Barbara Creed and Abjection Theory in I

Spit On Your Grave (1978)

By Na Ma, Ohio University

Abstract

This article applies Julia Kristeva and Barbara Creeds abjection theory to the analysis of Meir
Zarchis movie I Spit On Your Grave (1978). Most critics view this film as ugly, violent and
terrifying. This paper addresses four aspects of abjection application: abomination, border,
maternal figure and castration crisis. Especially from the maternal figure and border aspects, this
paper identifies Jennifers doubling and the males identity with this females victimhood and
monstrosity. I will use specific scenes to explain the abjection, the first part from the rape scenes
and the second part from the revenge scenes. This paper also examines the characteristics of
monstrous feminine in this controversial horror film from the following contents: graphic violence,
nudity, obscene language, and lengthy depictions of gang rape.

Keywords: monstrous feminine, abjection, abomination, border, maternal figure

From Kristeva to Creed: Maternal Abjection in I Spit On Your Grave (1978)

I Spit On Your Grave is not a mainstream male-based vision of brutalization and violence,
because this film takes the female point of view, casting Jennifer as a feminist heroine. Jennifer
is a sympathetic victim during the rape scenes, but her sudden and silent return, brutal acts of
vengeance and the determination throughout her revenge are monstrous.

I Spit On Your Grave: Too Ugly?

The plot of I Spit On Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978) runs as follows: a female writer named
Jennifer (Camille Keaton) leaves New York City, and escapes to a secluded lakeside cabin near
the Housatonic River in Connecticut to spend the summer working on her latest novel. There
she attracts the attention of four local men who capture Jennifer, and subject her to a series of
brutal rapes over twenty-five minutes. This onslaught of abuse and degradation comprises the
films first half and the rape itself takes up to twenty-five minutes of screen-time. Matthew
(Richard Pace), a mentally challenged virgin, unable to kill her as instructed by the gangs leader
Johnny (Eron Tabor), coats a knife in her blood to lead the others into believing her dead, and
leaves her in the cabin. Jennifer slowly recovers from the attack and starts her revenge. She
hangs Matthew, castrates Johnny, kills Stanley (Anthony Nichols) with an axe, and Andy (Gunter
Kleemann) with a boat propeller. Meanwhile the camcorder footage Stanley (Daniel Franzese)
shoots, positions the perspective briefly with the gang and highlights Jennifers discomfort by
having her effectively address the camera.

Here is the short review on the backcover about I Spit On Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978):

Banned for 17 years by the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification, the original,
uncut version of I Spit On Your Grave has long been called too ugly, too violent and too terrifying
to watch. Others have called it powerful and superb cinema. Judge For Yourself.
Film critic Joe Bob Briggs comments on the cult classic rape/revenge film, I Spit On Your
Grave (Meir Zarchi,1978): What were going to decide here is whether this is the most disgusting
movie ever made or is it the most feminist movie ever made? He thought that such films,
alongside the general trend in slasher films in the early 1980s, would foster a desire in the
audience for rape and violence against women, even concluding that the members of the
audience around him were nothing more than vicarious sex criminals. (Fidler, p. 42).

Roger Ebert writes, I Spit On Your Grave is sick, reprehensible and contemptible. Attending it
was one of the most depressing experiences of my life. Mick Martin and Marsha Porter wrote:
An utterly reprehensible motion picture with shockingly misplaced values one of the most
tasteless, irresponsible, and disturbing movies ever made.

Abjection

Kristevas notion of the abject defines films figuration of woman-as-monster, which disturbs
identity, system, order and does not respect borders, positions, rules. (p. 274). One example
is Medusas head. According to Freud, Medusas decapitated head represents woman as a
being who frightens and repels because she is castrated (p.74). Generally, her theory discusses
abjection relating to her notions of (a) the abomination (b) the border (b) the mother-child
relationship.

