By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
Texto escrito originalmente para o catálogo da mostra Mestras do Macabro: As Cineastas do Horror ao Redor do Mundo. Leia aqui a tradução para o português.
What does it mean when a rape-revenge film is made by a woman? Well, like men, it can
mean a whole lot of different things. Women – because they are people – can be smart,
stupid, funny, serious, cowardly, courageous, progressive or bigots. The gender of the
filmmaker does not give a rape-revenge movie a magical, automatic ideological ‘get out of
jail free’ card: a movie is not instantly protected from claims of exploitation or sensationalism
simply because the person who made it is a woman. At best, these films are noteworthy
because women as a broader demographic have historically been denied access to the
director’s chair: even today, women directors are a minority, and still often considered a
novelty. So if women rape-revenge film directors share one thing outside their shared
subject of interest, it is this: they are working in a role that far too many people even today
still consider to be a more “natural” fit for men.
It’s hard to identify what the first “official” rape-revenge film might be, simply because rape
and revenge have always sat in some kind of indirect relation to each other, long before films
like Ingmar Bergman’s Oscar-winning The Virgin Spring (1960), the film that would famously
be re-imagined in Wes Craven’s exploitation classic Last House on the Left (1972). Rape-
revenge stories go back at least to the Old Testement, and can be found everywhere from
Ancient Greek mythology to Shakespeare. Pre-code films like William A. Wellman’s Safe in
Hell (1931) and George Archainbaud’s Thirteen Women (1932) feature key elements of the
rape-revenge trope without necessarily being “rape-revenge films” per se, and the very first
episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents which broadcast in 1955 – simply called “Revenge” –
offers a very strong early example of how even by this time the expectations and
assumptions about rape-revenge were being subverted, years before “rape-revenge” as a
category even existed.
While not a revenge film per se, there is no serious consideration of the representation of
rape trauma on film that can be complete without a concrete acknowledgement of Ida
Lupino’s 1950 film, Outrage. Predating The Virgin Spring by a decade and Hitchcock’s rape-
revenge TV episode by five years, even by today’s standards Outrage is an extraordinary
viewing experience, focused on the assault and subsequent trauma of a normal, young
suburban woman following a random attack as she walked home from work. More famous
as a movie star herself, it has taken some time for Lupino’s directorial works to become
widely available, and contemporary critics are far more admiring of her work than earlier
feminist critics such as Molly Haskell who rejected Lupino’s films wholesale as misogynist,
despite films like Outrage being the exact opposite. Compassionate, clear-minded, and
unafraid, Outrage typifies Lupino’s so-called women’s pictures, where – aside from rape –
she would explore everything from single motherhood to polio. Outrage came hot on the
heels of Jean Negulesco’s Johnny Belinda (1948), a film which won Jane Wyman an Oscar
for her performance as a deaf and mute woman who becomes pregnant after she is raped
by a local lout, then saved through the love of the local doctor. But while films like Johnny
Belinda and The Virgin Spring imply rape is a relic of a kind of primitive, monstrous past, for
Lupino in Outrage, rape was very much a contemporary issue.
When it comes to women artists and authors of and rape-revenge narratives, these long pre-
date the moving image: at the very least, Italian Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi and her
painting Judith Beheading Holofernes (1612) has often been discussed through the lens of
her own highly publicized sexual assault. But when we turn to film specifically, Doris
Wishman’s Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965) is as good a place as any to begin looking at women-
directed rape-revenge films specifically. Here, grindhouse icon Wishman featured a central
rape-avenging protagonist in her iconic roughie, Gigi Darlene starring as the protagonist
Meg, who is raped on the stairwell of her apartment block in Chicago by a man when she
takes out her trash. Sliding a note under her door, he tells her that if she does not come to
his apartment, he will tell her husband. She follows his instructions, expecting him to
blackmail her, but he tries to rape her again and she fights back, killing him. She flees to
New York where she changes her name to Ellen and hopes to blend in with the crowd.
Moving from home to home, Ellen meets a parade of violent, sexually aggressive men, until
she encounters a lesbian with whom she has a positive, caring relationship. However, when
she sees that the Chicago murder has made the front page of the newspaper, Ellen – not
wishing to burden her lover with the consequences of her earlier actions – is forced to leave.
She finally lands a job as a companion with a kindly old lady, discovering too late that her
son is the policeman investigating the case. He confronts her, prompting her to plead “I
didn’t mean to do it!”, referring to the rape-avenging murder of the man in her Chicago
apartment building. But it was all a dream; Meg wakes up next to her husband, and the cycle
begins again as her husband leaves for work, and she finds the same man in the same
stairwell with the same intentions. Rape, revenge and its associated trauma are for Meg a
never-ending cycle and the lines between nightmare and her reality have collapsed entirely.
