There is perhaps no horror subgenre more controversial than the rape-revenge film. Many feel disgusted or uncomfortable at the depiction of sexual violence in film, claiming it plays into a male fantasy of violence against women. However, the genre also has a devoted female following, and to denote those fans of the genre as operating from a place of internalized misogyny would be reductive. In House of Psychotic Women, horror journalist and filmmaker Kier-La Janisse describes her enjoyment of the rape-revenge genre through the lens of catharsis:
“It’s been said a million times that horror films are meant to be cathartic, and that we put ourselves through the terror as a means of symbolically overcoming something that we are afraid of. And for women, we’re taught that nothing is more terrifying than that of the ever-present threat of rape.”
Reading this, I was inspired to think of my own relationship with sexual violence on screen. While it’s not necessarily something I seek out, I adore Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale and Mitchell Lichtenstein’s Teeth. On the other hand, I had never been more disturbed than when I was watching Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left, and I frequently skip over the rape scene in the Soska Sisters’ American Mary. For me, I am able to enjoy the film so long as the assailants are framed as pathetic, and the act dissatisfactory. It is only when the rape scene feels satisfactory to a male power fantasy that I find it disturbing.
One film that always stands out to me is Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge. Revenge possesses all the tropes of the rape-revenge genre: violence, transformation, justice, etc. However, the film is unique in that it is not an exploration of rape and revenge itself, but rather their depictions in film. Revenge functions as a cinematic response to the rape-revenge film genre, utilizing the male gaze and haptic visuality, both styles of filmmaking typically intended for erotic sensibility, to subvert the ways in which sexual violence is portrayed on screen. In doing so, the film posits that the voyeuristic male gaze is a form of mutilation, and the inverse of this is not similarly voyeuristic filmmaking towards male bodies, but rather haptic visuality: a participatory technique through tactile and sensory-oriented filmmaking.
Act 1: The Male Gaze as Mutilation
The concept of the “male gaze” comes from Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema.” In it, she describes the male gaze as the phenomenon in which “pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy [sic] onto the female figure.” The female character’s sexuality is intertwined with her passivity, her objectification being the primary spectacle and narrative purpose of her character. Though Mulvey describes the male gaze as it functions through eroticism, she also creates a concept rooted in mutilation by basing it on Freud’s psychoanalytic ideology of the woman as symbolic of castration. In this first act of Revenge, we see the eroticism of the male gaze uprooted in such a way that violence begins to overtake visual pleasure.
Revenge opens like a music video, dripping with visual excess evocative of pop culture sexual fantasy. The two conventionally attractive leads descend upon a mansion in the desert in a montage of colors and skin. Jen (Matilda Lutz) beckons Richard (Kevin Janssen) seductively to meet her by the couch. She lifts her skirt, and we see a close-up of her lingerie-clad butt rubbing against his fully-clothed crotch. The nudity is not limited to Jen, though. Richard is seen fully nude from behind in this scene, and in the following scene, he places a call to his wife fully nude in a wide shot that is even more revealing. But Richard’s nudity is not treated the same as Jen’s. Whereas he is framed in wide shots, as receiving pleasure, Jen is shown through close-ups that emphasize her physical beauty. Richard is engaging actively in sex whereas Jen passively exists as an object of pleasure, even as she performs fellatio.
While Jen’s performance of sexuality is consensual here, this performance haunts her beyond the confines of this interaction. The morning after her and Richard’s arrival, Jen walks into the kitchen to get food. The camera follows her starting at her feet, panning up, and stopping finally at her waist, framing her red underwear in the center of the frame. The camera cuts up to her face briefly, showing that she is listening to music through earbuds, before immediately cutting back to her butt, her waist tilting towards the camera once she opens the fridge. We don’t see what is in the fridge, we don’t see her contemplating what she wants, we only see her body. This needless sexualization creates the lens of the male gaze without the scapegoat of a male character. By overtly sexualizing this character through the lens of the camera, Fargeat forces the audience to reckon with the way in which film does not always allow us to view women as more than sexual objects. We are confined to the view of the camera, and oftentimes the camera is the eye of heterosexual men. When Stan (Vincent Colombe) and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchede) arrive, Jen gasps, realizing that her walk to the refrigerator, which had been innocent in her mind, was in fact being watched. Her shock and embarrassment at the men’s gaze is then by proxy a reaction to our own viewing of her, as we did not see her body under the impression that we were looking from Stan and Dimitri’s perspective. They stare at each other for a moment; Jen stares in shock, the men in awe.