Barbara Creed thinks the problem with Kristevas theory, particularly for feminists, is that she
never makes clear her position on the oppression of women. Kristevas theory moves uneasily
between explanation of, and justification for, the formation of human societies based on the
subordination of women. Creed has links to the Australian Womens Movement, and works within
a psychoanalytic framework derived from Sigmund Freud and the semiotic theorist Julia Kristeva.

In one scene in I Spit On Your Grave Jennifer arrives at the lake-house, then wanders around
the forest in a red dress and takes her dress off to dip into the water. Such a scene, where the
lead actress exposes herself for the camera, is an example of Laura Mulveys concept of the
male gaze: A woman performs within the narrative: the gaze of the spectator and that of the
male characters in the film are neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude. When
the nude Jennifer wades into the water in long-shot within this gaze, Zarchi describes the scene
in the script:

Exterior. River. Day. At last Jennifer has found the heavenly peace she was seeking. At last she
feels free from the confinement and commotion of the big city. She has returned to natures
womb. Awed by the beauty of the place she eagerly takes her clothes off and goes into the
water. (Fidler, p.46)

For Creed (1993), in I Spit on Your Grave, woman-as-victim is represented as an abject thing,
while man-as-victim is not degraded and humiliated.

Creed has extended feminist insights on many aspects of postmodern culture. She has produced
an extremely influential analysis of patriarchal ideology in the horror genre, which bonds with
visions of woman as the monstrous feminine. In her book The Monstrous-Feminine: Film,
Feminism, Psychoanalysis (2001), she outlines Kristevas theory of abjection and elaborates
structures of horror and female monstrosity in films such as The Exorcist (1973), Alien (1979),
and The Hunger (1983).

Rape: Feminine Body Abominations

Images of abjection in horror film include the corpse, whole and mutilated, followed by an array
of bodily wastes such as blood, vomit, saliva, sweat, tears and putrefying flesh.

In the notions of religious and historical abjection, according to Kristeva, there are several
religious abominations: sexual immorality and perversion; corporeal alteration, decay and
death; human sacrifices; murder; the corpse; bodily wastes; the feminine body and incest. In I
Spit On Your Grave, the most abominational forms are sexual immorality and the feminine body.

The battered, bruised, and nude Jennifer struggles through the woods where she has been
abandoned, walking to the house in a protracted sequence that underlines her weakness and
injuries. Crawling on the carpet inside the house, Zarchi springs another surprise when Paul
stomps on the phone and it is revealed the quartet of men are also inside, awaiting her return.
The third gang-rape involves the retarded Matthew finally submitting to both peer pressure and
his own desires, beginning to rape her before halting on account of impotence. When Stanley is
about to proceed with his turn at rape, Jennifer finally speaks, begging him not to as she is hurt.
While she offers to pleasure him with her hand or mouth, Stanleys mounting frustration develops
as he holds a bottle of wine close to her body (Filder, p. 46).

During the second gang-rape where the gang forces Jennifer down onto a rock, while Andy
proceeds to anally penetrates her, Jennifer screams loudly. The screaming sound is also another
form of abomination, making the audience uncomfortable.

The director Meir Zarchi has merged the visual abuse with the audio details of this real life case
in the third gang-rape of Jennifer. The camera follows the nude and violated Jennifer as she
slowly crawls away from each encounter:

She was a young woman, around eighteen or nineteen, totally naked, a walking corpse covered
in mud and blood. She was still in shock and struggled to talk through her broken jaw (Filder,
p.50).

Various sub-genres of the horror film correspond to religious categories of abjection. For
instance, blood as a religious abomination becomes a form of abjection in the splatter
movie (Texas Chainsaw Massacre); cannibalism, another religious abomination, is central to the
meat movie (Night of the Living Dead, The Hills Have Eyes); the corpse as abomination
becomes the abject of ghoul and zombie movies (The Evil Dead; Zombie Flesheaters); blood as
a taboo object within religion is central to the vampire film (The Hunger) as well as the horror film
in general (Bloodsucking Freaks); human sacrifice as a religious abomination is constructed as
the abject of virtually all horror films; and bodily disfigurement as a religious abomination is also
central to the slash movie, particularly those in which woman is slashed, the mark a sign of her
difference, her impurity (Dressed to Kill, Psycho).

