Editor’s observe: This piece incorporates descriptions and dialogue of sexual assault.
Rape-revenge movies promise two issues of their story: rape, and revenge. Whereas which will sound simple, there are clearly numerous methods to remodel that concept, as there are a whole bunch of examples of rape-revenge movies. These movies are sometimes criticized for his or her rape scenes—they’re meant to be titillating as a substitute of disgusting, they focus extra on the rapist than the sufferer, or they’re simply too brutal. Once I was studying (the admittedly only a few) evaluations of I Spit On Your Grave 2 (2013), I used to be stunned to see that the revenge was being criticized, slightly than the assaults on the rape survivor.
Directed by Steven R. Monroe, and a sequel to the 2010 remake of the unique I Spit on Your Grave from 1978 (directed by Meir Zarchi), this movie was launched when audiences have been craving a break from the brutality of the 2000s, and looking out ahead to the very completely different taste of horror we began seeing within the mid-2010s. It’s not stunning {that a} sequel to a remake of probably the most infamous rape-revenge movie of all time wasn’t critically lauded.
A number of evaluations of I Spit on Your Grave 2 stated that the revenge went too far, and that the scenes have been too nasty. Nevertheless, an alternate studying of the movie is that the revenge scenes are precisely nasty sufficient. I Spit On Your Grave 2 completely balances the brutality, and whereas the rape survivor Katie (Jemma Dallender) does undergo a horrifying expertise, the acts of revenge are warranted.
The movie opens with Katie attempting to interrupt out as a mannequin in New York Metropolis. She doesn’t have a lot to her identify, with all the cash from her waitressing job going to pay lease in her dilapidated house. Nevertheless, she’s suggested {that a} new portfolio will assist her get extra modeling jobs. Determined for a break, she meets up with a photographer providing a free photograph shoot. Ivan (Joe Absolom), the photographer, and his brothers, Nicky (Aleksandar Aleksiev) and Georgy (Yavor Baharov), greet Katie and really rapidly counsel she take her garments off. She declines and returns to her house.
Demise By An infection
Georgy is Katie’s first rapist and the worst of them (don’t fear, he will get the worst punishment). It’s due to him that every one this different bother started. After Katie’s photoshoot, he finds her house and sneaks in. When she discovers him, he tries to current himself as a pleasant man who desires to have a dialog. When Katie resists, he rapes her and kills her neighbor who comes to assist. As he’s raping her, he insists she says, “I such as you Georgy” and “I would like this.”
After the rape, he calls Nicky and Ivan to assist him clear up, and so they finally visitors Katie to Bulgaria. She is trapped within the basement of this sick household’s dwelling, the place they berate her, depart her bare, name her trash, and, worst of all, promote her physique. The brothers knew there was no escape for them in New York, so that they introduced Katie to the place she may very well be offered.
Katie finally escapes, which is when her revenge begins. She traps the individuals who harm her one after the other and matches their torture blow for blow.
When Katie traps Georgy, she chains him to a wall, in nothing however his underwear, in an underground tunnel. She cuts him in a number of locations, and covers the injuries in filth from the bottom, intending for an infection to unfold. She explains she is leaving him to rot, the identical method he left her. Georgy made Katie really feel filthy, and she or he desires him to really feel the identical, and expertise the sluggish, heinous feeling of a spreading an infection.
Katie returns to verify on him in between her different acts of revenge. She jams rods of rebar into his wounds and taunts him by asking, “You want me now, don’t you?” Penetrating his wounds calls to thoughts the best way he raped her, and Katie doesn’t maintain again. She insists he says he likes what’s taking place to him, as Georgy did to her, so he can really feel how terrible it’s to be made to assert you get pleasure from being raped and tortured. Georgy will get all of his horrible actions turned again on himself.
Demise By Defecation and Suffocation
Earlier than Katie escapes, she’s chained up of their basement, and Nicky taunts her whereas he forces sedatives down her throat. Insisting she swallow the medication, he says, “You understand how to swallow, don’t you?” When she’s excessive, he berates her, saying, “You don’t even know what’s taking place proper now.” So as to add to the humiliation, he urinates on her whereas she’s chained and bare.
When Katie catches up with Nicky after her escape, he’s nodding off in a membership, out of his thoughts on alcohol and medicines. Katie corners him within the bogs (the grossness of which rivals the disgusting scenes of the unique Noticed toilet) and taunts him with, “You don’t even know what’s taking place proper now.” As she drowns him in a rest room, visibly full of human waste, she sneers at him, “You understand how to swallow, don’t you?” Although Nicky probably drugged himself, Katie takes benefit of his weak state the best way he did to her. She forces him to swallow one thing disgusting and dangerous earlier than she kills him and mocks him whereas she does so. Nicky drowns in human waste whereas stoned, paying for his crimes.
Demise By Testicular Vice
Instantly after the preliminary rape in New York, because the brothers are serving to Georgy attempt to clear up, Ivan says to Katie, “Forgive my brother, he can’t assist himself. All of us have our vices, huh?” Ivan dismisses Georgy’s act of rape as if it’s akin to smoking or ingesting. When Katie finally traps Ivan, she crushes his testicles in a vice, demonstrating a “vice” of her personal. Since Ivan had the audacity to dismiss one thing so horrible that occurred to Katie, she desires to do one thing to him that he can’t recuperate from.
Demise By Cattle Prod
Whereas Katie is chained up within the Bulgarian basement, a buyer named Valko (Peter Silverleaf) paid Katie’s captives so he might rape and torture her. Earlier than raping her, he breaks her down by mentally and bodily torturing Katie with a cattle prod, forcing it into her mouth, and stunning her throughout her physique. He clearly enjoys seeing her in ache. Valko meets an applicable finish when Katie will get her revenge. She ties him down, runs a drain snake down his throat, and whereas he’s choking on his personal insides, she electrocutes him with a automobile battery. Katie needed him to really feel the helplessness and bodily and psychological agony he put her via.
Sure, Katie’s actions are excessive: electrocution, torture, drowning, and an infection. However what Katie went via was excessive: a number of rapes, being kidnapped and trafficked internationally, tortured, starved, and humiliated. In a 2024 interview with Thomas Fenton for The Pod and the Pendulum Patreon, who wrote I Spit On Your Grave 2, he explains how purposefully he wrote every scene to steadiness what occurred to Katie and Katie’s revenge. If a viewer thinks your entire film is simply too brutal for them to understand, truthful sufficient—it’s nonstop violence. But when a viewer accepts the brutality completed to Katie, however not the precise mirror of these actions on her captors and rapists, I might ask that viewer to consider why that’s.
If we settle for that on the planet of a rape-revenge movie, the survivors ought to get their revenge, we’ve to just accept that that revenge can go simply as exhausting because the preliminary assault. Katie wasn’t simply combating for her life; she was combating for the one type of justice obtainable to her. The matching of the brutality of the rape and the revenge in I Spit On Your Grave 2 is an inventive achievement.
Ariel Powers-Schaub is the creator of Millennial Nasties, which analyzes English horror movies of the 2000s and why these movies have been notably nasty within the wake of terrorist assaults, a rising surveillance state, a violent conflict, and extra. The e book is out now from Encyclopocalypse Publications.
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