Rape Revenge Films

This article brings together essays on revenge by philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Emmanuel Levinas with the raperevenge film genre through a detailed reading of French director Coralie Fargeat's first feature film Revenge (2017). It also links the film's presentation of rape and violence to the #MeToo movement and how it played out in France under the #BalanceTonPorc hashtag and suggests that the leading protagonist of Revenge Jen (Mathilda Lutz) may be considered as an example of the twenty-first century version of horror's "Final Girl" first theorized by Carol Clover in the 1980s.

“Rape—real, threatened, or implied—has been a staple of American cinema more or less from the beginning.” This hard-to-swallow statement opens the section ‘Rape Revenge’ in Carol J. Clover’s ground-breaking book Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992). In the thirty years that have passed since its release much has happened, including the #MeToo movement and reckoning in Hollywood that has challenged and changed the ways women’s bodies and violence towards those bodies is portrayed.

This article aims to address the largely negative critical response to Steven R. Monroe’s remake of I Spit On Your Grave (2010), by both analysing its themes in comparison to Meir Zarchi’s 1978 original film, and by positioning the new version within its own generic context. Using examples from feminist film theory which analyses Zarchi’s film (Clover 1992, Creed 1993, Read 2000), I suggest that Monroe’s version not only interprets, but actively enhances the perceived feminist message of the original, and consider how role reversal during the revenge section of the film contributes to this. I also outline the way in which Monroe’s film can be understood as representative of recent trends in the horror genre – most notably, its inclusion of explicit, gory violence and themes of retribution. Ultimately, the portrayal of the remake’s female protagonist as less sexualized and arguably more monstrous than the original character works in conjunction with other changes and a torture porn aesthetic in order to position the film clearly within the context of contemporary horror cinema.

This essay argues that Mitchell Lichtenstein’s film Teeth (2007) is an exemplary appropriation of the femme castratrice, a sadistic and castrating female figure that subverts the patriarchal mythologies undergirding the gendered logics of both screen violence and cultural misogyny. The film chronicles Dawn’s post–sexual assault transformation from a passive defender of women’s purity to an avenging heroine with castrating genitals. First, I illustrate how Teeth intervenes in the gendered politics of spectatorship by cultivating identification with a violent heroine who refuses to abide by the stable binary between masculine violence/feminized victimhood. This subversive iteration of rape-revenge cinema is assisted by the filmmaker’s introduction of camp, a playful and self-conscious cinematic style that renders transparent the fantasies guiding the cinematic construction of violence and the male gaze. Second, I argue that this revision of the rape-revenge genre equips audiences with important symbolic resources for feminist critiques of cultural misogyny. Teeth’s avenging heroine updates the sexual politics of second-wave feminism to resist recent political efforts to regulate women’s bodies.

Despite being a prevalent theme in popular cinema, revenge has received little dedicated attention within film studies. The majority of research concerning the concept of revenge is located within moral philosophy, but that body of literature has been overlooked by film studies scholars. Philosophers routinely draw on filmic examples to illustrate their discussions of revenge, but those interpretations are commonly hindered by their authors’ inexperience with film studies’ analytical methods. This article seeks to bridge those gaps. The 2010 remake of I Spit on Your Grave is used as a case study to illustrate the benefits of an interdisciplinary engagement with revenge. Philosophical literature on the topic has routinely posited that revenge is either appealing or appalling, and that impasse has stifled conceptual understanding. The interdisciplinary approach employed here elucidates that revenge is simultaneously appealing and appalling; this dualistic nature is evident in I Spit on Your Grave since it is built into the narrative design. I conclude that an interdisciplinary approach to revenge has the potential to advance understanding of revenge-qua-concept both within films studies and philosophy.