Revenge: Monstrous Feminine

This film is told from Jennifers point of view so that there is no sense of sharing the rapists
pleasure, particularly during the last of the grisly rapes; as Briggs remarks, I dont think this scene
makes you think of anything except Castrate those guys immediately (Filder,p.52).

Jennifers revenge is to kill the men in a way similar to how the men had tortured her during the
rape scenes. Matthew is seduced into the woods by Jennifer, with a promise that she can give
him a summer to remember for the rest of your life. Jennifer encourages him to penetrate her
before she tightens a noose around his neck when Matthew orgasms. Andys face was dunked
in a lye bath as revenge for his attempted drowning of Jennifer in a dirty puddle. Voyeur Stanley,
who filmed the scene of Jennifer being raped, has his eyelids pulled with fishing hooks and his
eyeballs smeared with fish guts to be eaten by crows, while his own camera records his torture.

The shower scene in I Spit On Your Grave is the most brutal scene. Like the shower scene
in Psycho, the vulnerability of bathing and being exposed physically to the penetration of a knife,
is present.

Zarchi draws out the tension in quick details: a sudden flick of Jennifers hand, Jennifer strokes
his penis off-screen in the bathtub water, Johnny mistaking the pain for pleasure, the bloody
knife being thrown into a sink. In the beginning as Jennifer explains how she has murdered
Matthew, Johnny laughs derisively, believing it to be a bad joke. With Johnnys eyes closed,
Zarchi cuts to a close-up of a folded towel on the bathroom floor and to Jennifer picking up a
sharp knife with her free hand, and Johnny finally grasping the horror of his situation, screaming,
What have you done to me? As blood pumps profusely from his crotch, Jennifer walks out and
locks the door behind her, letting him bleed to death.

Borders: Vomit, Dichotomy between City and Country, and Ambiguity

Images of blood, vomit, pus, feces, etc., are central to our culturally/ socially constructed notions
of the horrific. In terms of Kristevas notion of the border, the expression made me sick and
scared the shit out of me foreground the specific horror film as a work of abjection or abjection
at work in both a literal and metaphoric sense. The horror film signifies a desire not only for
perverse pleasure (confronting sickening, horrific images being filled with terror/desire for the
undifferentiated) but also a desire, having taken pleasure in perversity, to throw up, throw out,
eject the abject (from the safety of the spectators seat). In this movie, after Matthew rapes
Jennifer, we see him throwing up immediately.

Abjection separates the human from the non-human and the fully constituted subject from the
partially formed subject. On the one hand, the images of Matthews vomit threaten the constituted
subject (the other four men who are still torturing Jennifer) in relation to the symbolic whole and
proper (the pleasure of Matthew completing his masculinity by rape). They fill the subject
Jennifer and the other four men in the movie and the spectator in the cinemawith disgust and
loathing. On the other hand, they imply the fusion between mother and nature existed
(Matthews lost virginity); when vomit, while set apart from the body, is not seen as an object of
embarrassment and shame.

According to Creed, the concept of a border is central to the construction of the monstrous in the
horror film; that which crosses or threatens to cross the border is abject. Although the specific
nature of the border is different in different films, the function of the monstrous is to bring about
an encounter between the symbolic order and that which threatens its stability.

In this movie, the dichotomy between the city and country is a border. It amplifies the differences
between the educated and affluent Jennifer and her hillbilly rapists. This border has become the
four mens insecurities and ultimately used as their excuse for attacking her.

