By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. The idea of making a truly dark revenge film at heart, in this day and age of global political-correctness-vs.-fascism, felt like the right thing to do (especially) if you are a true genre fan/filmmaker.” – Can Evrenol Going back at least to Metin Erksan’s classic The Well […]
Sonic Violence: Cinematic Rape, Sound, and the Body in Lipstick (Lamont Johnson, 1976)
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. Lipstick stands as a largely underrated film when it comes to the often complex representation of the male rapist in fictional film. Sound often plays second fiddle to the supremacy of the visual in cinema… yet as this example indicates, it can play a significant part in […]
The Anti Rape-Revenge Film: Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli on Violation (TIFF 2020)
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. There is something super cathartic about the idea of revenge, and what we recognised when first making the film is that really we’re making an anti revenge film. It’s like the film is designed to scare you not to seek revenge because of how it’s going to […]
A Genre Reclaimed: Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge
April 18, 2018
By Alex Brannan. There is a critical stigma to the small subset of films that comprise the rape-revenge genre – or, at the very least, a healthy hesitation. In 1980, Roger Ebert famously took down Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave, calling it “a vile bag of garbage … without […]