Man and nature are both all-consuming in Meir Zarchi’s landmark horror film I Spit on Your Grave, effortlessly enveloping attractive young novelist Jennifer Hills (Camille Keaton) as she drives from New York City into the Connecticut countryside to work on her first novel. The film’s titles fill the frame in big red block letters and the lack of music or sound in general immediately becomes a striking aesthetic choice. Large groves of thick trees mark both sides of the road, eventually guiding Jennifer to a dilapidated gas station with a single white shack as an office. Two man-children, the shirtless Stanley (Anthony Nichols) and the suspender-wearing Andy (Gunter Kleemann), gleefully play with a switchblade, while suave mechanic Johnny (Eron Tabor) idly chats Jennifer up before she drives away into the distance. The interaction is strange but unthreatening, and Jennifer’s casual and hopeful demeanor is expressed when she immediately disrobes for a swim upon reaching her cabin in the woods.
On the surface, isolation equals safety in I Spit on Your Grave, and Jennifer quickly settles into her routine walking through the dense, verdant forest surrounding her isolated cottage, lounging on the calm lake in a red canoe, and soaking up the sun in her hammock. But the sporadic use of sound effects begins to encase her world in dread, and what first seems like random overlapping noises quickly develops into menacing patterns. The audible motifs of a motorboat engine and a harmonica quickly take the place of the traditional horror-film theme music, cueing the human monsters that are circling Jennifer’s cabin from beyond the frame. Jennifer has no idea of the impending danger slowly closing in on her, and I Spit on Your Grave turns the languishing peace of nature into a prolonged arena of terror.
The prolonged rape sequence that takes up more than 30 minutes of I Spit on Your Grave’s runtime is devastating not only for its brutality, but also for its ghostly matter-of-factness. A handicapped grocery delivery boy named Matthew (Richard Pace) joins the trio from the gas station, and as the men emerge from the woods, the moment is striking for its lack of editorial buildup. Even worse, the sequence is broken up into three stages to signify both the duration and crippling trajectory of the act. The inference of possible escape during the moments that segue into these scenes becomes the film’s most diabolical trick. Each segment, from the initial assault by Johnny right out in the open, to the protracted set piece within the dimly lit forest, then finally in Jennifer’s cabin at night, takes on a unique type of visual repulsion, and the affects still make an impact more than 40 years after the film’s release.
Throughout this shocking and at times near-silent middle stretch of I Spit on Your Grave, Zarchi reduces everything to the elemental. As Jennifer’s white skin becomes caked in mud, sweat, and blood, we very much sense a violent shift in her spirit—an overall transformation of ideology. After Jennifer recovers from her attack, allowed to live only because Matthew is unable to kill her (finalizing a trend of impotence), she stages a calculated show of retribution that’s never represented in narrative terms. The famous torture that defines the film’s manifesto on male aggression (including the infamous bathtub castration) springs forth from an elemental part of Jennifer’s core being, much like the deviancy of the rapists.
One can’t mistake I Spit in Your Grave for anything other than a raging political text. “I don’t like a woman giving me orders,” Johnny arrogantly says right before his castration. Jennifer can only smile, reveling in the pain she’s about to unleash. Her malicious focus is so clear in the final moments that there’s no need for narrative closure, and Zarchi simply cuts to black after her final lethal blow, fittingly wielded aboard the motorboat that earlier evoked her rapists’ omniscient power. Engulfed in nature and violence, she forcefully reclaims her individualism, taking away power from the good ‘ol boys and making it her own. Her smile, captured in a rare close-up, is a deafening exclamation point that’s difficult to forget.
Image/Sound
The new 4K scan of the film’s original camera negative walks circles around the already impressive transfer we got from Anchor Bay back in 2011. The image is gorgeously film-like, skin tones are rich, and colors, especially reds, pop with a disturbing intensity. The nighttime scenes remain a bit muddy, but that can be chalked up to the film’s low-budget origins. As for the film’s soundtrack, it has never been a workhorse, but key dialogue is more comprehensible and less pitchy here than it is on prior home-video releases.
Extras
Most of the goodies on Ronin Flix’s three-disc collector’s edition have been ported over from prior releases of the film, including the two commentary tracks on the main disc, one from director Meir Zarchi, who touches on everything from the film’s themes to its on-location photography, and the other from cult-film afficionado Joe Bob Briggs, who’s love for I Spit on Your Grave is as undeniable as his flippancy toward feminist readings of the cult classic. The only new extra on this disc is a location featurette hosted by former Fangoria editor-in-chief Michael Gingold, masked in New York and unmasked in remote Connecticut where social distancing is easier, that offers a rather unilluminating glimpse of what the film’s locations look like now. In short, more or less the same. The second disc includes Zarchi’s 2018 film I Spit on Your Grave Déjà vu and an assortment of extras, including a new commentary from Briggs, and the third includes Terry Zarchi’s 2019 documentary Growing Up with I Spit on Your Grave and a few odds and ends, most notably a series of deleted scenes. Gingold also provides very well-researched liner notes in a sturdily mounted book that comes with the set.
Overall
Every bit as disturbing and dubious today as it was way back in 1978, I Spit on Your Grave gets what may be its definitive home-video release from Ronin Flix.
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