In this paper, I explore a small but significant group of Southeast Asian films that tell rape-revenge stories and consider them collectively as a point of entry into conceiving a regional feminist identity. I begin with a brief survey that traces cinematic iterations of the rape-revenge genre as seen in Southeast Asia from the 1970s onward. Following this, I discuss how powerful women are framed in the contemporary period with a focus on three films: Nan Achnas’s Whispering Sands (Indonesia, 2001), Bui Kim Quy’s The Inseminator (Vietnam, 2014), and Mouly Surya’s Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts (Indonesia, 2017). Despite being produced in different spatio- temporal contexts, the three films present similar experiences of rural womanhood that is repeatedly subjected to sexual violence. Evidently, Southeast Asian filmmakers especially (and counterintuitively) women continue to find currency in the Third World woman figure. Interestingly, this goes against the grain of third wave feminist discourse which, since the late 1980s, has cautioned against ratifying the rhetoric of female victimhood as the second wave had previously done. Paying attention to the films’ formal qualities, such as their experimentation with chronology and expressionist elements, I argue that Southeast Asian rape-revenge films offer a way to clarify feminist debates. I demonstrate this by reading the films alongside Gloria Anzaldúa’s conception of the new mestiza, a hybridized feminist identity premised on shifting borders, and ultimately propose that—consciously or not—these films and their filmmakers have created a new mythic hero whom I term ‘She of Borderlands’.

This essay makes sense of the trauma of cinematic un-belonging, whether sedimented over a landscape situated in the crevices of caste-revenge and justice, or extracted from nonplussed strangers trapped in the photographic meanwhile of Hindi cinema's ground-zero, via two landmark films situated orthogonal to popular cinema's straightforward certitudes.

In this paper, I focus on a small but significant group of Southeast Asian films that tell rape-revenge stories and conceives these films as a point of entry in conceiving a regional feminist identity. Surveying thirteen films across four decades from Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, I begin by tracing iterations of the rape- revenge genre in Southeast Asia through the years. In laying out the filmography as a corpus, I demonstrate transnational affinities that suggest the presence of a regional cinematic imagination which cuts across, or at least exists alongside, national boundaries. Following this, I explore how powerful women are framed within contemporary Southeast Asian rape-revenge films through substantive close readings of three recent films: Nan Achnas’s Whispering Sands (Indonesia, 2001), Bui Kim Quy’s The Inseminator (Vietnam, 2014), and Mouly Surya’s Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts (Indonesia, 2017). Despite being produced in different moments and separate places, all present similar experiences of rural womanhood that is repeatedly subjected to violence. Interestingly, these depictions go against the grain of global feminist discourse which, since third wave feminist movements of the late 1980s in North America and Western Europe, has cautioned against ratifying the rhetoric of female victimhood. Evidently, Southeast Asian women filmmakers today continue to find currency in the Third World woman figure. Through an analysis of the films’ formal qualities, paying particular attention to experimentation with chronology and expressionist elements, this paper concludes that these films and their filmmakers have— consciously or not— created a new mythic hero. This hero, whom I term ‘She of Outlands’, is envisioned as the Southeast Asian female equivalent of the Western genre’s frontier man, a figure of the past conjured by the present to embody uncertain anticipation of the future. Ultimately, this paper proposes that in reinterpreting the well- worn Third World woman archetype this way, these films effectively remobilize her for new purposes—that is, to imagine a 21st century Southeast Asian female identity that has yet to be explicitly articulated. To that end, this paper speculates that it is possible to not only recuperate the Third World woman into global feminist discourses but also, through her, consider the possibility and the promise of a regional Southeast Asian feminism.

With the huge resurgence in popularity in the 21st century for the rape-revenge genre, what a number of these films have in common is their physical representation of the female avenger as quite literally monstrous. While this preoccupation with the supernatural and demonic does cater for a gore-hungry modern audience, it is also used to further emphasise the horror of the victim’s ordeal. It also links the rape-revenger with figures from folklore, fairy tales and mythology – and in doing so, reiterates the timeless appeal that these films have.

This paper begins with a reading of three contemporary Southeast Asian films by women filmmakers through a genre studies approach. It perceives the treatment of sexual violence and self-wrought justice in Nan Achnas’s Whispering Sands (Indonesia, 2001), Bui Kim Quy’s The Inseminator (Vietnam, 2014), and Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts (Indonesia, 2017) as evidence that sexual difference remains a key site in Southeast Asian women’s fiction. Drawing from keystone works in feminist film studies such as American film theorists Carol Clover’s Men, Women, Chain Saws (1992) Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-feminine (1993), this paper reads the films as Southeast Asia’s take on the rape-revenge drama. By exploring them collectively and chronologically, this paper argues that the films traces evolutions in the region’s feminist movements and identities, even if the filmmakers themselves may not agree with such labelling of their work. More than exemplifying heterosexual binaries inherent in masculine-feminine debates regarding the vengeful woman as femme castratice (Creed) or phallicized (Clover), this paper ends by speculating on Southeast Asian feminism’s possible desire for queer futurity.

