I Spit on Your Grave: The Original, Remake Revisited & Series Legacy

I Spit on Your Grave: The Original, Remake Revisited & Series Legacy

 

All the way back in my first October horror movie marathon in 2014, I reviewed a handful of more modern horror remakes, including I Spit on Your Grave. I had rented it from the video store, watched it not really knowing what I was in for, and felt downright bad for having watched it. In more recent times, I was perusing a pawn shop for used DVDs and came across the 1978 version. I wondered if it had any more merit than the remake (not thinking it could have any less), so to spice up this year’s remake-a-thon, I’m going to not only review the original, but make some comparisons between both versions, and cover some of the films that followed the remake, because I am surprised and a little disturbed that there were multiple follow-ups beyond what I had first seen.

The genesis of what is otherwise known as Day of the Woman was to show a woman senselessly raped by a bunch of guys, only for them to find out they’ve chosen the wrong woman, because she then proceeds to get revenge and kill all of them in horribly violent ways. When writer/director Meir Zarchi cast Camille Keaton in the lead role as Jennifer Hills, he said she was “brave” for taking it on. I guess that’s one word for it. Among the most shocking, controversial, and difficult aspects of the film is how much of the runtime you see her in various states of nakedness. Usually in a horror movie, nudity is used as part of the appeal, separate from the gore and violence and scares, but here, they’re intertwined. A lot of the time she is just fully nude, and this is one of the biggest reasons the movie was branded as exploitative and uncomfortable and problematic when it first came out, but the reason its reputation hasn’t diminished all these decades later is because of how gratuitous the entire rape is.

Going into it, one of the reasons I didn’t think the original would be as disturbing as the remake is because I had finally seen the original The Last House on the Left: the low budget rape-and-revenge film that put Wes Craven and Sean S. Cunningham on the map. Not to get on too much of a tangent, but it seems to me that I Spit on Your Grave owes a great deal to the success of Last House on the Left, and while I don’t really like that film for similar reasons, it at least had a bit more going on with its plot and characters, given it was based on Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (1960). In I Spit on Your Grave, the scariest thing about it, to me, was how much the rapists seem like regular guys. When they aren’t defiling Jennifer, or even when one of them is and the others are just sitting around watching or waiting for their turn, it’s all so casual. They’re so nonchalant that it makes you think these could be a bunch of guys you might pass on the street or see in a diner and not even give them a second glance, they blend into the scenery so well.

Compared to the 2010 remake, the original is much grimier, grainier, and more amateur-looking, but it’s also more languid and oddly goofy at times. When the guys first decide to start harassing her, they buzz by her canoe in their motorboat over and over, and as the harassment escalates it becomes gruelling, then even tedious. There is one really effective jump scare—you think it might finally be over, but not even close—and after they’re finally finished with her, the tone of her revenge-seeking in the later half of the movie becomes less scary. She uses her own body to lure them in one at a time, even letting them have sex with her, before killing them, which I found highly questionable. In the remake, there is a much stronger sense of urgency with Jennifer exacting revenge, and it feels not only more traditionally horrific (in line with the torture porn trend started by similarly themed trash like the Saw sequels and The Human Centipede) but it also feels consistent with the horror of the rape and her more mysterious departure from the rapists. I suppose in this sense the remake is better than the original, but with the core concepts being the same, both are still contemptable by their very nature, and there’s no satisfying conclusion in either version.

The ending of the original is unintentionally silly, with Jennifer recreating the boating assault that happened to her with the final guy left alive, then killing him with the motor’s prop and speeding away as the credits roll. The ending of the remake leaves Jennifer just sitting there in the wake of her final over-the-top kill, but then, the remake spawned sequels. The original creator, Meir Zarchi, had a script that followed his original film written and ready to go, but this was the 2010s, remember, so it was all about remakes. I Spit on Your Grave probably seemed a rather unlikely candidate for the remake treatment at the time, given the original’s nasty reputation, but Zarchi executive-produced the retelling, and ultimately, if you are interested in either of these movies, I would say the remake is more watchable. The technical aspects are all higher quality, including the cinematography (though it’s quite clean and glossy, as many other remakes were from the same era), it fixes some of the logic issues, and amps up the revenge portion.

Even though the remake, generally, is regarded as the better version, it didn’t make any money when it was first released, but it must have recouped enough on home video because the first sequel, I Spit on Your Grave 2, came out in 2013, and another one, I Spit on Your Grave III: Vengeance Is Mine, came out two years later. The first sequel featured a different protagonist getting raped and took the concept internationally, and the third film brought back Jennifer, but deviated from the rape catalyst for something a little different, though still revenge fuelled. Finally, Zarchi got to make his sequel to the original, I Spit on Your Grave: Déjà Vu, which came out in 2019, and miraculously, reunited him with Camille Keaton, who reprised her role as the original Jennifer—miraculous because the two of them got married after making the 1978 film (an ick factor I just can’t shake) then later divorced. I’ve heard some good things about the remake’s sequels, but the long-in-production legacy sequel was absolutely slammed beyond any slamming the preceding Grave’s had taken. I have not watched any of these ones, and do not plan to.

I think I’ll be sending my DVD of I Spit on Your Grave back to the pawn shop. I just don’t see the value in making a movie like this or ever watching it a subsequent time. To me, the idea for it was just about trying to find punishments that fit one of the worst crimes that could be committed, but there isn’t a fitting punishment, and I don’t really find it scary, just an exploitative excuse to show rape and revenge murders with very little else going for it. Some interpret the concept differently and think it has important themes and a moral dilemma at its core, but I don’t see it, I just see it as overly simplistic and controversial for the sake of controversy. It’s not worth putting on at a Halloween party to shock your friends or start an ethical debate, nor worth getting impaired and watching it for a deranged experience. It simply lacks worth. I could see the original potentially intriguing someone interested in independent horror movies of the 1970s, and I wouldn’t say it's not worth checking out on those grounds, but for the general horror fan, skip it. Normally I like to review movies that I can recommend on some level, but in addition to spicing up this year’s marathon, this also serves as a cautionary message to anyone curious about this vile series of films.