archive.sens esofcinema.com/contents/04/32/tarantino. html.

7. Todd McCarthy, "A Killer Double Bill," Variety 406:7 (2-8 April 2007): 25-32.

8. Special thanks to my colleague Craig Martin for pointing out that Lee's experience in her friend's absence is also suggested sexual violence, and for summarizing the scenario far more eloquently than I could hope to: "The owner is Jasper, the man killed by Beatrice in the hospital scene in Kill Bill Vol. 1. He's introduced to Beatrice by "Chuck who likes to Fuck" while she is (pretending to be) comatose. Jasper and Chucks deaths in Kill Bill constitute rape/revenge, as Beatrice exacts revenge on Chuck for her being pedaled as a sex toy. In Death Proof when Lee is left behind with Jasper (whom audiences recognize from Kill Bill), Tarantino is, I believe, insinuating that she will be raped. As Jasper stands over Lee chuckling sleazily, her final line is `gulp."' (Email correspondence from Craig Martin to author, 25 October, 2010).

9. Nick James, "Tarantino Bites Back," Sight & Sound (February 2008), accessed 10 January, 2010, http://www.bfi.org.uk/sight andso an d/feature/4943 2/.

10. Derek Elley, "Review: Straightheads," Daily Variety 295:19 (27 April, 2007): 4, 10.

11. Anna Smith, "Review: Straightheads," Sight &r Sound 17:5 (May 2007): 83-84.

12. Rob Carnavele, "Gillian Anderson: Straightheads," BBC. co.uk, April 2007, accessed 6 October, 2009, http://www.bbc.co. uk/films/2007/04/23/gillian-anderson-straig htheads 2007 interview.shtml.

13. James Quandt, "Flesh and Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema," Artforum 42:6 (February 2004): 126-132.

14. Because of the diversity and political impact of these different translations, this chapter will refer to the film by its original French title.

15. Linda Ruth Williams cites an interview where Despentes stated, "I've been raped and one of my actresses has been raped.... It's horrific, so I don't see why I shouldn't treat it this way." See: Linda Ruth Williams, "Sick Sisters," Sight & Sound (July 2001): 28-29. In a supplementary Q&A feature on the U.K. DVD release of the film, Trinh Thi echoes this sentiment, stating, "We have the right to show how awful can be rape" [sic].

16. The banning of Baise-Moi in France caused even greater controversy, so the French government quickly reintroduced an 18+ certificate that meant the film was allowed only to be screened in adult cinemas.

17. Gavin Smith, "Toronto," Film Comment 36:6 (November-December 2000): 66.

18. Eric Monder, "Baise-moi (Rape Me)," Film Journal International 25 (March 2002), accessed 6 October, 2009, http://www.film journal.com/Article.cfm/PageID/75641304.

19. Potential Films (Australia and New Zealand), Baise-moi Press Kit, 2000.

20. Colin Nettelback, "Self-Constructing Women: Beyond the Shock of Baise-moi and A ma soeur!" Flinders University Languages Group Online Review 1:3 (December 2003): 58-68, 61.

21. Phil Powrie, "French Neo-noir to

Hyper-noir," in European Film Noir, ed. Andrew Spicer, 55-83 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).

22. Linda Ruth Williams, 2001, 28.

23. That this sex is unprotected emphasizes the extent of their self-destructiveness.

24. See: Colin Nettelback, 61; Judith Franco, "Gender, Genre and Female Pleasure in the Contemporary Revenge Narrative: Baise-moi and What It Feels Like for a Girl," Quarterly Review of Film and Video 21 (2004): 1-10, 4.

25. Judith Franco, 2.

26. Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi interview, "Q&A Session," Baise-moi, UK DVD release, Universal Studios, 2003.

27. Ibid.

28. Mark Kermode, "Horror Movie," Sight e!'' Sound 13:2 (February 2003): 21-22, 22.

29. David Sterritt, "`Time Destroys All Things': An Interview with Gaspar Nod," Quarterly Review of Film and Video 24:4 (2007): 307-316, 312.

30. Elvis Mitchell, "Irreversible: Rape, Violence... It's OK to Look Away," New York Times 7 March, 2003, El: 32.

31. Nick James, "Horror Movie," Sight & Sound 13:2 (February 2003): 21-22, 21.

32. David Sterritt, 312.

33. Mark Kermode, 22.

34. Lars von Trier is "the P.T. Barnum of modern cinema, a brilliant showman-cumshaman, part provocateur, all entrepreneur." Damien Wise, "No Dane, No Gain," The Guardian, 12 October, 2003, accessed 6 October, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/ film/2003/oct/12/features. magazine.

35. Dendy Films (Australia), Dogville Press Kit, 2003.

36. Von Trier says in the Dogville press kit, "As far as I can recall, they never went to Casablanca when they made Casablanca."

37. Jack Stevenson, Lars von Trier (London: BFI, 2002), 185.

38. Damien Wise, http://www.guardian. co. uk/film/2003/oct/12/features. magazine.

39. Bryant Frazer, "Review: Dogville," Deep Focus, 21 March, 2004, accessed 6 October, 2009, http://www.deep-focus.com/df weblog/2004/03/dogville.html.