This article brings together essays on revenge by philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Emmanuel Levinas with the raperevenge film genre through a detailed reading of French director Coralie Fargeat's first feature film Revenge (2017). It also links the film's presentation of rape and violence to the #MeToo movement and how it played out in France under the #BalanceTonPorc hashtag and suggests that the leading protagonist of Revenge Jen (Mathilda Lutz) may be considered as an example of the twenty-first century version of horror's "Final Girl" first theorized by Carol Clover in the 1980s.

"Steven R. Monroe’s I Spit On Your Grave (2010), a remake of Meir Zarchi’s controversial 1978 film of the same name which gained notoriety through its inclusion on the ‘Video Nasties’ list, was released in early 2011 to a critical response of indifference and disgust. With the exception of a handful of positive reviews, mostly in genre magazines and on horror forums, Monroe’s film attracted criticism which, while often acknowledging it as a marked improvement on the original, conversely and repeatedly drew attention to the perceived ‘pointlessness’ of remaking Zarchi’s film.

This paper aims to address the largely negative response to I Spit On Your Grave (2010) by both analysing its themes in comparison to the 1978 film, and by positioning the remake within its own generic context. The original has been widely discussed in feminist and psychoanalytical film theory (Clover 1992, Creed 1993, Read 2000) due to its rape/revenge narrative and infamous castration scene; yet it remains problematic as a legitimate example of a feminist text, largely due to the highly sexualised depiction of its female protagonist. I will suggest that Monroe’s version both interprets and enhances the perceived feminist themes of Zarchi’s film, resulting in a more credible ‘femme castratrice’ as its central character, who is representative of a group of strong, independent and vengeful female leads in contemporary horror cinema. I will also outline the way in which Monroe’s film can be understood within the context of recent trends in ‘torture porn’, and as part of a cycle of films which feature themes of rape and revenge (Last House on the Left, Iliadis, 2009; The Horseman, Kastrissios, 2008; 7 Days, Grou, 2010; The Tortured, Lieberman, 2010)."

This paper begins with a reading of three contemporary Southeast Asian films, each featuring women in rural landscapes. Despite being produced in different moments and separate places, Nan Achnas’s Whispering Sands (Indonesia, 2001), Bui Kim Quy’s The Inseminator (Vietnam, 2014), and Mouly Surya’s Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts (Indonesia, 2017) all present similar experiences of rural womanhood that is repeatedly subjected to violence. These depictions go against the grain of feminist discourse, which, since third wave feminist movements of the late 1980s in North America and Western Europe, has cautioned against ratifying the rhetoric of female victimhood. Evidently, Southeast Asian women filmmakers today continue to find currency in the Third World woman figure.

Through an analysis of the films’ formal qualities that pays particular attention to the use of expressionist elements, this paper demonstrates how the films actively establish an intimate relationship between the Third World woman and the rural landscape, framing the latter as a necessary part of the former’s eventual will-to-power. In doing so, this paper argues that these films and their filmmakers have— consciously or not— created a new mythic hero. She of outlands is envisioned as the Southeast Asian female equivalent of the Western genre’s frontier man, a figure of the past conjured by the present to embody uncertain anticipation of the future. To that end, this paper proposes that in reinterpreting the well-worn Third World woman archetype this way, these films effectively remobilize her for new purposes— that is, to imagine a 21st century Southeast Asian female identity that has yet to be explicitly articulated. Ultimately, this paper speculates that it is possible to not only recuperate the Third World woman into global feminist discourses but also, through her, consider the possibility and the promise of a regional Southeast Asian feminism.

