Sarah Butler ('I Spit On Your Grave' remake)

By Kayley Thomas

CineTel announced a few months ago that they would begin filming an updated version of the ever-controversial I Spit On Your Grave, bringing on Steven R. Monroe as director. My first thought was one shared by many: why in the hell would anyone want to remake this movie? My initial reaction didn’t arise, however, from the spirit that the original film evoked in some – and undoubtedly Monroe’s take will too.

I recently spoke with Sarah Butler (you may have seen her in the horror webseries Luke 11:17), the young actress cast as 'Jennifer' in the new film. She provided some excellent insights into the motivations behind the remake, how Monroe makes this film his own, her own experiences with such a difficult role, and how she thinks - or hopes – that modern audiences will react to this story...

New York magazine writer Jennifer Hills decides to spend her summer in a little country cottage by the lake in order to get some writing done. Horror movie history tells us this probably isn’t a good idea. Apparently disturbed by this independent woman off doing her own thing, four men harass her and eventually capture, rape and torture her in one of the longest, most horrific gang rape scenes in cinema. Jennifer seeks out her vengeance, however, brutally murdering the men, one by one...

Originally released in 1978 as Day of the Woman, reissued in 1980 as I Spit On Your Grave, Meir Zarchi’s rape and revenge flick stirred up some pretty strong reactions. Roger Ebert famously referred to it as “a vile bag of garbage...so sick, reprehensible, and contemptible” that it could be considered as nothing more than “an expression of the most diseased and perverted darker human natures.” Ebert concluded that “because it is made artlessly, it flaunts its motives: There is no reason to see this movie except to be entertained by the sight of sadism and suffering.”

This was not a singular opinion. Many fans and critics alike lumped the film in with other exploitation films of the time rather than considering it as a reaction to those very films. I Spit On Your Grave remained banned in many countries until the late 90s, and certainly it’s still not without controversy. The film received some critical reconsideration, however, when Carol Clover addressed it in "Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Film" in 1992 as a film that, despite her own difficulty in watching, “at least problematizes the issue of male (sexual) violence” (115). In her survey of viewers of the film, she found that one woman “went so far as to call it a radical feminist film; another (male) found it such a devastating commentary on male rape fantasies and also on the way male group dynamics engender violence that he thought it should be compulsory viewing for high school boys” (115-116).

On the other hand, as Clover points out, the film was relegated to the category of “video nasties” taken to trial in Britain, opponents arguing that the film glorified rape and even encouraged copycat crimes (116). As the film garnered more viewers when it hit video, due in part to this very controversy, Mick Martin and Marsha Porter in the 1987 edition of Video Movie Guide lambasted it as “an utterly reprehensible picture with shockingly misplaced values” that rather than exposing the horror of violence against women, instead took “more joy in presenting its heroine’s degradation than her victory” (704). Admittedly, you would be hard-pressed to find a more lengthy, brutal series of rapes in one film, unless there’s something I’m missing out on (and defender of I Spit On Your Grave that I am, I think I’d prefer to stop there).

In 2007, however, Michael Kaminski came out with a piece featured at Obsessed With Film entitled “Is I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE Really a Misunderstood Feminist Film?” In his essay, Kaminski argued that I Spit On Your Grave may just be “the most misunderstood film of all time.” He suggests that the film was, in fact, about “both personal expression and wish fulfillment, a very personal film and one that ought to be considered an example of feminist cinema in many ways. It is one about real-life female victimization and, in some twisted sense, about female empowerment.” I suspect that these mixed reactions will recur with Monroe’s release, and this may be the most compelling reason to welcome the remake. It will be interesting to see how I Spit On Your Grave is written and received in this particular moment in our culture and in horror.

Camille Keaton in the original role
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Were you familiar with the original film before you took the part?

I actually wasn’t at all. I had never heard of it. But then, of course, after I booked it, I decided it’d be good to rent it! I’d heard enough about it then that I kind of guarded myself before I watched it because I knew it was going to be difficult to watch. And it was.

First of all, when you think of watching an exploitation film, you’re like, “okay, this is going to be shocking” – I mean, that’s the whole point of an exploitation film, I think. And then I knew the storyline, obviously, from our film and I knew it was going to be difficult, plus everyone had told me – the director, the producer – “we’re toning down the nudity and stuff... she’s pretty much naked the whole movie” – and I’m like, “oh, jeez,” and they were so right about it. I mean, from the time she pulls up at the cabin, she runs back to the pond or the lake or whatever, strips off her clothes and jumps in. It’s like, “oh wow, okay, here we go!”