Youre from an evil place, Matthew tells Jennifer upon their first meeting, after Hills rewards
him with what she refers to as a big tip from an evil New Yorker for delivering her groceries.
We are reminded of Jennifers city status through her internal monologue as she works on her
book, and the assumptions that the men draw from this during the harrowing rape scenes, where
Andy, mocking her unfinished manuscript as he tears up the pages, exclaims New York broads
sure fuck a lot (Mee, p.80).
The men think Jennifers existence threatens their stability because of her superiority. But
Jennifer never thinks herself superior to any of the four men. No scene shows her boasting her
big-city superior over the small town. Her initial banter with Johnny is friendly. The men,
however, believe what they perceive to be snobbishness on Hillss part: before forcing her to
drink liquor during her ordeal, Johnny asks her you too good to have a drink with us? What are
we to you, bunch of dirt? Therefore, the rapes are the groups way of teaching the stuck up city
bitch a lesson and an attempt to put her back in what they see to be her place.

Ambiguity is a very important characteristic in the border experience. In this movie, the difference
between fictional narration and true event is very ambiguous. The audience can feel this border,
especially during the rape scenes. Reacting to the action in the rape scene, the film has the
power to disturb the audiences ability to tell what is real and what is pretending.

Another ambiguity is the emphasis on pleasure of violence or the pleasure of sex in the rape
scenes. In the first rape scene, one technique the film has used to de-eroticize the rape scene
is the different angles of close-ups. There are close-ups on the rapists face in but medium close-
ups on Jennifers face, so that the audience can only see the rapists evil face instead of
Jennifers suffering. Assaulting Jennifer to take revenge on Jennifer and step down her
confidence/priority as a city bitch instead of sex pleasure, as Fielder (2009) states, the audience
would take the side of the rapists against Jennifer (p.49). In the second rape scene, the film
has de-escalated the violence of the rape scene and weakened the monstrous masculine image.
The camera follows most of Jennifers naked body: walking to the woods with dirty and bloody
body, and then being raped with her naked body instead of rapists buttocks on top of her body.
There is no sympathizing with the gang-rapists, and it is not a pretty sight (Fielder, p.50). The
naked body is a sexual attraction, but dirty and bloody naked body makes Jennifer not an erotic
object; her body is for only violence and revenge instead of for sex pleasure, the normal use of
female body as Mulvey (1975) always says.

In some horror films the monstrous is produced at different borders: between human and in-
human, man and beast (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Creature from the Black Lagoon, King
Kong); between the normal and the supernatural, good and evil (Carrie, The Exorcist, The
Omen, Rosemarys Baby); between those who take up their proper gender roles and those who
do not (Psycho, Dressed to Kill, Reflection of Fear); or between normal and abnormal sexual
desire (Cruising, The Hunger, Cat People).

Maternal Figure

One of the key figures of abjection is the mother who becomes an abject at that moment when
the child rejects her for the father who represents the symbolic order. Kristeva refers to the
construction of the maternal figure as abject. She argues that all individuals experience abjection
during their earliest attempts to break away from the mother. The child struggles to break free,
but the mother is reluctant to release it. Thus Kristeva argues that the maternal body becomes
a site of conflicting desires. The position of the child is rendered more unstable because, while
the mother retains a close hold over the child, it can authenticate her existence an existence
which needs validation because of her problematic relation to the symbolic realm (p.14).

In this movie, Matthew functions as Jennifers son and fulfills Jennifers maternal figure. During
the rape scene, Matthew in some ways is the most sympathetic of the male offenders, continually
resistant to the idea of raping Jennifer and merely a product of the gangs peer pressure. During
the revenge scene, Jennifer lures Matthew by ordering groceries to be delivered to her house.
We see Matthew take a large butchers knife with him to either defend himself or to kill her.
Jennifer leads him through the forest and plans to kill him during the sex. She ties a noose
around his neck and eventually hangs him up until he is dead. The scene in which she caresses
Mathew is like a mother touching her lovely baby. The way she teaches Matthew to finally orgasm
and then kill him is like a maternal mother:

She only wants him to die at the moment of climax. That is how kinky this woman is. This will be
his first orgasm and his last. She will take his virginity at the same time she takes his life (Filer,
p. 55).

When Kristeva speaks of the subject who is being constituted, as Creed clarifies, she never
distinguishes between the male and female child. The female childs experience is different from
the males experience. The mother is aware of the differences between the masculine and the
feminine and might give a male child a more acute sense of pride and pleasure. Thus it is
difficult for the child to reject the mother for the father.

