Greatest Film Scenes
and Moments



I Spit On Your Grave (1978)

 



Written by Tim Dirks

Title Screen
Movie Title/Year and Scene Descriptions
Screenshots

I Spit on Your Grave (1978) (aka Day of the Woman)

In producer/director/writer Meir Zarchi's gruesomely-told and widely vilified exploitation story, a notorious rape/vigilante revenge splatter-horror ('nastie') film:

  • the character of NYC socialite/writer Jennifer Hills (Camille Keaton, grand-niece of the famous comedian Buster Keaton) who rented a remote and woodsy summer riverside dwelling in Connecticut, and was spied upon; when she first arrived at the house, she went skinny-dippin
  • she made the acquaintance of four locals, including three aimless, misogynistic and sex-obsessed guys she had first met at a gas station (Eron Tabor as gas station manager Johnny, and his two unemployed friends Anthony Nichols as Stanley, and Gunter Kleeman as harmonica-playing Andy), and a fourth bespectacled, mentally-slow supermarket delivery man (Richard Pace as Matthew Lucas) who brought Jennifer an order of groceries
Johnny Stillman
Matthew Lucas
Andy Chirensky
Stanley Woods
  • there were two entirely painful-to-watch rape sequences that were graphic and lengthy (30 minutes in a 100 minute film!), one in the muddy forest, and another in her house
  • one day while she was sunning herself in a canoe on the river, Stanley and Andy circled her in their motorboat, and towed her canoe to shore where they harrassed her and chased her through a muddy forest. They were met by the other two men - the excuse to hassle her was to aid Matthew in losing his virginity to her ("The broad's all yours. Come on....We got her for you"). So they stripped her of her bathing suit and offered her up, but when Matthew chickened out ("I can't do it now, not now!"), Johnny raped her in a meadow in degrading fashion. She vainly struggled against them as she was held down and violated.
Repeated Rapes and Threatened Murder: In Muddy Forest

She crawled away and ran off, only to be tracked down again - and then brutally and anally raped by Andy while restrained over a large boulder - and letting out a horrendous scream! Her experience was particularly heinous, including both a vaginal and anal rape in the outdoors.

Repeated Rapes and Threatened Murder: In House
Matthew's Attempted Rape
Bottle Rape by Stanley
Matthew Faking Jennifer's Death
  • there was a second attempted rape in her rental house before she could call the police; an impotent, slightly-drunken Matthew complained to his buddies: "I can't come, you're interrupting my concentration...I can't, not with people watching me." As Jennifer laid there helpless, Stanley told her: "Total submission. That's what I like in a woman. Total submission," then briefly bottle-raped her and thrust his crotch into her face, yelling: "Suck it, bitch!" as he repeatedly slapped her and called her a whore.
  • when ordered and coaxed into stabbing Jennifer to death in the heart to eliminate their only witness to the multiple crimes ("If she's dead, she can't point her finger at us"), Matthew faked the murder by spreading blood on the knife blade
  • bruised and battered, the traumatized victim Jennifer knelt under a cleansing shower; two weeks later after Jennifer was spotted on the lawn by the river, Matthew was beaten up for lying
  • planning revenge, the traumatized victim paid a visit to a church to pray for forgiveness before her brutal and bloody counter-assault she had planned, followed by the scenes of her angry (yet often seductive) revenge against each of the four attackers; two of the killings involved sexually seducing and distracting the men beforehand, in order to lower their defenses
  • (1) outside her home where she had summoned Matthew to deliver groceries, she unbuttoned her see-through nightgown as she promised him: "I could have given you a summer to remember for the rest of your life." She kissed him, pulled down his pants to his ankles, and gave herself to him, before slipping a rope noose around his neck while he was climaxing and then hanging him from a tree. She dumped his body into the lake.
  • (2) she picked up Johnny at the gas station, held him at gunpoint and forced him to strip, but then admitted that she had inappropriately teased the group into raping her. She invited him back to her house, promising: "Come on, I'll give you a hot bath." Naked in the warm bathtub with him, she manually stimulated him as he closed his eyes and relaxed ("You've got great hands - God bless your hands. Oh yeah, that's fantastic"). She conducted a lethal bloodletting castration - a literal bloodbath with a conveniently-placed carving knife (his first reaction: "That's so sweet, it's painful"), causing him to bleed to death in the locked bathroom ("What have you done to me? Oh, God! Oh, s--t!...I can't stop the bleeding...It won't stop bleeding!"). In the living room, she calmly sat stone-faced in a rocker and listened to a Puccini opera on the phonograph as he screamed in the background and died. She burned his clothes in the fireplace, cleaned up the blood-splattered bathroom, and dumped his body on the basement stairs.
  • (3) after hijacking Stanley's motorboat on the river, she pushed him into the water and terrorized him by threatening to run him over; meanwhile on-shore, Andy (with an axe) came to the rescue and charged into the water; his axe ended up on the floor of the motorboat; Andy swam out into the water to rescue the drowning Stanley, just as Jennifer swung Andy's axe into his back
Andy Axed in Back
Stanley Disemboweled by Motorboat
  • (4) she pretended to help rescue Stanley, but then disemboweled him with the outboard motor as he clung onto the engine while climbing into the boat. She uttered the same words he had spoken to her earlier: "Suck it, bitch!" (the film's final line of dialogue).

Jennifer: Skinny-Dipping


Cleansing Shower after Rapes

Visit to Church







Seduction of Matthew Before Hanging Him







Castration of Johnny

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