So I watched it, and when I finished watching it, I realized that my whole body was clenched. It happened a few times while I was watching it where I sort of had to relax all my muscles because it was just so intense. Plus, then I was also thinking, “I’m going to have to do this,” so it made it more personal. All in all, I was excited to see the extremes I would have to go to. That’s a cool thing for an actor to be able to do.

Did you have a moment when you questioned “did I really just take on this role?” as you were watching?

Yeah, definitely. But I tried to just remember my faith in our director, Steven (Monroe), and things that he told me. Also, after booking the role, we sat down and had some coffee and talked about things and I was just really relieved by the fact that he was a completely normal guy. He came onto the project – he was hired by CineTel – and it’s kind of one of those things that if this had been someone’s “passion project,” I would have been a little bit questioning their personality, you know what I mean? You don’t know about someone with something they’re really into. And Steven made it his passion, but that was because he was hired to do a job and do it right. It was a huge relief to see that he was just a normal guy - young beautiful family; his wife came to set with their son a couple of times. They were there in Louisiana for like a week or so. Of course, they only came on days that we weren’t doing any of the really tough material. But no, he’s just such a family guy, and it really made me feel a lot more comfortable doing the material.

That makes sense. It’d be a little different if it was some sort of sketchy-looking director asking you to take your clothes off...

Exactly! But everyone was so cool, you know, and that goes for the crew and the cast as well. Everyone was very protective of me while we were shooting and making sure that I always had everything I needed. At one point, one of the prop girls gave me this huge Hershey’s chocolate bar after we finished filming one of the rape scenes. She says, “Here, I just thought this would make you feel better after today.” Which is sweet! Everyone was always looking out and made shooting something that could have been so difficult and so uncomfortable a way better experience than I could’ve hoped for.

When the original film first came out, it definitely got a lot of mixed responses. People were horrified, disgusted, but then some people came to see it as a sort of feminist film. What are your thoughts on that from your experience filming this new version and watching the original?

I don’t know. I’ve heard a lot of that debate. I guess it just depends... if you start the movie halfway through, then yeah, maybe! Because you get to see Jennifer controlling these men and delivering justice, empowering herself and thus women in general. But the sacrifices that she had to go through to get to that point – I think for me, it was more of a personal journey of my character. Going from being a normal woman – a young woman on the verge of a great career, having everything going for her, never believing that anything like this could ever happen to her – and then just the shock of, “Oh my God, this really did happen to me.” And so she finally gets to the point where life isn’t worth living anymore. She throws herself off a bridge. When she doesn’t die after doing that, I think it’s just kind of like, “Oh my God, what am I going to do? I can never go back to a normal life.” I think she still has to fight her human urges to want to forgive these guys, not to want to hurt them. There’s a moment in the film where you’ll see, right before the torture and the murders, she wants to be able to move past it but she knows she can’t. It’s more like this personal journey of the loss of meaning of life after this trauma than a feminist film. It’s not like, “Go women! We can overpower men!” It’s almost more like it’s the very sad truth of what happens to a woman whose life can never be the same again.

Did you find it hard coming home at the end of the day to shake off that character? When you were finished filming, did it hang around, or were you able to separate yourself from it?

You know, I found that I had to separate myself from it because I was so exhausted, shooting at least twelve hours a day in this extreme emotional state. I would try to stay in that state all day long. Even if it was lunch, I tried to go to my trailer and just stay there because once I’m in the zone, I’m in the zone, but by the end of the day, that became really exhausting. Most of the time at the end of the day, all of us would head back to our hotel, and we had a great place to stay where they would give free hot dinners on Monday through Thursday, and they had free beer and wine, and we’d all hang out in the lobby and relax and eat and drink, and even sometimes hit up the hot tub in the courtyard! All just to kind of shake it off because each day is a long day, and you have to give yourself a break in between. At least, that’s what works for me.

There’s been a lot of talk already surrounding this film. I know I’ve heard the reaction, “why in the world would anyone remake this film?!” Either because they don’t see how it can be topped or just why someone would want to take on something so intense. Can you speak to that at all, from your perspective or the director’s? Why remake this movie now? When it was filmed the first time, it was definitely in dialogue with a lot of other exploitation films. Do you feel there’s any reason why we would be seeing a movie like this right now?

