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One Sunday morning in October, 1974, a teenaged girl left her parents home in Jamaica Hills, New York, and headed for her boyfriend's place on the other side of town. She wanted to get there quickly, since it was overcast and starting to rain, so she cut through Goose Pond Park, a small children's play area next to the woods. She had gone through this park on the way to her boyfriend's place many times before and nothing out of the ordinary had ever happened, but today would be different. Two thugs jumped her, dragged her into the woods and proceeded to beat, rape and sodomize her for hours. One of the rapists pulled out a knife and was about to cut her throat, but the girl convinced him not to do it because he had knocked her glasses off her face, and since she was very near-sighted, she couldn't identify either of them. The men didn't kill her, but instead broke her jaw with a punch and ran away. Naked, filthy, brutalized and beaten almost to unconsciousness, the girl managed to get up and staggered to the nearest road hoping to find any kind of help.

Help came in the form of Meir Zarchi and Alex Pfau, two men out for a casual Sunday drive with Zarchi's 8-year-old daughter Tammy. Pfau noticed the naked body of a young girl by the side of the road and pulled over; Zarchi got out and carried the traumatized victim back to the car. She managed to explain that she had been raped and beaten. Meir and Alex drove back to the Zarchi residence, left Tammy with her mother, and went out to get some help for the young woman.

The good Samaritans had obviously made a mistake bringing the victim to the authorities (it is not known if the rapists were ever apprehended and punished for their heinous crimes), but in this harrowing incident, Meir Zarchi found the inspiration to do someting that would change his life. A motion picture sound and film editor, he had longed harboured the hope to make a movie of his own and he had finally found his subject. He would make a rape-revenge film, a movie in which a brutally violated woman would take the law into her own hands and punish those who had raped and beaten her. Cinema was about to get one of the most controversial, despised, notorious, yet misunderstood motion pictures in its history: I Spit on Your Grave.

The screenplay was written mostly underground--on the subway as Zarchi commuted to and from his film editing job in downtown New York City. In all, it took four months to complete the script. (Upon seeing the finished film, several critics sarcastically suggested the story was probably written in one afternoon in a single sitting.) Titles such as No Time for Pranksters, The Housatonic Revenge, No Love on the River and The Rape and Revenge of Jennifer Hills were considered before Zarchi settled on Day of the Woman.

Next came casting. Zarchi put out a bunch of ads in several film magazines and posted numerous bills all over Times Square. Over four thousand hopefuls auditioned for the five major roles: Matthew, the retarded, nerdy, would-be rapist was played by Richard Pace while the macho, boorish rapists Johnny, Andy and Stanley would be played by Eron Tabor, Gunter Kleemann and Anthony Nichols. None had any previous work acting in feature films (nor would they have much in the future). For his protagonist, writer and rape victim Jennifer Hills, Zarchi settled on Camille Keaton, Buster Keaton's grand-niece, a native of Arkansas who had been raised in Atlanta, Georgia and had made several films in Europe, most notably Massimo Dallamano's What Have You Done to Solange? in 1972.

"The story of I Spit on Your Grave is told with moronic simplicity," critic Roger Ebert wrote upon viewing the finished product when it was released years later. "A girl goes for a vacation in the woods. She sunbathes by a river. Two men speed by in a powerboat. They harass her. Later, they tow her boat to a rendezvous with two of their buddies. They strip the girl, beat her, and rape her. She escapes into the woods. They find her, beat her, and rape her again. She crawls home. They are already there, beat her some more and rape her again. Two weeks later, somewhat recovered, the girl lures one of the men out to her house, pretends to seduce him, and hangs him. She lures out another man and castrates him, leaving him to bleed to death in a bathtub. She kills the third man with an ax and disembowels the fourth with an outboard engine. End of movie."

