10. Rape Revenge
Particularly popular in the 1970s, the first rape revenge movie appears to be Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring. The structure of the rape/revenge movie is pretty simple: a woman is brutally tortured, raped or gang raped. On occasion the woman will be killed at this point and her family/ friends will enact revenge upon the perpetrators. Other times the woman will survive the attack and undergo a period of rehabilitation before she decides on a path of revenge against her attacker(s). The most famous rape/revenge movies are Last House on the Left and I Spit on Your Grave. In Last House on the Left, two teenage girls are killed by a group of sadistic thugs. They end up seeking shelter in one of the deceased girl's house where the parents gradually cop on that they murdered their daughter and plan an elaborate revenge with chainsaws, penises bitten off and throats cut. I Spit on Your Grave is a film in which the victim - this time Jennifer - gets to enact revenge upon her rapists. After a harrowing and protracted rape scene, we see Jennifer trying to come to terms with what has happened to her. Eventually, she decides to embark upon a path of vengeance and she coldly and systematically hunts down her tormentors and kills them (the castration scene is particularly memorable) Some more notable rape/revenge films include Thriller: They Call Her One Eye - a 1970s Swedish exploitation film in which Christina Lindberg suffers terrible abuse at the hands of men whilst at the same time learning martial arts and learning to shoot on the sly so she can kill her tormentors in extreme slow motion at the end of the film. Irreversible, by Gaspar Noé, is a French art house flick which depicts, in a non linear fashion, the violent rape and sodomy of a young woman and her boyfriend and his friend's attempts to track down her attacker and dole out justice. Most rape/revenge films are very hard to watch as they really go to town on the graphic details of rape and sodomy.