I Spit On Your Grave Deja Vu

And Decarceration

During my time in prison, I thought a lot about legacy. How someone had filled my bed previously, how someone had walked the steps I have, and how when I am gone, the next person off the bus would take my place. I thought about what kind of curious ecosystem that was. How we consider the idea of a legacy one of virtue and honor, when in fact this country (all of civilization, really) has a greater legacy of pain, of hurt, of diminishment, and how glory emerges from a break with legacy, and tragedy comes from an embrace of it. And how societies advance, thrive, and innovate, but there is always a force to drag that backwards through time.

Oddly enough, I thought of this during the cheap, ugly and honest “I Spit On Your Grave: De Ja Vu” (actual title), a “legacy sequel” to one of the most notorious exploitation films of all time. Only recently has the “legacy sequel” caught on, usually following the plot developments of a movie sometimes four decades earlier, even though that fan demographic is no longer the advertiser-desired one. Recently, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” opened to a nine figure gross, even though someone who was ten when the original film was released would now be 46. Of course, the idea is that families will share in the experience, both old and young. I doubt there are many families queuing up “I Spit On Your Grave De Ja Vu”. But maybe some of them should? Age-appropriate, mind you: as you’d expect, hide the kiddies.

The original “I Spit On Your Grave” was the ultimate in cinematic provocations. She, an unassuming city girl. They, a group of backwoods redneck klutzes. She is assaulted and raped, quite savagely, in a protracted sequence that remains difficult to watch today. And because this is a laser-focused piece of celluloid junk, she returns to enact her revenge. It’s telling that, given that action movie vocabulary had not yet evolved enough in 1978, her path of bloodshed is plausibly clumsy and slow-paced. A low-rent 2010 remake, which spawned a trilogy, was very much within the realm of contemporary suspense/revenge thriller tropes, featuring a victim who meticulously planned her path of vengeance.

Shortly after that trilogy wrapped up, those remakes were swept from the ledger by Meir Zarchi, who returned after helming the original forty-one years prior. This is a direct sequel, following up with Jennifer Hills, the protagonist of the first film played by Camille Keaton. Older, softer, and finally at peace, Hills works with rape survivors and travels to promote her book about the events of the first film. She also has a daughter, Christy, who is a successful model. The question of her parentage is floated a few times. Suffice to say, the truth doesn’t necessarily line up with the actual timeline, but if such a fact is a dealbreaker for you, then you may need to recalibrate your imagination.

As you’d expect from a movie like this, Jennifer and her daughter run afoul of the descendants of her attackers from the first film. I will now spoil First Act elements of a shockingly-long two-and-a-half hour movie – Jennifer is kidnapped, and after putting up the sort of fight you’d expect from an elderly woman, she falls into the grasp of Becky, who is supposed to be related to one of the first film’s attackers, though it’s hard to figure out how. She is coded maternally, which doesn’t make sense chronologically, but again, imagination. Whatever the case, the thin string of familial bonds is all it takes to justify Becky’s rage. In a fit of insanity she slowly, painfully, cuts off the head of Jennifer Hills.

And, for a brief moment, I had to stop.

I have no strong affection for “I Spit On Your Grave”. I saw it once, maybe twice in my earlier years. At the time, I had said to myself, “I see what they were talking about” in regards to the film’s reputation as one of the more infamous video nasties. I think the movie is made with a sense of craft, I think it is engaging. I think, considering the period, it is historically relevant. I respect the film.

But it’s worth remembering the nature of that reputation. This was a movie about a woman who survives a savage rape. To some, the selling point is the sexual assault, mostly the Times Square degenerates and the nihilist frat boys of that period. But to others, the obvious draw is her revenge. The title is clearly from her perspective. It’s a spoiler, telling you she’s won already (the alternate title was more blunt: “Day Of The Woman”). I grew up in the video era, and on the shelves, the most popular promotional photo for the film was a woman’s thinly-clad backside (actually, apparently, Demi Moore’s). But the lasting visual in that photo is that the body itself is massive, towering over the background foliage of the image, her hand clutching a glistening knife. The movie’s tagline asserts that, “No jury in America would ever convict her,” suggesting that her revenge was not only righteous, it was crowd-pleasing. It was a radical image depicting the violence implicit in a war of the sexes in 1978. It’s only grown in stature since.

