“Suck It, Bitch!”

Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978) is an archetypal classic of the slasher subgenre, i.e. rape-revenge film. The film is divided into two symmetric halves (rape and revenge), where the only one that remains is Jennifer, the victorious Final Girl. In this way, the film strives to find the fragile balance between the right of the victim and that of the murderer, in a world where there is no higher authority than the criminal justice system; however, in their explicitness, the image and the idea of the film touch the edge of the extremity and endurance of the gaze. So, on the one hand, the film raises questions of the reader-response criticism that this article addresses through psychoanalytical and feministic film theory (Carol J. Clover, Barbara Creed and Peter Lehman), while, on the other, it establishes itself in a socio-political context (the concurrent second-wave feminism and the active position of feminists regarding the question of rape) through its commentary of social structure and gender.

The integral (Slovenian) version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!