Initially refusing to take part in Jennifers humiliation, vulnerable Matthew only rapes Jennifer
after bullying from the other men and Johnnys threat to get your clothes off, Matthew, or Ill slice
her from chin to cunt. His attack on Hills is a direct attempt to save both Jennifer from this fate
and himself from a potential beating from Johnny and exclusion from the group. And yet, as we
have clearly established that Matthew both knows the act to be wrong (he verbally defends Hills,
refuses to participate in her assault until Johnnys warning, vomits immediately afterward in
disgust, and subsequently suffers flashbacks of the attacks) and ultimately physically, at least
enjoys it regardless of this fact (he orgasms), he must suffer the consequences of his
involvement. As Jennifer states before tightening a noose round his neck, in response to his
apologetic exclamations: its just not good enough (Mee, p. 81).

Creed (1993) continues to elaborate that Kristeva also does not distinguish between the relation
of the adult male and female subject to rituals of defilement. The following questions should be
asked: do women relate to rites of defilement, such as menstruation rites? Is it possible to
intervene in the social construction of woman as abject? Is the subjects relationship to the
processes of abjectivity unchangeable? Is the abjection of women a precondition for the
continuation of sociality? How do women see themselves in relation to taboos that construct their
functions as abject? Therefore Kristevas theory of abjection is an apology for the establishment
of sociality at the cost of womens equality (p.123).

Castrated and Castrator

In her study The Monstrous Feminine, Creed (1993) discusses Hills as being representative of
the all-powerful, all-destructive, deadly femme Castratrice (129). In her dual roles of both
symbolically castrated (through the act of rape) and literal castrator (with the emphasis on the
revenge), Jennifers revenge is justifiable and her actions are sympathetic. Yet, Creed argues,
the film remains misogynistic in spirit, due to the eroticized depiction of male torture, and its
resulting association of death with masochistic pleasure (Creed, 1993, p.130).

After having Johnny literally stare down the barrel of her gun, she chooses not to shoot him,
instead taking him back to the cabin. She masturbates him in the bath before severing his penis,
his initial reaction being to mistake pain for intense pleasure before he looks down to see his
arterial blood spurt forth. While the need to first seduce her rapists in order to kill them could be
some kind of feminist statement, perhaps the use of her body and sexuality as her ultimate
weapons, the way in which Jennifer lures her rapists to their eventual deaths is decisively
problematic not so much in the use of seduction to entrap her tormentors-turned-victims, but
in the fact that (and particularly in Matthews case) she follows through with the sexual acts
offered as allurement (Mee, p. 81).
Mee (2013) also thinks Johnny treats Jennifer like a show horse and commands her to show the
teeth and behave like an ornery stallion (p.80). Later, Jennifer pulls Johnnys teeth with pliers
and says, you know what they do to horses that cant be tamed, Johnny? They geld them, then
she cuts off Johnnys penis and ultimately castrates him.

Creed discusses the significance of pulling teeth in Freudian dream analysis, concluding that the
meaning of such an act, if the tooth represent the penis, could be interpreted as an act of
castration, intercourse or masturbation (1993, p. 11719). This association of castration with
sexual gratification again signifies a kind of symbolic masochistic pleasure, an element of the
original film that, as stated earlier, caused Creed to ultimately view it as a misogynistic text
(Creed 1993, p. 130).

Conclusions

While any potential feminist message in I Spit on Your Grave 1978 is confused by the
representation of its abjection as a monster, I would suggest that this is as a result of the need
and deliberate attempt to position the film within a contemporary genre context. Furthermore,
despite the near demonizing of Jennifer, this film interprets the perceived feminist agenda and
enhances the image of Jennifers maternal figure. Keatons Jennifer is a strong, smart and
determined female who survives from the violence and returns to avenge her violations. Julia
Kristeva (1982)s abjection theory and Barbara Creeds (1993) analyses of the 1978 film remain
the most useful in approaching the monstrous feminine issues.