Well, I imagine it was thought up by CineTel – I know they acquired the rights a few years ago. For sure, producing companies have on their mind money, and in this marketplace, in the genres that are popular today in film, I think this movie does really fit in, especially with modifications we’ve made, increasing the torture element. You know, we’ve got things like Hostel and Saw that are very popular right now. People’s tolerance has gone up for this kind of stuff, and the more shocking, the better. I feel that probably when CineTel acquired the rights, they were thinking big bucks. This is definitely in the vein of what horror fans want to see nowadays.

The cool part is that I think the modifications that have been made from the original do more than just update the story to the modern times. It’s also kind of like we’ve perfected a film that had the bare bones there and had some sparkling moments, but it’s not conventional in the way that Hollywood and the main public want it to be. So with the addition of the sheriff character and the torture element, and then a lot of stuff was done with more modern camera techniques, with the camera being handheld. That kind of thing will bring it up to speed with all of these other films. Besides those technical aspects, I’m definitely really impressed with the casting of this film. All the guys that I worked with were so amazing in their roles, and I admire their careers and their performances so much. I think we got the chance with this movie to remake a movie that may not have gotten the best reviews, but it definitely got into people’s heads and stayed there for years – people still remember it. And we got the chance to take that and use the name of that film and those bare bones and flesh it out and make it something better, something that shines. You rarely have the chance to do that, to remake a movie and make it better, and I feel like everyone involved here feels like we’ve done that. I think that’s pretty much the motivation of everyone else involved – “let’s perfect this.”

How was it switching from being the victim to becoming the one who wields this kind of vengeance?

It was like being a completely different character! It was like I had wrapped one movie, and I was starting another movie the next week. It was strange. And it was scary because, you know, playing a victim, I had gotten so used to it, and I’d basically been doing it for two weeks straight. I got the chance to really hone those skills – getting those tear ducts in shape – and being able to just be real and responsive, very scared of the things that were happening to my character. I had gotten used to it, and I was like, “Cool, I can cry, I can be scared, because it’s creepy, it’s not hard!” But then real acting chops had to come into play in that second half. I had all of the dialogue, I had all of the action, I had to control the scenes. And not only that, but I had to do it from a perspective that I hadn’t played in three weeks or a month since I had booked the role. I hadn’t really visited that character or that state of mind in a while. So I was scared – “Am I going to be able to do this?”

But actually what got me into it was the night before we started shooting all those torture scenes, all the guys and I were in one of the hotel rooms, and kind of winding down for the night and getting ready for the next day, and one of them just all of a sudden had an idea. Like, “How are you going to play this scene with Johnny or whatever?” And they were throwing out ideas and I wanted to listen and take in what they had to say because I respect them, but at the same time I was like, “Well, you know, this is really my choice.” It’s my character, and I want to be able to make this what I want it to be, and some of the stuff they said, I was not in agreement with. So I tried to say, “Nooo, I don’t think so, guys,” and I’m kind of going from this different perspective. And they kind of challenged me on that. It was weird. I got very upset, and I got angry, and I was thinking in my head, “They have no right to tell me this. This is my choice.” So I decided to just get up and leave. And the thought actually crossed my mind, “Oh, if I’m upset at them right now, I should just hold onto it. If I’m still upset tomorrow, it’s really going to help me!” And one of the other actors, Danny Franzese, the next day he told me that they actually did know that they had screwed up, and they felt really bad and they wanted to chase me down the hall, but they thought to themselves, because they had the exact same thought, “Hey, she’s mad at us! That will give her great motivation!” I think it worked. I know that they were shocked at the anger and deep emotions that I was able to pull out. They had never seen it before.

That’s kind of an interesting correlation. Like, why should they get to influence how you torture them or react to them?

I know, right? I almost feel like maybe they had thought of that. I had the thought cross my mind, “Oh, did they plot that out?” You know, a couple of them are pretty method, and they might have thought of something like that! I love them all dearly, though - that was one night out of three weeks of our time together.

So everybody made up at the end of the day? There were no extra-hard, real punches or stabbings during the filming after that?

[laughs] No, no, definitely not! That could’ve gotten dangerous.

Was there stunt work involved in those kinds of scenes? What was it like for you as an actress to take on a more violent, active role? Have you done that before?

Ironically enough, I’ve get cast as these double-sided girls all the time. Either they seem really nice but they have a dark side or ulterior motives, or in this case, someone who does start out as a really nice girl and changes into a really vengeful, angry person. In that respect, it’s kind of in my ballpark.