Some critics facetiously suggested that the cast and crew of the film must have lived like animals during the shoot, sleeping outside, getting drunk and having wild, violent orgies and killing animals and eating them raw for food. In fact, the shooting went quite smoothly for the inexperienced cast and crew. Zarchi used no storyboards, preferring to shoot the film from every possible angle and deciding which to use for the movie during the arduous editing stage. In all, over fourteen hours of film were shot, putting great stress on the cast. Repeated takes of the harrowing, protracted rape scenes eventually caused Camille Keaton to have a breakdown in her trailer. While shooting the rape on the rock sequence, one electrician said "I'm sorry, I can't help it. This is just too much for me," and walked off the set. Haviv turned to Zarchi and whispered, "Congratulations--the scene works!"

Aside from this, the only real problem the production encountered was with the church sequence, in which Jenny asks divine forgiveness just before she goes out to kill those who raped her. The Reverend who ran the church was initially very eager to let Zarchi shoot there (interestingly, the priest playing the organ is Meir Zarchi himself), but after the scenes were shot, a former worker on the film, who had been fired from the shoot, called the priest and told him that Zarchi was shooting a porno film. The minister asked for all the footage shot in his church to be returned. The director calmly told the minister the entire plot of the film and explained that his movie had "Biblical themes: crime and punishment, man's inhumanity to man, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." The Reverend understood fully and even gave Meir Zarchi's film his blessing.

Zarchi spent more than eight months editing the fourteen hours of film down into a feature-length movie. In what would turn out to be one of the most controversial elements of the project, he chose no original score for the soundtrack. Although Zarchi listened to lots of music, he decided nothing was appropriate for his movie, so all background sound would be natural: wind, water, birds, animals.

The completed film, still entitled Day of the Woman, was sent to every major and independent movie distributor in America--and they all rejected it. Since Zarchi had financed the film through deferred credit, he would have to sell the movie to someone pretty soon, or else it would bankrupt him. Somehow Zarchi managed to enter the film into the 1978 Cannes Film Festival, where it received its first public screening. Walls, car windshields, telephone poles and billboards were plastered with Zarchi's ads for the film and despite filling the theatre to capacity and getting several distributors potentially interested, nothing materialized from the Cannes screening.

Nobody saw Day of the Woman in public again until December, 1979, at the Miami Film Festival. Once again, Zarchi posted flyers and advertisements for his film everywhere, hoping desperately that someone would get interested--and someone did: The Jerry Gross Organization. A representative of that independent, unorthodox film distributor--which would also give America Lucio Fulci's Zombie--requested a meeting with Zarchi and a deal was made in 1980. The film would be released all over North America in July of that year on one condition: that the director relinquish the rights to the title. By now so broke that he would welcome any kind of distribution deal, Zarchi agreed. Day of the Woman was released as I Spit on Your Grave, one of the most notorious titles of all time (even Zarchi says he hates it).

The controversy began immediately. "I Spit on Your Grave is a vile bag of garbage that is so sick, reprehensible and contemptible I can't believe it played in respectable theatres. But it did. Watching it was one of the most depressing experiences of my life," spat the film's fiercest and most influential critic, Roger Ebert. He and the late Gene Siskel (who called I Spit on Your Grave the worst film he had seen in his eleven years of reviewing movies) embarked on a campaign to get the film pulled from distribution and banned outright, condemning it to high heaven on radio, television, in print, even in person--they went to theatres and demanded that the film be boycotted, urging moviegoers to do the same. I Spit on Your Grave was pulled after a week, and although the film's theatrical run was over, its legenday status had just begun.

Siskel and Ebert's attacks turned out to be the best possible promotion for the film (Zarchi is actually quite grateful to Ebert for publicizing his movie). Upon its 1981 video release, I Spit on Your Grave stayed on Billboard's Top 40 list for fourteen consecutive weeks, at one time out-selling Robert Redford's Oscar-winning Ordinary People.