And now, I am in 2024, and I am watching the woman who achieved bloody revenge in a way no jury would convict. I am seeing her head, guts dangling from the neck, hair wrapped in the fist of the primal Becky, who hollers with pride as she screams her own vengeance, all these decades later. It is an unhinged, overwhelming moment in the film, because for a certain person, it is catharsis. I saw the (honestly fake) head of Jennifer Hills, her killer standing outside a church, and I’m seeing “I Spit On Your Grave” undone — by a woman, no less. I’m seeing her revenge, undone. 1978, undone. I am seeing the rights women aggressively fought for, undone. Hills survived trauma to become a writer, while Becky’s characterization is, like her family, uneducated, undomesticated, socially misplaced. It feels like a victory against literacy. It feels like cultural erasure of the accomplishments of my generation and the generation before mine. Becky is the return of the repressed, the country-born protector of the patriarchy that currently stalks America’s libraries, schools, neighborhoods. Becky is everywhere, and Jennifer Hills is dead, on the steps of a church.

And then it gets worse. Jennifer’s body is desecrated, and remains a part of the narrative. And the attackers take Christy, and they do to her what was once done to Jennifer. The same song, played over forty years later. Yes, there is still an audience for those diseased cheap thrills. Because, ultimately, that is the legacy of “I Spit On Your Grave”. Christy escapes, but her spirit has been soiled. She is something of a product of “I Spit On Your Grave”, and now a victim of “I Spit On Your Grave Deja Vu”. She is nonetheless her mother’s daughter, and she takes steps to remedy this sickness.

The executions she performs are more crude and violent than in the original, but in keeping with the savagery of the first film. What changes is a fairly slow, difficult final act. Christy finally wrestles with the violence done to Jennifer but also what Jennifer did to her attackers. It becomes a damning elegy for the grudges and violence we pass on to later generations, but sometimes even to earlier, still-remaining ones. In keeping with the film’s disinterest in accurate chronology, the sins of the child and the sins of the parent are acknowledged as one sickening loop. There is no immediate remedy, only short-term solutions. “I Spit On Your Grave: Deja Vu”, over forty minutes longer than its predecessor,  is needlessly distended, raw, visually decrepit and broadly acted, an often-punishing sit. But in how it wrestles with the legacy of the first film, it is an invaluable addition to the canon.

What is important for those who, like me, are prison abolitionists, is to convince people that prison, too, is a legacy. And legacies can end. The prison population has exploded since the nineties, and it has kept expanding. But many prisoners on a state level quickly return, as high as 82% within ten years of their release, according to the Department of Justice based on a handful of states – the numbers on a federal level are not so serve because federal sentences are longer, though it’s believed to be in the vicinity of 50%. These figures are always fluid. But America has two million plus citizens incarcerated – shouldn’t recidivism be in the single digits, or at least close to it? These places are called correctional centers, right?

The mistake people make is in giving divine assignation to prisons and their role in law enforcement. It’s easy to assume prisons have always been with us. But prisons are still being built, still siphoning off taxpayer money to pay for meals and housing. The prison-industrial system has shrunk considerably as institutional closures and inmates released during COVID have altered the landscapes. But we have to ask, as a society, why do we do this? We are moving in positive directions, as crime rates have plummeted since the nineties across the country. It’s not enough. 

Too many people accept prison as an element of our society like the sun, like oxygen, like nights and days. The problem is coupling the legacy of prison with the regular workweek, with the outlines of suburbs versus cities, with the economy. As in, man-made concepts that must be re-evaluated and reinvented every generation or so. Prisons haven’t been questioned in this regard. If we are to abolish the prison-industrial concept, then the average citizen must start asking those questions. What does a correctional center do? Why doesn’t it work? Why do we have them? Once we change the national dialogue, we can entertain solutions.

Next week, we’re doing five days of Horror Comedies!