Technically, though, speaking of the torture scenes, there was a lot more to deal with because there were a lot of special effects, makeup, and props – and a lot of the props were real, real knives and other things that could be potentially dangerous. Of course they built them to a certain degree, but in order to act out scenes like that, you’ve got to really believe it and go full-out. Sometimes we would have to stop and the stunt coordinator would come over and say, “Okay, so you need to think of something that Danny can say when you’re torturing him, some kind of safe word, and if he says it, we have to stop immediately.” We always had something like that in all of those scenes to make sure, despite the fact that, regardless, they were going to be uncomfortable. I mean, these guys are just being tied up in strange positions, and they’re going to be uncomfortable, regardless – they’re in like the same position twelve hours a day. But we tried to make it as comfortable as we could by using safe words and that kind of thing. It was very interesting. It was difficult and challenging, for sure - a lot of elements involved.

What do you anticipate the average female audience’s reaction to be to this film? I know that’s a pretty big question.

No, I’ll tell you what I want, what I’m going for. I want every woman who watches to stop and follow me through this journey, to be able to identify with every emotion that I go through in the film. And if it was up to me, I would love for every woman in the audience to stand up and cheer when I get my revenge on these men! I want them to be right there with me. As much as I personally don’t want revenge and violence, I still want them to understand why I had to do what I did. I’m sure that women who go through really tough situations, being abused and violated in their life, I’m sure every single woman at one point has a fantasy of what they want to do to these guys to get back at them for what they did. And I’m sure many women have fantasized about torturing a man who has abused her, and as much as we all know that may not be the right thing to do, it appeals somehow to that urge, that fantasy to get revenge. I think it must cross every single one of their minds, even if they’re a better person and dismiss it.

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a gruesome scene of a woman's revenge

It will be interesting to see what kinds of reactions the new film evokes, in fans and opponents of the first as well as new audiences, women and men alike. I’m definitely with Sarah on this one – I think that the film has the potential to be somewhat therapeutic, in its own way. Genre movies allow us to explore fantasies that we don’t always get to – or even want to – otherwise, and the desire to see eye-for-an-eye justice served out in these situations is hardly uncommon. In fact, in the millennium edition of I Spit On Your Grave DVD, Zarchi got the chance to set the record straight about his own thoughts on and motivations behind the film. Zarchi claims that the story was inspired by an event in his own life in 1974. Driving past a park, he spotted a young woman emerging from the woods, clothes torn and bloody, telling Zarchi that she had been attacked and raped. He wasn’t sure whether to take her to the hospital or to the police first and, sadly, made the mistake of driving her to the police office. There, he says that the officers were unsympathetic, forcing the girl to answer questions even as her jaw appeared broken. Zarchi eventually stepped in and demanded that he be able to take her to a hospital. Horrified by the violence inflicted upon the young woman and disgusted at the manner in which the law handled the situation, Zarchi wrote Day of the Woman, giving this woman a chance at vengeance.

What always struck me about the film may seem somewhat strange. Certainly the rape and violence horrified me. I have never since watched a film in which I have been so emotionally and bodily uncomfortable. There was no turning away, no forgetting, and no mercy – Zarchi’s terror is relentless, from rape to revenge, both equally disturbing even as I inwardly cheered Jennifer on too.

By no means do I intend to belittle the extreme physical and sexual violence that the character of Jennifer experienced – it dominated my own experience of the film - but I can still recall my gut-wrenching reaction to the destruction of her manuscript. A lesser form of rape but disturbing nonetheless. It only served to compound for me how completely these men degraded Jennifer, reducing her to nothing more than a body, and a body that was no longer even hers. Her life, her career, her creativity, her will, her independence – everything was ripped to shreds.

When I heard of the remake and began to think about writing something on it for Pretty/Scary, I couldn’t help but come back to this idea of a strong woman following her dreams, and how desperately I had wanted her to succeed in her revenge, even as I shuddered and felt my stomach twist. I’m rarely shy of blood, guts, gore, and even torture, but even now, I Spit On Your Grave shakes me up, and I can only hope that the new film will accomplish this as well, despite, or because of, the changes Sarah has mentioned. And most of all, I look forward to her performance, and I wish her the best of luck in her own journey as an actress!

According to IMDb, the film will receive a September 2010 release.

Watch the original trailer:

Sources:

Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Ebert, Roger. RogerEbert.Com. 16 July 1980. Accessed 19 Dec 2009.

Kaminski, Michael. “Is I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE REALLY A FEMINIST FILM?” Obsessed with Film. 29 Oct 2007. Accessed 19 December 2009.

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