The film got another dose of controversy in 1984, when it was scathingly attacked in Britain during the infamous "Video Nasty" scare. Dozens of gory, violent horror films from the 70s and early 80s were banned on video in England--it was declared illegal to buy, sell, or own any of the "blacklisted" films. Guess which movie stood at the very top of the list?

I Spit on Your Grave remains banned in several countries to this day, but it has enjoyed immortal cult status in America, where it has undergone no less than six video releases in the past 20 years--the most recent being Elite Entertainment's 2002 Millennium Edition DVD. While the sound and image quality is just as good as Anchor Bay's 1999 rerelease, this disc features some excellent extras: besides trailers, excerpts from reviews and profiles of the director and cast, we get a priceless audio commentary from Meir Zarchi himself--his first statement to the public since a 1984 interview which appeared in Fangoria #54. Speaking in a cold, crisp, yet compelling central- or eastern-European accent, Zarchi talks about almost every facet of the making of the film (most of the information related at the start of this review came from Zarchi's commentary). Zarchi's words come out sounding very deliberate and controlled--he's either reading from prepared notes or reciting carefully-memorized lines--and as a result, his commentary doesn't have any of the humour or spontaneity we hear in other director commentaries, but his words are invaluable nontheless.

Oddly enough, the second commentary is much more humourous and spontaneous, but not as engaging. We get to hear cult film guru Joe Bob Briggs talk about the film in his hilarious Texas accent, but he gossips more than he informs, with a lot of his jokes falling flat: "Y'see that closeup of her! Looks like a Clairol commercial, dunnit?". I suppose Elite Entertainment wanted to contrast Meir Zarchi's cold, detached commentary with a funny, irreverent one, and although I did laugh a lot at his lines ("There's something about a woman in a string bikini gassing an outboard on the Housatonic with an axe in her hand that says to me: 'You've come a long way, baby!' Girl power rules!"), I wasn't as satisfied. (Believe it or not, Elite Entertainment actually approached Roger Ebert about recording a commentary for this disc. It made sense, since Ebert's scathing words have done more to promote this film than anything else. Not surprisingly, he refused. Being a big fan of Roger Ebert myself, I would've loved to have heard him pan this film all over again, but, sadly, it wasn't meant to be.)

My own thoughts on this controversial cult classic? Like everyone who watches it, I am most affected by this film's relentlessly stark style. Like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Salo: The 120 Days of Sodom and Men Behind the Sun, this movie presents its inhumanities with an unforgettably cold, unflinching stare, making the inhumanities feel all the more repulsive. By lingering so long over the horrific events, the film brutally hammers home its point of how awful and horrendous sexual assault is for the victim. Zarchi refuses to gloss over the protracted rape and murder scenes with any distancing effects (such as fancy photography, editing, or music), and these scenes are all the more disturbing and disquieting--and powerful.

As David Kerekes and David Slater state in See No Evil: "I Spit on Your Grave is very anti-cinema. The camera often comes to a complete standstill, looking into shots for an uncomfortably long time without cutaways. Without a doubt, the primitive, disturbing quality of the film is a premeditated effort on the part of the film maker." (pg. 191)

The absence of background music, intended to make the film feel more brutally real, is only partially successful, in my opinion. The rape and murder sequences couldn't have been realized in a more disturbing manner thanks to the sound of nothing but screams, but for other sequences (such as Jennifer's stalking of the rapists before she lures each man to his demise) the silence results in tedium, not tension, and the film really could have been augmented by some kind of music.