Annotated Bibliography:

Briggs. J.B, (2002), commentary, I Spit On Your Grave DVD. Directed by Meir Zarchi (Force
Entertainment, 2004).

Film critic Joe Bob Briggs describes the cult classic rape/revenge film, I Spit On Your
Grave (1978) as either the most disgusting movie or the most feminist movie ever made. He
suggests that such films, alongside the general trend in slasher films in the early 1980s, would
foster a desire in the audience for rape and violence against women, even concluding that the
members of the audience around him were nothing more than vicarious sex criminals.

Creed. B. (1986). Horror and The Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection.

Creed has extended feminist insights on many aspects of postmodern culture. She has produced
an extremely influential analysis of patriarchal ideology in the horror genre, which bonds with
visions of woman as the monstrous feminine.
Chaudhuri, S. (2006). Feminist Film Theorists: Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de
Lauretis, Barbara Creed.

Chaudhuri analyzes the most popular film feminism theories by Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman,
Teresa de Lauretis, Barbara Creed and compares the differences.

Cixous, H. (1976). The laugh of the Medusa. Signs, 1(4), 875-893.

Cixous thinks the sight of the Medusas head makes the spectator stiff and turns him to stone,
and can be a female monsters weapon.

Fidler, T. (2009). They dont call em exploitation movies for nothing!: Joe Bob Briggs and the
critical commentary on I Spit on Your Grave. Text Theory Critique 18, 38-58.

Fidler analyze most critical commentary on the movie I Spit on Your Grave and did a comparison
between the 1978 version and 2010 version.

Force Entertainment, I Spit On Your Grave (DVD), (Australia: Force Entertainment, 2004, back
cover. Freud, S. (1905). Three Essays on Sexuality.

On the back cover of the movie I Spit On Your Grave: Banned for 17 years by the Australian
Office of Film and Literature Classification, the original, uncut version of I Spit On Your Grave has
long been called too ugly, too violent and too terrifying to watch. Others have called it a powerful
and superb cinema. Judge For Yourself.

Freud, S. (1981), Fetishism, On Sexuality, Harmondsworth, Penguin, Pelican Freud Library.

Freud thinks female fetishism is represented within many horror texts-as instances of patriarchal
signifying practices-but only in relation to male fears and anxieties about women. The
fetishisation of the mothers genitals could occur in those texts where the maternal figure is
represented in her phantasmagoric aspects as the gaping, voracious vagina/womb.

Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Leon S. Roudiez trans.) Columbia
University Press.

Kristeva proposed the concept of abjection. As a source of horror, abjection works within
patriarchal societies, separating the human from the non-human and the fully constituted subject
from the partially formed subject. One of the key figures of abjection is the mother who becomes
an abject at that moment when the child rejects her for the father who represents the symbolic
order.

Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.

Mulveys concept of the male gaze subsequently became the main talking point of feminist film
debate. Here Mulvey argues that the controlling gaze in cinema is always male. She proposes
that narrative cinema produces the male as agent of the look and the female as the object of
spectacle through mechanisms of voyeurism and fetishism.

Mick Martin and Marsha Porter, Video Movie Guide: 1987, (New York: Ballantine, 1986), 704.
The authors both find the movie I Spit On Your Grave disgusting, especially Jennifers screaming
during the second gang-rape. The screaming has made the audience very uncomfortable.

Mee, L. (2013), The re-rape and revenge of Jennifer Hills: Gender and genre in I Spit On Your
Grave (2010), Horror Studies 4: 1, pp. 7589, doi: 10.1386/ host.4.1.75_1

Mee mostly compares I Spit On Your Grave between the 1978 version and the 2010 remake,
and thinks the 2010 remakes is a more successful one, which has described Jennifers feminine
monstrosity in a reasonable way.

Roger E. (2011), I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie.

Robert lists several reasons explaining why he does not like the 1978 version of I Spit On Your
Grave, and strongly criticizes the director Meir Zarchi.