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The original was posted on /r/horror by /u/unclefishbits on 2025-06-12 20:33:24+00:00.
I had linked this to the only place online where the article exists... and it was removed. So here is the article inline, for discussion and history. I’ve heard this article mentioned in various circles for a LONG time, but finally felt compelled to find the article, because it was cited in an absolute masterclass of research and post-modernist theory on horror, “MEN, WOMEN, AND CHAINSAWS: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, by Carol J. Clover.
Roger Ebert is not far from my mind. Whether his skilled reviews, or his audio tracks for Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Dark City, Valley of the Dolls, and Lawrence of Arabia… or just his impact on culture through criticism and skilled and supernatural understanding of cinematic vocabulary, subtext, shot design, etc. He’s a joy to read, and his old reviews still bubble to the top.
But, I find it really interesting this excerpt doesn’t exist online anywhere… at all. It even seems to missing from the academic horror repository, HorrorLex.
So, enough rambling. I transcribed this as perfectly as possible, other than removing typed “-” from carriage returns. =) I also did not put the movie titles in italics, FWIW.
WHY MOVIE AUDIENCES AREN’T SAFE ANY MORE
A directing ploy invites viewers to participate with sinister results.
Roger Ebert
In more than a dozen years of professional attendance at the movies, I’ve never had an experience more disturbing than one I had last summer, in the United Artists Theatre in Chicago, during a showing of a movie named I Spit On Your Grave. The theater was pretty well filled for a weekday afternoon, but I found a seat in a row toward the back. One empty chair separated me from a white-haired middle-aged man who was, as it turned out, to be my guide through the horrors of this movie.
The film itself was garbage-reprehensible, vile. Its skeleton of a plot existed only as an excuse for a series of violent scenes in which a woman was first ravaged by a pack of four demented men, and then took her vengeance against them. The film’s one small concession to artistry was the creation of one male character who was not merely a raping and slicing machine, but was given individual attributes: He was portrayed as gravely mentally retarded. To my horror, I realized that he was the comic relief. After scenes in which the movie’s heroine was raped or menaced by the other characters, they’d urge on this guy. And he’d slobber and dim-wittedly, impotently try to rape her, too, while the audience laughed.
Watching this film was a terrible experience. As a daily newspaper movie critic who goes to see nearly every movie that opens commercially, I thought I’d seen almost everything in the way of screen violence, but I had not.
What made I Spit On Your Grave particularly effective (if that is the word) was its brutal directness of style. Lacking grace, humor, or even simple narrative skill, the filmmakers simply pointed their camera at their actors and then commanded them to perform unspeakable acts upon one another. Although the violence in the film was undoubtedly staged, the directness of this approach took away any distancing effect that might have been supplied by more sophisticated storytelling; the film had the raw impact of those pornographic films which are essentially just documentary records of behavior.
And that, I quickly gathered, was exactly how the white-haired man to my right was taking it. The film marched relentlessly ahead. We saw the woman repeatedly cut up, raped, and beaten. The man next to me kept up a running commentary during these events. His voice was not a distraction, because the level of audience noise was generally high; the audience seemed to be taking all this as a comedy, and there were shouts and loud laughs at the climaxes of violence. And then, beneath these noises, as a subtle counterpoint, I could hear my neighbor saying, “That’s a good one… ooh-eee! She’s got that coming! This’ll teach her. That’s right! Give it to her! She’s learned her lesson….”
And so on. I glanced at this man. He looked totally respectable. He could have been a bank clerk, a hardware salesman; he could have been anyone. He was instinctively, unquestioningly voicing his support for the rape and violence on the screen.
Elsewhere around me in the theater, the vocal responses continued. During the opening scenes of rape, the voices shouting at the screen had been mostly men’s. But then, as the movie’s heroine began to kill the rapists, a chorus of women’s voices joined in. “You show him, sister,” a female voice yelled from the back row. “Wooo!”
How does one respond to an experience like the one I had during I Spit On Your Grave? As a film critic, I was fortunate, of course: I had a forum in my newspaper to attack the film and to deplore its reception. But as a filmgoer sitting there in the dark, that seemed small consolation to me. I wanted to shout back at my fellow audience members – or, more to the point, I wanted to turn to the man next to me and tell him that he was disgusting.
I did not. I left. A few days later, talking about I Spit On Your Grave with fellow Chicago film critic Gene Siskel, I found that he had been as disturbed by the film as I had. He also sense that the film was clearly a departure from the ordinary run of Summer exploitation and horror movies we critics have come to expect. It was cruder, it was more raw, it was more vile of spirit. And the audience response to it had been truly frightening.
I saw I Spit On Your Grave that first time with an audience that was mostly black (although my quiet neighbor was white). I saw it again, a week later, with an almost all white audience in the Adelphi theater on Chicago’s north side. The response was about the same. But in contrast to the mostly male downtown audience, the delphi’s crowd on that Friday night included a great many couples on dates; perhaps forty percent of the audience was female. They sat through it – willingly, I suppose.
By now the word was out about I Spit On Your Grave. My review in the Sun-Times and Cisco’s in the Tribune had already appeared. And for a piece on the local CBS news, Cisco had stood in front of the United artists theater with a television camera crew and described the movie to customers about to go in. One couple with their small children listen to his description and then said they were going in anyway. “I’d like to know more on the subject,” the woman said, an 8-year-old clutching her hand.
Or later audiences influenced by the strongly negative local reviews? Hardly. The Plitt theater chain pulled the movie from the United artist theater on orders from the chains executive vice president, Harold J. Kline, who admitted he had not seen it before it opened. But in the theaters where it’s still played, the movie had a good second weekend – although, curiously, the print I saw at the Adelphi had been extensively cut.
During the month after I saw the film, I became aware that I Spit On Your Grave might have been the worst of the Summer’s exploitation films, but it was hardly alone and it’s sick attitude toward women. Searching back through my movie memory, and looking at some of the summer’s and Autumn’s new films with a slightly different point of view, I began to realize that a basic change had taken place in many recent releases.
Although the theme of a woman in danger had long been a staple in movies and on television (where television films like John Carpenter is someone is watching me! Have racked up big ratings), the audience is sympathies had traditionally been enlisted on the side of the woman. We identified with her, we feared for her, and when she was hurt, we recoiled. But was that basic identification still true? I realized with a shock that it was not, not always, and that with increasing frequency the new horror films encouraged audience identification not with the victim but with the killer.
Siskel had arrived at a similar conclusion and we decided to devote one of our sneak previews programs on PBS to the women-in-danger films. On the program we showed scenes from several films (although not the most violent), and we pointed out, in the scenes from films like Friday the 13th, that the camera took the killers point of view and stalked the victims. It is a truism in film strategy that, all else being equal, when the camera takes a point of view, the audience is being directed to adopt the same point of view.
We also pointed out that the crime of many of the female victims in the women-in-danger films was their independence. The heroin of I Spit On Your Grave had gone off for a vacation by herself in the woods. The heroin of Friday the 13th was hitchhiking to a summer job as a camp counselor.
“I’m convinced,” Siskel said, “that this has something to do with the growth of the women’s movement in America in the last decade. These films are some sort of primordial response by very sick people saying, ‘get back in your place, women!’ the women in these films are typically portrayed as independent, as sexual, as enjoying life. and the killer, typically – not all the time but most often dash is a man who is sexually frustrated with these new aggressive women, and so he strikes back at them. He throws...
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