For a film with so much savage sexual violence, the cast performs remarkably well. Camille Keaton is appealing in the early scenes while her many, many difficult scenes of rape and beatings--often performed while totally naked--required a lot of courage and she definitely has it. (The sequence in which she's raped on the rock is still, for me, the most brutal rape scene ever put to film--even worse than the notorious, nine-minute-long, uncut scene of Monica Bellucci getting sodomised in a subway tunnell in Gaspar Noe's Irreversible. Keaton's ear-shattering screams and Kleemann's animalistic howls make the scene feel much more painful and harrowing.) Scenes of Jenny sobbing and shaking as she recovers from the rapes are heart-wrenching; it is only in the final act of the film, as she becomes almost catatonic as she stalks and kills the rapists, does her performance disappoint. I would have preferred to see her torture and kill the men with the same wild, animalistic frenzy that they used on her. By becoming so detached and poker-faced, Jenny ends up distancing the viewer.

Richard Pace's portrayal of Matthew, the town retard, feels ridiculously overdone, so exaggerated it seems condescending and eliminates the credibility of his role. However, Eron Tabor, Anthony Nichols and Gunter Kleemann make their characters believably boorish, so loutish, ignorant and misogynistic that not only do we truly believe that they would brutally beat and rape a woman, but we also feel we would not be compelled to imitate their barbaric behaviour, since they're so repulsive. In this respect, I believe I Spit on Your Grave is definitely against rape. As Phil Hardy writes in Horror: The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: "Here, the men are so grossly unattractive and the rapes so harrowing, long-drawn-out and starkly presented that it is hard to imagine most male spectators identifying with the perpetrators." (pg. 350) However, I have problems with their performances in the latter part of the film, particularly during their death scenes, which come across more unintentionally funny than shocking or disturbing. Gunter Kleemann, hopping up and down on the ground as Camille pilots the motorboat around the river, looks like something out of a bad cartoon, while his death--getting an axe in the back--looks so obviously phony that it has hardly any impact at all. Similarly, Anthony Nichols' moronic screams ("Help me! I don't wanna die! Please, I don't wanna die!") as he splashes around in the river after Camille has pushed him out of the motorboat, is exaggerated to the point that the film's credibility is lost. Only Eron Tabor's castration in the bathtub--which still has the power to make viewers squirm--has any real impact, though it should have taken him more than a few seconds to realize that he has lost his dick.

Though its drive and power starts to fade in its third act, I Spit on Your Grave remains an undeniably powerful film that leaves an indelible mark on anyone who watches it. Few films have explored the horrific acts of rape and murder with such a stark, cold glare, and for that reason alone, Meir Zarchi should be commended. Not quite a masterpiece of cinema, but not a piece of worthless trash either. However, it's still a tough film for average viewers to watch and should only be seen by serious horror movie buffs with really warped sensibilities. (As a film student at York University, I took a cinema theory course called "Genre Study: Horror" and the professor screened I Spit on Your Grave. I had already seen the film many times, so I knew what to expect, but a good quarter of the students had to leave the classroom. Some even threw up. Never in my life did I expect to see I Spit on Your Grave in film school.)

One last word: In their critique of this movie in See No Evil, Kerekes and Slater profess skepticism at Zarchi's statement that this film is based on an actual incident in the director's life. "Zarchi's recollections of the true life events that took place in 1974 bear a similarity to a TV movie of that same year called A Case of Rape. Directed by Boris Sagal, it told the story of a young woman who goes to the police after being raped, which only leads to red tape, further humiliation, skepticism and the ordeal of a court case." (pg. 190) Despite the striking similarities between that film and Zarchi's account of the events that inspired his movie, I believe Zarchi's words to be true, because in his audio commentary he states that a few days after the rape victim was admitted to the hospital, he got a call from a police officer who had been assigned to the case; she told Zarchi that the victim's father wanted his name and address in order to send him some money in gratitude for helping his daughter. Zarchi politely refused the offer of money, but gave his address anyway and a few days later the good Samaritan received a letter:

My wife and myself would like to express our heartfelt thanks for the kindest consideration that you have given to our daughter after she was so viciously attacked by those two who must have come down from the trees. Thank God that our daughter is coming along nicely. The swelling subsided and she can now eat. The police have a number of suspects but have not, as yet, made any arrests. Again, our deepest thanks.