In contemporary arthouse appropriations of the rape-revenge genre, the conventions, affects, and expectations of this ‘low cultural’ form are manipulated to deepen understanding of the impact of rape on its victims and to challenge the inevitability and righteousness of revenge as a response to this crime. Katalin Varga (Peter Strickland, 2009) and Portret v sumerkakh/Twilight Portrait (Angelina Nikonova, 2011) are exemplars of this shift in the rape-revenge genre, confounding generic expectations and conventions to achieve an ethical positioning in which the spectator is asked to reassess the ethics and effectiveness of revenge. Through this ethical interrogation, the rape-revenge genre tests its own boundaries, its own assumptions, and the spectatorial pleasures it has traditionally offered. The genre’s characteristic affects of shame, rage and disgust are challengingly redeployed to different political and ethical ends. Katalin Varga and Twilight Portrait locate themselves first within, and then against, the rape-revenge genre, and in so doing, offer reconsiderations of the affective experience of rape victimization and the contrasting responses of revenge and restorative justice while also pointing to the radical potential of the contemporary genre.

Keynote Address.
Revenge has been a consistent theme in Australian genre cinema, from the heyday of the Ozploitation boom in the 1970s to horror films made today. Most notably, the tradition of eco-horror, where the rampaging forces of nature take humans to task for their mistreatment of the land, still continues, in films such as Rogue (Greg McLean, 2007), The Reef (Andrew Traucki, 2010), Primal (Josh Reed, 2010), Boar (Chris Sun, 2017) and the remake of Long Weekend (Jamie Blanks, 2008).

While the depiction of the Outback as a place of danger and violence still persists, a growing number of films also depict the urban and suburban environment as a similarly unwelcoming and unsettling space. The overarching message of Australian horror is that no matter how much you try to run away from or bury the past, it will always catch up to you. Past crimes and traumas are revisited in the form of ghostly visitations in Lake Mungo (Joel Anderson, 2008), The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014), Johnny Ghost (Donna McRae, 2011), Boys in the Trees (Nicholas Verso, 2016) and Lost Gully Road (Donna McRae, 2017), which also highlights the growing number of Australian women filmmakers working in the horror genre. The alarming statistics surrounding the prevalence of domestic violence and violence against women, part of a long history of sexism and inequality, are at the core of several films where stereotypes of Australian masculinity are questioned and deconstructed, as in Storm Warning (Jamie Blanks, 2007), The Horseman (Steven Katrissios, 2008) and Killing Ground (Damien Power, 2016), as well as in films that dramatise the crimes of real-life serial killers, such as Wolf Creek (Greg McLean, 2005), The Snowtown Murders (Justin Kurzel, 2011), and Hounds of Love (Ben Young, 2017).

In this paper I will survey the current boom in Australian horror, and argue that the prevalence of revenge as a force that is pervasive and inevitable is inextricably tied to Australia’s colonial history, which is revealed to be a history of invasion and exploitation. These contemporary horror films carry a subversive streak, wherein those dark aspects of Australian history and identity – the genocide, xenophobia, environmental destruction, mass animal extinction, and the toxic celebration of a misogynistic form of ‘mateship’ – can be exposed and critiqued.

Das rekurrierende filmische Motiv der sexuellen Gewalt gegen Männer lässt sich bis in die 1930er Jahre zurückverfolgen und gehört heute beispielsweise zum erwarteten Repertoire einer jeden zeitgenössischen Gefängnis-Narration. Auf den ersten Blick sehr ungewöhnlich erscheint jedoch das wiederholte Auftauchen des Motivs im Kontext der zeitgenössischen Filmkomödie, welcher der Vortrag seine Aufmerksamkeit widmet. Nach dem Versuch einer Historisierung und gleichzeitiger Konturierung dieses noch unstrukturierten Forschungsfeldes unter Bezugnahme auf die parallele Entwicklung der Rape-Revenge-Struktur soll ausgehend von Wedding Crashers (David Dobkin, USA 2005) und  Horrible Bosses (Seth Gordon, USA 2011) dargestellt werden, wie diese innerhalb der Rahmung einer um männliche Protagonisten zentrierten black comedy zur Funktion gebracht wird. Anhand weiterer Beispiele soll die Pervasivität des Motivs aufgezeigt werden, das in all seiner scheinbaren Variation unterschiedlicher Repräsentationsweisen stets der Persistenz zentraler, traditioneller patriarchaler Mythen dient.