Dark Narratives: May Issue
Re-envisioning revenge stories and a bunch of industry updates for the indies out there!
Hello and welcome back, creepies! I hope this issue finds you well. This month, we’ll be talking about:
Some changes to the industry that are more indie-friendly
Some opportunities you won’t want to miss
A deep-dive into the “rape-revenge” film genre
Just as a note, if you haven’t seen it yet, my newest guide is about character creation, and it’s jam-packed with advice about story arcs, names, archetypes and more. Pick it up or any of my other guides today on Gumroad: https://gumroad.com/tlbodine
Some interesting tidbits of industry news for you this month!
Barnes & Noble is changing the way its books are acquired, giving more power to individual stores as opposed to handling stocking decisions at a corporate level. This shift toward a more independent model spells good news for small-name authors, who should now have a slightly more even playing field. If you haven’t called the bookstore yet to try getting your books stocked, now could be the time!
Amazon is making a few noteworthy changes as well. The first is its new Kindle Vella program, which allows authors to self-publish their stories in serial format and be paid as readers unlock each chapter — basically competition for what Wattpad and Radish have been doing. There’s also a UK-focused story contest with a hefty £20,000 prize for a lucky novelist publishing through KDP; all those contest details can be found here: https://www.freedomwithwriting.com/freedom/uncategorized/25000-writing-contest-from-amazon/
Speaking of opportunities, LitUp Writer’s Fellowship is offering an all-expense-paid retreat and mentorship opportunity to five lucky writers. To apply, you’ll need to be unpublished, unagented, and identify as a “woman from a diverse background.” More details here: https://bookriot.com/litup-writers-fellowship/
Finally, in case you haven’t been following already, Gwendolyn Kiste offers a monthly roundup of submission opportunities on her blog. So you should definitely go check those out: http://www.gwendolynkiste.com/Blog/spring-inspiration-submission-roundup-for-may-2021/
For decades, the rape-revenge plot has been a staple of the horror genre, and it shows no signs of stopping, with new releases like 2020's Promising Young Woman and the 2017 Revenge. A glance at the Wikipedia category page for "rape-revenge films" yields more than 200 entries, making it a truly enduring trend. As we enter a #MeToo informed world, we're more culturally aware and sensitive to the issue than ever before -- but the films are still plagued by issues that have been endemic to the stories from the subgenre's inception.
Who are these stories made for? What is their true purpose? Why do they endure? And -- if we want to see them become more relevant to modern audiences and respectful to the experiences of rape victims -- what template do we have to follow?
Buckle in, kids, because this is going to be a bumpy ride. Blanket warning throughout for discussion of sexual abuse and spoilers for The Nightingale and a few other films.
Arguably the first cinematic entry to the rape-revenge film formula was Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, released in 1960. The film, based on a 13th-century ballad (which goes to show there truly is nothing new under the sun) is set in Medieval times and incorporates elements of folklore or legend. In 1972, a young Wes Craven would be inspired by Bergman's film to create The Last House on the Left, a modern (and significantly more graphic) retelling of the story.
But these stories are not so much rape-revenge tales as we currently consider them. They are really "bad houseguest" stories -- which makes sense, given the Medieval origins and the history of hospitality. In both versions of the tale, a young woman is brutalized by strangers who then seek shelter in a home they do not realize belongs to the girl's family; when her parents learn the truth, they enact vengeance upon their daughter's murderer.
The true ur-example of the rape-revenge genre is the 1978 I Spit On Your Grave, written and directed by Meir Zarchi. In this film, a female novelist travels to a secluded lakeside cabin for the purpose of working undisturbed, but runs afoul of the locals. For reasons never fully explored in the text (but which may be rooted in xenophobia and classism -- it was horror in the 1970s, after all), a group of men decided to harass, torture and rape the woman before leaving her for dead. When she survives their torment, she decides to stay in town rather than flee, eventually ensnaring them one by one and brutally murdering them all for their transgression.
This movie was remade by the same director in 2010, which then spawned several sequels (some with the same lead character, some totally unrelated). While these modern versions have gone largely unnoticed except by certain pockets of horror fandom, the original film continues to be a controversial classic. And in order to understand I Spit On Your Grave and the rape-revenge genre in general, we need to first have a brief history lesson.
