‘I Spit on Your Grave 2’ Balances the Scales
Editor’s note: This piece contains descriptions and discussion of sexual assault.
Rape-revenge films promise two things in their story: rape, and revenge. While that may sound straightforward, there are clearly countless ways to rework that idea, as there are hundreds of examples of rape-revenge films. These films are often criticized for their rape scenes—they are meant to be titillating instead of disgusting, they focus more on the rapist than the victim, or they are just too brutal. When I was reading (the admittedly very few) reviews of I Spit On Your Grave 2 (2013), I was surprised to see that the revenge was being criticized, rather than the attacks on the rape survivor.
Directed by Steven R. Monroe, and a sequel to the 2010 remake of the original I Spit on Your Grave from 1978 (directed by Meir Zarchi), this film was released when audiences were craving a break from the brutality of the 2000s, and looking forward to the very different flavor of horror we started seeing in the mid-2010s. It’s not surprising that a sequel to a remake of the most notorious rape-revenge film of all time wasn’t critically lauded.
Several reviews of I Spit on Your Grave 2 said that the revenge went too far, and that the scenes were too nasty. However, an alternative reading of the film is that the revenge scenes are exactly nasty enough. I Spit On Your Grave 2 perfectly balances the brutality, and while the rape survivor Katie (Jemma Dallender) does go through a horrifying experience, the acts of revenge are warranted.
The film opens with Katie trying to break out as a model in New York City. She doesn’t have much to her name, with all the money from her waitressing job going to pay rent in her dilapidated apartment. However, she’s advised that a new portfolio will help her get more modeling jobs. Desperate for a break, she meets up with a photographer offering a free photo shoot. Ivan (Joe Absolom), the photographer, and his brothers, Nicky (Aleksandar Aleksiev) and Georgy (Yavor Baharov), greet Katie and very quickly suggest she take her clothes off. She declines and returns to her apartment.
Death By Infection
Georgy is Katie’s first rapist and the worst of them (don’t worry, he gets the worst punishment). It’s because of him that all this other trouble began. After Katie’s photoshoot, he finds her apartment and sneaks in. When she discovers him, he tries to present himself as a nice guy who wants to have a conversation. When Katie resists, he rapes her and kills her neighbor who comes to help. As he’s raping her, he insists she says, “I like you Georgy” and “I want this.”
After the rape, he calls Nicky and Ivan to help him clean up, and they ultimately traffic Katie to Bulgaria. She is trapped in the basement of this sick family’s home, where they berate her, leave her naked, call her trash, and, worst of all, sell her body. The brothers knew there was no escape for them in New York, so they brought Katie to where she could be sold.
Katie eventually escapes, which is when her revenge begins. She traps the people who hurt her one by one and matches their torture blow for blow.
When Katie traps Georgy, she chains him to a wall, in nothing but his underwear, in an underground tunnel. She cuts him in several places, and covers the wounds in filth from the ground, intending for infection to spread. She explains she is leaving him to rot, the same way he left her. Georgy made Katie feel filthy, and she wants him to feel the same, and experience the slow, heinous feeling of a spreading infection.
Katie returns to check on him in between her other acts of revenge. She jams rods of rebar into his wounds and taunts him by asking, “You like me now, don’t you?” Penetrating his wounds calls to mind the way he raped her, and Katie does not hold back. She insists he says he likes what’s happening to him, as Georgy did to her, so he can feel how awful it is to be made to claim you enjoy being raped and tortured. Georgy gets all of his horrible actions turned back on himself.
Death By Defecation and Suffocation
Before Katie escapes, she’s chained up in their basement, and Nicky taunts her while he forces sedatives down her throat. Insisting she swallow the drugs, he says, “You know how to swallow, don’t you?” When she’s high, he berates her, saying, “You don’t even know what’s happening right now.” To add to the humiliation, he urinates on her while she’s chained and naked.
When Katie catches up with Nicky after her escape, he’s nodding off in a club, out of his mind on alcohol and drugs. Katie corners him in the toilets (the grossness of which rivals the disgusting scenes of the original Saw bathroom) and taunts him with, “You don’t even know what’s happening right now.” As she drowns him in a toilet, visibly filled with human waste, she sneers at him, “You know how to swallow, don’t you?” Though Nicky likely drugged himself, Katie takes advantage of his vulnerable state the way he did to her. She forces him to swallow something disgusting and harmful before she kills him and mocks him while she does so. Nicky drowns in human waste while stoned, paying for his crimes.
Death By Testicular Vice
Immediately after the initial rape in New York, as the brothers are helping Georgy try to clean up, Ivan says to Katie, “Forgive my brother, he cannot help himself. We all have our vices, huh?” Ivan dismisses Georgy’s act of rape as if it’s akin to smoking or drinking. When Katie eventually traps Ivan, she crushes his testicles in a vice, demonstrating a “vice” of her own. Since Ivan had the audacity to dismiss something so horrible that happened to Katie, she wants to do something to him that he cannot recover from.
Death By Cattle Prod
While Katie is chained up in the Bulgarian basement, a customer named Valko (Peter Silverleaf) paid Katie’s captives so he could rape and torture her. Before raping her, he breaks her down by mentally and physically torturing Katie with a cattle prod, forcing it into her mouth, and shocking her all over her body. He clearly enjoys seeing her in pain. Valko meets an appropriate end when Katie gets her revenge. She ties him down, runs a drain snake down his throat, and while he’s choking on his own insides, she electrocutes him with a car battery. Katie wanted him to feel the helplessness and physical and mental agony he put her through.
Yes, Katie’s actions are extreme: electrocution, torture, drowning, and infection. But what Katie went through was extreme: multiple rapes, being kidnapped and trafficked across the world, tortured, starved, and humiliated. In a 2024 interview with Thomas Fenton for The Pod and the Pendulum Patreon, who wrote I Spit On Your Grave 2, he explains how purposefully he wrote each scene to balance what happened to Katie and Katie’s revenge. If a viewer thinks the entire movie is too brutal for them to appreciate, fair enough—it is nonstop violence. But if a viewer accepts the brutality done to Katie, but not the exact mirror of those actions on her captors and rapists, I would ask that viewer to think about why that is.
If we accept that in the world of a rape-revenge film, the survivors should get their revenge, we have to accept that that revenge can go just as hard as the initial attack. Katie wasn’t just fighting for her life; she was fighting for the only kind of justice available to her. The matching of the brutality of the rape and the revenge in I Spit On Your Grave 2 is an artistic achievement.
Ariel Powers-Schaub is the author of Millennial Nasties, which analyzes English horror films of the 2000s and why these films were particularly nasty in the wake of terrorist attacks, a growing surveillance state, a violent war, and more. The book is out now from Encyclopocalypse Publications.
Categorized:Editorials