While Wishman’s reputation as a key figure in sexploitation film history is assured, lesser
known are more hardcore women pornographers who incorporated rape-revenge elements
into their films, such as American adult filmmaker Ann Perry and her movies Teenage Sex
Kitten (1975) and Sweet Savages (1979). But women have also long been making rape-
revenge films that were more accessible to the mainstream. In The Ladies Club (1986),
Janet Greek adapted Betty Black and Casey Bishop’s 1977 novel The Sisterhood to the
screen, with Karen Austin and Christine Belford starring in a film about a group of middle-
class suburban women banding together with other rape and sexual abuse survivors to
abduct and castrate offenders before releasing them back onto the streets, taking the law
into their own hands when the law has so aggressively failed them. Like the best rape-
revenge films, however, The Ladies Club ends with significant questions about the
effectiveness of this kind of vigilante justice: does it really help these women in their
recovery?
Women were also making powerful rape-revenge informed films in the underground. The
late US filmmaker Sarah Jacobson is today synonymous with 90s Riot Grrrl filmmaking
primarily through the legacy of iconic 1996 feature Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore, but it
is arguably her 1992 short I Was a Teenage Serial Killer that today packs the mightiest
punch. Starring Kristin Calabrese as Mary, the film consists of a series of vignettes depicting
a broad spectrum of abusive male behaviours towards women that Mary either witnesses,
hears about anecdotally, or – most poignantly – experiences herself. Mary is demeaned,
insulted, harassed, and at one point, a consensual sex scene becomes non-consensual
when her partner removes his condom without telling her mid-coitus. Understanding that this
in itself is a form of sexual assault, Mary does not hesitate to kill him, forcing a banana into
his mouth as an unsubtle fellatio metaphor to mirror the sexual violence she has just
experienced at his hands. After a romance goes wrong and having killed 19 men, the film
ends with Mary giving a powerful speech about how she just wants her pain acknowledged.
Aside from being one of the most raw and exciting underground films of the 1990s, via
Mary’s final speech alone I Was a Teenage Serial Killer directly addresses Jacobson’s
desire for women filmmakers to be heard, issuing a manifesto of sorts for other women
filmmakers that explicitly positions extreme violence as an understandable response to the
enormity of what women experience under the patriarchal weight of rape culture.
Of course, women-directed rape-revenge films are hardly a uniquely North American
phenomenon. Rape-revenge films made by women can be found from all around the world,
running the gamut of extreme exploitation like legendary Japanese pink film director Sachi
Hamano’s Drifted Into Chaos (1989) to film festival darlings like Mouly Surya’s Marlina the
Murderer in Four Acts (2017) from Indonesia. While best known for her iconic feminist
masterwork Daisies (1966), Věra Chytilová is a key figure in the Czech New Wave who
made the black comedy rape-revenge film Traps in 1998, an unusual and uncommon
generic blend that made an impressive impact. Following a young vet who castrates her rich,
powerful rapists in the same way that she castrates pigs, while Chytilová’s choice of comedy
might at first seem insensitive or tone deaf, she uses it to powerful effect: resorting to
slapstick to show the post-op rapists bumbling and stumbling, Chytilová at the same time
always treats her rape-avenging protagonist and her experience with the utmost
respect,sensitivity and dignity. The joke here is on the rapists.
From 2017, with the breaking of a series of news stories about now-convicted rapist
producer Harvey Weinstein, the social movement known as #MeToo began in earnest,
allowing a new fresh perspective on women-directed rape-revenge films. In this climate,
movies that were once curios were now met with fresh new eyes and – rightfully – understood
and appreciated as women filmmakers themselves seeking to use cinema as a creative
forum to speak to the broader subject of rape and sexual violence. While some filmmakers
such as Jennifer Kent and her film The Nightingale (2018) aggressively rejected and resisted
the rape-revenge label – despite the film pivoting explicitly around the acts of rape and
subsequent revenge – other filmmakers such as Coralie Fargeat with Revenge (2017) and
Brazilian filmmaker Natalia Leite’s M.F.A (2017) demonstrated how a conscious, deliberate
engagement with the trope could be fully mobilized for powerful social critique. And with
Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman (2020) returning rape-revenge to the Oscar-
winning space long ago established by Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, women-directed rape-
revenge films in this context have been re-energized, giving voice to the diverse treatments
of sexual violence by a professional demographic far too long rendered comparatively silent.
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas is the author of ten books on cult, horror and exploitation cinema, and winner of the 2024 Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Writer of the Year Award. Her 2020 book 1000 Women in Horror was adapted in 2024 into a feature documentary from Shudder of the same name (directed by Donna Davies), and Heller-Nicholas also appears in Alexandre O. Philippe’s documentary Chain Reactions alongside Stephen King, Karyn Kusama, Takashi Miike and Patton Oswalt, which won the Best Documentary on Cinema Award at the 2024 Venice Film Festival.