Exploitation Films of the 1970s
For decades, filmmakers adhered to The Hays Code, a cluster of rules or best-practices for avoiding censors and producing morally upstanding, family-friendly films. These rules, which were in place from the 1930s well into the 1950s -- aka, most of Hollywood's golden age -- had a huge hand in shaping both filmmaking as an art and pop culture in general.
But by the 1960s, the Code had been essentially abandoned, and filmmakers were eager to shed these restraints and start making more experimental and boundary-pushing works. This gave rise to the grindhouse circuit -- independently owned theaters that would show things mainstream theaters wouldn't touch, often at a lower price and with things like matinee double features targeting teenage viewers. To exploit this new market for maximum profits, filmmakers started making (you guessed it) exploitation films.
To be a successful exploitation film, a movie must have a few qualities:
Cheap to make, in order to maximize profits
Appeals to an audience of 15-25 year olds (aka, young folks with big appetites for entertainment and the pocket money to spend on it)
Easy to understand, usually relying on tried-and-true storytelling formulas
Lures in audiences with promises of titillation, salaciousness, taboo-breaking, etc.
Just like the pulp novels and penny dreadfuls that came before, exploitation films existed to provide entertainment to the masses, and the masses want what they've always wanted: sex, violence, and easy-to-follow plots.
From that perspective, it makes clear sense why the rape-revenge genre would become such a predictable staple of the grindhouse era:
It's cheap to make. If you have some latex and a bucket of fake blood, your effects budget is covered, and you don't have to spend money on any big-name actors
By design, you have an excuse to include nudity, sexual content, and a ton of gory violence
The story is simple, and seeing bad guys get punished is emotionally gratifying
Of course, the formula is not without its problems. One issue is just how willing audiences are to see a woman brutalized as an excuse to de-humanize her attackers as setup for the revenge story. Another is the message that stories like this send -- intentionally or not -- about the nature of rape survivors.
Who Are These Movies Actually For?
Arguably the most disturbing thing about I Spit On Your Grave is the documentary-like detachment it affords to the pivotal rape scene, and the excessiveness of the scene itself. The main character is attacked repeatedly, by multiple men. They let her go, then catch up with her again, playing a cat-and-mouse game to torment her. From beginning to end, the sequence takes up at least a third of the film's runtime, and the entire experience is shot without a score and with minimal cutting. None of the violence that follows manages to overshadow the torturously long horror of this sequence.
And therein lies the fundamental flaw with I Spit On Your Grave and films of its ilk. While Zarchi reportedly was inspired to work on the film after meeting a rape survivor, and his goal was to provide an empowering wish fulfilment narrative for victimized women, this goal is purchased at the price of 35+ minutes of watching a woman being repeatedly and violently assaulted. While you can argue that the sex in this movie and others like it is not filmed in an eroticized way -- and that is true, this is just about the least sexy film you can imagine -- it's nevertheless uncomfortable to see how willing the filmmaker and moviegoers alike are with using this sequence as a means to an end.
Because here's one uncomfortable truth of the rape-revenge genre: In order to "justify" the immense violence of the revenge -- and make no mistake, this genre's success as exploitation cinema depends entirely on the creativity and brutality of its kill scenes -- the bad guys must be shown as utterly depraved and irredeemable. In other words, the assault on the woman must be "bad enough" to "warrant" the revenge that follows.
This limits the utility of the rape-revenge film as a cautionary tale to men. The actions of the characters in I Spit On Your Grave and other similar films are so over-the-top, so detached from rational motive and so overtly bestial that I can't imagine any man in the audience ever connecting the on-screen events with their own actions (and any who do see themselves represented on screen are unlikely to be dissuaded by the moral messaging). If the intended message of these films is "don't rape women," they do a great disservice by creating such a specific and erroneous image of what real-world sexual violence more often looks like.
Are these films empowering toward women? Possibly. There is some appeal in the power fantasy aspect of exacting vengeance on a deserving party, and some catharsis to be found in the act of securing justice when so many real-world cases go without any real resolution.
At the same time, though, the focus and shape of the revenge arc strips a female character of personality and humanity. The main character of I Spit On Your Grave becomes a single-minded badass, a killing machine, but it's unclear what sort of life she has waiting for her after it's over or whether she's given any thought to it at all. (One of the sequels does attempt to resolve this question by allowing her to become a counselor and write a memoir of her experiences...only to punish her by way of kidnapping by readers. No rest for the wicked).