40. Caroline Bainbridge, The Cinema of Lars von Trier: Authenticity andArtifice (London: Wallflower, 2007), 151.

41. An American version of the film is scheduled for a 2011 release; at the time of writing, it is understood to be directed by David Fischer, and star Daniel Craig, Stellan Skarsgard, Max von Sydow and Robin Wright.

42. Although there is only one key sex scene between them in the films, Lisbeth's success in maintaining her relationship with "alternative" Miriam is thwarted throughout in the films (not least by Miriam's beating when she is captured by a man looking for Lisbeth). Even her friendship with fellow hacker and industrial-geek Plague (Tomas Kohler) is one maintained via predominantly remote communication. Again, it is emphasized that Lisbeth's subcultural involvement is notably different in the novels.

43. Adam Rockoff is credited in the film under the alias Stuart Morse; he is familiar to many horror fans through his book Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978-1986 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002). See: Sean Decker, "Exclusive: Dread Central Hits Red Carpet Premiere of I Spit on Your Grave," Dread Central, 30 September, 2010, accessed 15 October, 2010, http://www. dreadcentral.com/news/40076/exclusivedread-central-hits-red-carpet-premiere-ispit-your-grave.

44. Sean Decker, "Exclusive: Director Steven R. Monroe Talks I Spit on Your Grave," Dread Central, 4 September, 2010, accessed 15 October, 2010, http://www.dreadcentral. com/interviews/monroe-Steven-r-i-spityour-grave.

45. Anchor Bay Film, I Spit on Your Grave (Steven R. Monroe, 2010) Press Kit, 2010.

46. Sean Decker, http://www.dreadcen tral.com/interviews/monroe-steven-r-i-spityour-grave.

47. Barbara Creed, 129.

48. Ibid.

49. Linda Ruth Williams, 2002, 70.

50. Ronnie Scheib, "Review: I Spit on Your Grave (Steven R. Monroe, 2010)," Variety, 26 September, 2010, accessed 15 October, 2010, http://www.variety.com/review/VE11179436 93.html?categoryid=31&cs=l.

51. See: Ibid.; Scott Tobias, "Review: I Spit on Your Grave (Steven R. Monroe, 2010)," The A.V. Club, 7 October, 2010, accessed 15 October, 2010, http://www.avclub. com/articles/i-spit-on-your-grave,46100/.

52. Ronnie Scheib, http://www.variety. com/review/VE1117943693.html?categoryid= 31&cs=1.

53. According to Wikipedia, Shutter was also remade in India as Sivi (K. R. Senthil Nathan, 2007), Click (Sangeeth Sivan, 2010). See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutter(2004-film).

54. Paul Fischer, "Rachael Taylor: Shutter Interview," Femail, accessed 6 October, 2009, http://www.femail.com.au/rachael-taylorshutter- interview. h tm.

55. Jamie Russell, "Review: Shutter," Sight Sound 17:7 (July 2007): 71.

56. Barbara Creed, 106.

57. Ibid., 7.

58. Kyle Buchanan, "Biting Wit," Advocate 1001 (29 January, 2008): 57-58.

59. Gavin Smith, 66.

60. Elaine Lamkin, "Bad Reputation: Writer/Director Jim Hemphill," Bloody Disgusting, September 2005, accessed 6 October, 2009, http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/ interview/138.

61. "Interview with Jimmy Hemphill, Director/Writer of Bad Reputation," Fatally Yours, accessed 10 August, 2010, http://www. fatally-yours.com/interviews/interview-withj immy-hemphill-directorwriter-of-bad-rep u tation/.

62. Elaine Lamkin, ibid.

63. Fatally Yours, ibid.

64. Rape Is a Circle was re-edited and rereleased in 2010 as Catherine's Pain.

65. "The exploitation Rape Is a Circle concerns a pair of female friends who, after hitchhiking, are trapped by a sadist who perform [sic] a variety on them. He also, under threat of death, forces the two to perform acts on each other. The relationship between the two friends alters as a result of these experiences." Perry Selbert, "Plot Synopsis: Rape Is a Circle," Allmovie.com, accessed 6 October, 2009, http://www.allmovie.com/work/rape-is-acircle-342395.

66. Diane Wolfthal, 198.

Afterword

1. Angela Baldassarre, The Great Dictators: Interviews with Filmmakers ofltalian Descent (Toronto: Guernica Editions, 1999), 14.

2. Ibid. I do not believe Argento means "high concept" in the way in which it has been applied to mainstream (Hollywood) cinema a la Justin Wyatt's High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood (Austin: Texas University Press, 1994). Rather, I understand this as meaning that he aspires to a high art standard.

3. Carol J. Clover, 42.

4. For example, transsexual Eva Robins plays one of the key female figures in Tenebrae, and Carlo's male lover in Deep Red is played by a female actress. The killer in his 1971 film Four Flies on Grey Velvet is a woman who was raised as a boy, while in Cat o'Nine

Tails that same year, the murderer had a mutant chromosomal structure and was thus called the "XXY killer." That being said, this is not to suggest that all representations of LGBT characters in Argento's films should be assumed to be necessarily progressive: The depiction of homosexuality in both Four Flies on Grey Velvet and Tenebrae, for example, might make such a claim problematic.

5. Daniel Schweiger, "The Stendhal Syndrome Paints It Red," Fangoria 162 (May 1997): 40-41, 40.

6. Louis Paul, Italian Horror Film Directors (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), 57.

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