Oh, and before I forget, in case someone comes across this who actually enjoys or loves the movie Tamara (2005), or got something positive out of it, that's not bad or invalid or something one should feel guilty of. There is enough ambiguity here that I can imagine experiences of this movie that aren't horrible, especially for a teen girl who might have watched it in 2005.

So place all of the above analysis in frame of this being my personal map of the #FemRevenge genre and how I read these films. There are some things in all of these movies that are probably just straightforwardly problematic (e.g. gayness as punishment, rural and working class people as threat to the urban middle class), but that doesn't mean one is awful for enjoying or taking something important from movies like these.

So, the first two films of this #FemRevenge horror hyperfocus movie marathon really map out a contrast of different possibilities in the genre.

"I Spit On Your Grave" (1978) primarily places us in the gaze of the survivor, it portrays SA as violent and horrible, and the revenge is not equated to the original violence, but is a method for catharsis and restoration on the part of the survivor.

"Tamara" places us mostly in the gaze of the perpetrators, it plays the potential statutory rape of a child like she is an aggressor and rival, the violence done to her is minimized, and the violence she does is equated to the violence done to her. The only people restored in the end are those that the film deems "innocent" and representing status quo norms more or less.

So, when it feels helpful going forward, I'll probably use these two as guideposts or cardinal directions for discussing how movies handle key areas in the Fem Revenge genre, since they map the territory so well.

#FemRevenge #FemRevengeFlick #ISpitOnYourGrave #TamaraMovie

A common feature of #FemRevenge that’s worth mapping is the structure of the plot and character development.

In early horror and thriller cinema through the period of the Hayes’ Code, the basic structure of the story was: 1) protagonist starts in the familiar, safe, and ordinary place and life often embodying the status quo of a society; 2) they venture out to some unfamiliar, foreign, and dangerous place, and the monstrosity is often violating the norms of the status quo; 3) the monster is vanquished and the protagonists return to the familiar and safe as the status quo is restored.

Think of the simpler versions of the Dracula story: usually the protagonist starts in familiar and safe England, ventures out to that foreign and dangerous Transylvania where the queer-coded and sinful monstrosity resides, and in the end, the monstrosity is defeated as safety and civilization are restored to the survivors back in England.

This changed with new horror cinema, like Night of the Living Dead and Rosemary’s Baby in the 60s and 70s. In these stories, our protagonists often start in the familiar and safe, but the danger itself resides in the familiar and safe, and invades their lives. And in the end, frequently, safety and the status quo is not restored, but instead, if anyone does survive, they and their world are forever changed.

In fem revenge, we often see a pattern that mixes both the old and new horror plot beats. A woman is living her life and has a sense of security, she goes somewhere unfamiliar, the danger is found there, but the source will often represent the status quo and be familiar to the audience to some degree. And finally, the woman will overcome the danger to restore her sense of safety, though she has likely been permanently changed by the experience and the status quo is not restored.

I want to come back around to something I didn’t clarify earlier: what am I talking about when I talk about “fem revenge” as a genre?

This isn’t how many of these movies are often described, and marks out a different but heavily overlapping territory with other genres. The core of this is simple: a person is wronged and carries out violent revenge upon the perpetrators. Importantly, I am only talking about movies where the protagonist is either a woman, femme, transfem, or otherwise fem-adjacent person. Additionally, the wrong done can be of almost any kind, but usually involves some form of violence.

For this reason, it heavily overlaps with the rape-revenge genre, though there can be rape-revenge movies that are not fem revenge, if the survivor who takes vengeance is a man or masc person. Additionally, fem revenge can include revenging other wrongs than SA, such as murder or false imprisonment. All of this also means most of these will fall under horror or thriller conventions and tropes, but it is not a necessary criteria, as there are action movies that fit this too.

The key to all this is that people who are seen as belonging to a vulnerable gender are harmed and then claim their own power to take it into their own hands to see accountability dealt out to their perpetrators through violent consequences. These are the kinds of movies I am talking about with #FemRevenge

Through out Ebert's review of the movie, he often emphasizes his sense of disgust, by talking about how the audience that enjoys the film are being invited to be "vicarious rapists." He talks a lot about how men in the audience reacted. And he fails to process and register the development of Jennifer.

This was not my experience of watching the film at all. Okay, to give Ebert some grace, if I first saw the film in an audience where I heard men celebrating the rape, my experience might be so soured that I couldn't see beyond it either. But the thing is, I *identified* with Jennifer and felt like I knew her within the first 20 minutes of the film. I never once felt like I was being asked to identify with the rapists, and always felt like I was watching through the survivor's eyes.

And when I look at random reviews of the film that I find on reddit and elsewhere, I see many people with masculine-coded usernames talking about the movie being awful and disgusting....is it just me or might their disgust come from their own discomfort at identifying too closely with the men who commit sexual assault and the experience of being forced to confront that?

I'm not saying these men all are secretly desiring to be rapists, but rather, the men that commit these acts are depicted as normal, straight, white men. One is a breadwinner and family man, with wife and children. In another film, maybe they would be protagonists. But they are not in this film, they are the monsters. And their monstrosity is merely an extension of a toxic masculinity that soooo many men either already embody or at least tolerate in their friends and acquaintances. This movie forces you to look on the violence these behaviors, beliefs, and complicity are capable of enabling.

And I think this an important compass to the whole genre of #FemRevenge (and Rape-Revenge films): who does the movie ask us to identify with, who do we actually identify with a audience members, and what is it saying to the two potential audiences, those that identify with the survivor, and those that have the capacity to identify with the perpetrators.

#FemRevengeFlick #ISpitOnYourGrave

All in all, I think one of the fulcrums of a person's reaction to "I Spit On Your Grave" (1978), and the genre as a whole, is a question of who one is identifying with and whose eyes one is vicariously experiencing the story through.

I find Roger Ebert's review of the movie actually quite interesting on this (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/i-spit-on-your-grave-1980). I often find Ebert misses the mark in a huge way on horror films, but this one is interesting in a lot of ways.

One of the things he notes is how different members of the audience reacted. He described how many middle-aged men were vocally celebrating the depiction of SA in a way that was disturbing (fair, that's creepy as fuck), and how this switched when Jennifer goes on her revenge spree, with a woman in the audience celebrating and cheering her on (which Ebert is actually curious about, to his credit).

Ebert talks about leaving the film feeling "unclean, ashamed, and depressed." He earlier describes the heroin as "simply a girl" with no character development, which is weird because we learn she is writer from NYC, we see her working hard and also taking pleasure in her peaceful breaks, and we find out she is a religious Catholic when she visits a church to ask for forgiveness for the revenge she plans to carry out. We also see development in her attitudes towards violence, as she first encounters a gun in a drawer in the cabin, quickly closing the drawer in discomfort towards the idea of violence it implies, and later see her pick up the gun when her attitude towards violence develops, justifiably so.

Part of Ebert's discomfort seems to come from the lack of an explicit editorial voice clearly passing judgment on these things, since we are often presented these scenes without dialogue or exposition. He is not a fan of ambiguity in film, or relying primarily on show don't tell.

But there's more to it than that in my opinion...

#FemRevenge #FemRevengeFlick #ISpitOnYourGrave