That night, the characters hang out around a pool. Jen is once again aware of how she is being perceived desirably by both the men and, subsequently, the audience. Unlike the kitchen scene of that morning, Jen is aware she is being watched and enjoys it, relishing in the performance of sexuality. It is possible, and even common, for women to perform sexuality and enjoy it; to enjoy being the object of desire and sexuality is not immoral, nor is it necessarily connected to sex. However, the camera does not allow us to see her sexuality as she sees herself, but rather how the men watching her see her. Rather than emphasizing Jen’s enjoyment of her sexuality, and her thrill of being an object of desire for these men, Fargeat focuses exclusively on the predatory lens through which the men are viewing her. In some cases, this lens is literal; one of the men has a pair of binoculars through which we see extreme close-ups of her lips, her ears, her breasts, etc.
Yet even throughout this scene, which functions as an elevated version of common images intended for pleasure, it feels uncomfortable. Mulvey claims in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” that the male gaze is also reliant on the male character being the “main controlling figure with whom the spectator can identify.” In Revenge, the main character we identify with is Jen, yet the film is still told exclusively through the spectatorship of the men. Through the title of the film, we know what is going to happen to her, and as such the context of the gaze is changed. The audience’s implicit knowledge of what is to come — that her sexualization will lead to an act of violence — makes the male gaze feel more like a butcher’s gaze. Each close-up is slicing her body into pieces, making it appear as delectable as possible before it is devoured.
The following morning, Richard has gone to run an errand, leaving Jen alone with Stan and Dimitri. The previous night, Jen and Stan shared an erotic dance, grinding on each other while the rest of the group watched. This morning, Stan continues to regard Jen as he did last night: acting overly excited to see her, his hand lingering too long on her waist as he rubs in sunscreen. But the performance of the previous night is over, and Jen is visibly uncomfortable with Stan’s behavior. Jen attempts to communicate her discomfort by not reciprocating Stan’s flirting. When he informs her “it’s just the two of us,” she simply smiles and takes out her phone. When Stan continues to stare at her, she excuses herself to pack her things. Later, Stan enters her room after she showers, staring at her as she gets dressed. She continues to be polite; after all, they are alone in this mansion in the desert, and he has not done anything explicitly predatory. He comes into her room and sits next to her on her bed. She is again visibly uncomfortable as he makes a more obvious move by giving her his business card and asking her to call him.
Rape-revenge films tend to emphasize the spectacle of sexual violence. They show the nitty-gritty of how these women are brutalized in order to justify their subsequent revenge. By contrast, Fargeat instead focuses the rape scene in Revenge on the social aspects leading up to rape. There is no moment when it would have made sense for Jen to become assertive and harsh towards Stan. Stan frames his predatory behavior with false politeness, and any harshness in Jen’s response could have garnered the response of “I was just being polite.” Especially given Jen’s isolation in this house, we understand the desire to placate the men around her. For a film that focuses so heavily on fantasy, it is notable that this scene is depicted as realistically as possible. Many rape-revenge films feature random acts of violence from strange men, a distinct separation from reality, where the majority of rape victims know their attacker. Revenge keeps its audience trapped alongside Jen in this moment, where Stan exerts more social power than physical, in order to get what he wants. The act of rape itself is shown only through a few brief shots that keep the majority of the violence out of frame.
The events following the act happen very fast. Richard arrives home and, upon finding out what happened, offers Jen money and a job in Canada in exchange for her silence. Naturally upset at this narcissistic and apathetic offer, Jen threatens to inform Richard’s wife of their affair, and Richard slaps her to the ground in response. When Richard turns away, she runs out the door and into the desert. The three men follow her, cornering her finally on the edge of a cliff. Richard pretends to call the helicopter to pick her up, before suddenly pushing Jen off the cliff where she is impaled by a dried-up tree, suspended in mid-air, and left for dead.
Act 2: Resurrection
This middle section of the film is often what garners the most criticism; that her surviving the injury is unrealistic, that her peyote trip is too outlandish, or that her beer-can branding and subsequent wardrobe change into a gun-slinging bikini-clad warrior woman caters to heterosexual male fantasy. Each of these, however, is an important element in the film’s positioning in the context of rape-revenge cinema. Rape-revenge cinema often overlooks the physical injuries sustained by rape in favor of exploring the subsequent psychological effects. So, what makes this film unique is that it is willing to show its heroine physically mutilated and not simply psychologically damaged. But it goes deeper than that. Cinema has a tendency to view rape as a fate worse than death. After a rape, a woman becomes hardened, defined solely by her trauma, and hunts for revenge. Her previous self is gone, replaced by a singularly focused fighting machine. This is perhaps because it is more palatable to focus on punishing “bad apples” than it is to focus on the trauma inflicted upon rape victims both during and after the assault. So, just as the film has made overt and literal the implications of the male gaze, Fargeat takes this resurrection element of rape-revenge a step further as well, elevating the implied fantasy to a literal one. We, the audience, are not spared the pain, confusion, and fear that Jen experiences following her attack. We follow alongside Jen as she dies, traverses through hell, and is resurrected into her revenge-seeking persona.