Vengeance is not generally a path one can return from, even in media -- so once the bodies are piled up, the woman's life is essentially over. This is a discouraging message, to say the least, and one that could prove actively harmful to real-world survivors (not to mention the triggering nature of the attack scenes played out in excruciating on-screen detail). The victim-to-vengeance trajectory is dehumanizing and offers no practical guidance or path forward.
Some modern attempts to revitalize the genre try to avoid some of these issues by side-stepping the first-act rape scene and focusing their efforts more on prevention than revenge. Hard Candy and Promising Young Woman for example both introduce us to female protagonists who ensnare would-be predators, taking out the trash before anyone else gets hurt. This is better in some ways, but it doesn't answer our earlier problem of what happens to the women who have already been victimized. In fact, it's worse in this regard: both films set up their protagonists as going on their vengeance arcs specifically because of friends who died as a result of sexual violence.
So the rape-revenge story gives us two possible options for victims: death or dehumanization.
But what about healing?
The Nightingale: The Potential for Light in the Darkness
2018's The Nightingale, directed by Jennifer Kent of Babadook fame, is a historical drama set in 1825 on the Van Diemen's Island penal colony (now Tasmania). The main character, Clare, is an Irish convict working off her sentence as a servant to a Lieutenant of the British Colonial force holding the island. Clare should be at the end of her sentence, needing just a letter of recommendation from the lieutenant so that she, her husband and their infant daughter can be freed. Unfortunately, Lieutenant Hawkins has no intentions of letting that happen.
Hawkins rapes Clare on the job. Later, her husband confronts him about the assault, which ends in the death of both Clare's husband and their baby, and an additional sexual assault. It's excruciating to watch, but handled with a more deft hand than the exploitation films; instead of watching the attack play out in flat focus like a documentary, the camera lingers primarily on Clare's face or the patch of ceiling she stares at, leaving the focus more on her emotions than on the physical acts. This is already a significant step in the right direction (though certainly no more pleasant to watch).
Clare, now with her life utterly destroyed, sets out on a path toward vengeance, stalking the lieutenant and his men across the jungle with the intention of killing them all. She enlists the aid of an aboriginal tracker known as Billy to help with this vengeance quest, and the two set out to follow the now-relocated regiment.
What makes The Nightingale so special is the care it gives its characters, and the space it affords for them to grow and breathe and develop. In the beginning, Clare and Billy are at odds, separated by race and class, but they find common ground and even friendship along the way. One especially perfect stand-out scene occurs when Clare, bitterly and vehemently, explains that she's Irish and hates the English just as much as he does (and for most of the same reasons). The intersectionality of ways people are damaged by colonialism plays out in human terms, and the bond they develop throughout the course of the film feels genuine and well-earned.
In the end, Clare does at last have a chance to confront Lieutenant Hawkins, and she does so not with the gun she's been carrying but with a verbal upbraiding in front of his superiors. It doesn't really matter at this point whether it will have any effect on his life; Clare says what she needs to say and realizes that there is no point in wasting further effort on him beyond this; she sees him clearly for the pathetic man he is, and he no longer frightens her.
Unfortunately, Billy has his own vendettas to settle, and though Clare begs him to let it go, he can't resist taking out several soldiers, sustaining a grievous wound in the process. The ending is bittersweet and a bit open-ended, but it's implied that Billy will die of his wounds, leaving Clare alone to grieve once more. It's heart-wrenching for sure, but in its own dark way it's an improvement over other revenge stories.
The Nightingale is an ambitious film, telling an ambitious story. It seeks to contextualize colonialist violence, with a central thesis about colonialism itself being a type of rape, and its many messages about race and class and gender are tangled and difficult. It is also a deeply troubling film, often unpleasant to watch. But it's also one of the only films I've ever seen that lends real dramatic weight to the concept of healing -- not as a one-and-done solution, but as an ongoing and worthwhile effort. The film is very long, and while much of its runtime is dedicated to brutality, a good amount of it is dedicated instead to friendship, shared burdens, quiet rumination and emotional processing. By the end, Clare may be no better off than she had been, but at least we have the idea that maybe she could be all right.
It's not a perfect film by any means, and I could not in good conscience recommend it to anyone sensitive to the issues we've been discussing today. But I think it offers a template that could be helpful for others looking to write stories about the topic. By centering the story arc not on the vengeance and dehumanization but rather on the emotional development of a character healing her wounds and moving on -- while still bringing some kind of closure and justice to the attacker -- the rape-revenge film could be brought at last into the 21st Century in a way that might be useful or even essential to our modern needs.
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