After pushing Jen off the cliff and watching her get impaled, the men attempt to cover up the evidence that she was ever with them and move on with their trip. They believe that she is dead. When we cut back to Jen’s body impaled on the tree, we do not see her whole body. Rather, the camera first focuses on the blood dripping off of her, and the ants crawling on her skin. It is almost as though this sequence teaches the audience how to engage in haptic visuality.
Haptic visuality is a term coined by scholar Laura Marks. In essence, haptic visuality is when an image emphasizes not the visuality, but the physical sensations of touch, smell, and taste that are evoked from the screen. She states, “In haptic visuality, the organs themselves function like organs of touch.” Marks talks about how haptic visuality exists in opposition to the male gaze as a technique for creating erotic images outside of the heterosexual masculine perspective. As such, when a camera attempts to look at men with the same kind of objectifying gaze it doesn’t have the exact same effect, because the camera lacks a distinctly feminine perspective that exists in a context unique to masculine perspectives, not solely an inverse of it. The voyeuristic gaze upon a passive subject is an inherently hetero-masculine viewpoint; it holds within it not just the immediate visual pleasure, but the historical context of patriarchal objectification of women. To use cinematic techniques of the male gaze on men’s bodies lacks the context that gives it its narrative power. Haptic visuality, then, is not inherently gendered female in and of itself, but becomes a feminine response in so much as it exists in opposition to the male gaze. Where the male gaze relies on objectification and spectatorship of its subject, haptic visuality relies on creating sensation. Where the male gaze forces its viewers to look, haptic visuality forces its viewers to feel.
When Jen is lying impaled by the tree, her injuries are introduced through representations of texture and sensation, rather than simply visual gore. We may not know what it feels like to be impaled on a tree, but we can feel the ants running up her feet, tickling the wound in her belly. We feel the stark contrast of dark, wet blood dripping down her pale, dry face, and shots of the bright, clear sky emphasize the heat beating down on her. The shots isolating Jen’s body differ from those in the first act because of the way they emphasize not how her body looks, but how it feels.
Jen is able to pull herself off of the tree and hide before the men come back to collect her body. Realizing she is still alive, the men split up to hunt her down. That night, she runs into Dimitri, who attempts to drown her in a body of water. Jen grabs Dimitri’s knife and stabs him in the face, freeing herself from his grasp. Jen is then able to take refuge in a cave, where she embarks on what will truly be her symbolic transformation and resurrection. In this cave, Jen starts a fire and inspects the items she stole from Dimitri’s backpack. Among many things, she finds a can of beer and a dose of peyote. She heats the beer can in the fire and uses it to cauterize her wound, resulting in a branding of the eagle from the can onto her skin. To numb the pain, she takes the peyote.
The resulting peyote trip is a series of nightmares depicting the three men hunting her down through horrific, demonic forms. While on the surface this scene does not move the plot along, it plays an important role in the “resurrection” element of the film. If we read Jen’s rape and subsequent impalement as her death, then this scene shows her journey through hell. She is murdered by these men over and over again, each time coming back to the eagle branded on her skin. At the end of the sequence, she embraces this eagle and is able to free herself from the nightmares and escape the cave. The bald eagle branding on her stomach becomes a physical manifestation of the mental transformation expected of her character. Fargeat acknowledges in this scene that rape-revenge films are not concerned with the emotional trauma experienced by rape victims, but instead are only concerned with the body — how it can be abused, weaponized, and mutilated. By showing Jen traveling through hell and coming out the other side physically changed, the film engages with this element of fantasy that is unconcerned with realism. This fantasy aids in guiding the film away from a realistic depiction of sexual assault, and towards a commentary on the rape-revenge genre. This genre is a fantasy, and Revenge demands it be acknowledged as such.
Act 3: Haptic Violence (AKA Tie Your Shoe)
After Jen is pushed and “crucified” on the tree, there is a major shift in the film. This shift is not just in the film’s increase in gore, but also in the role of the audience. Prior to Jen’s “death,” the audience is a spectator; we view Jen as the men did, watching as they rape her, watching them chase her toward the cliff. Even as we identify with Jen as the main character, the camera still shows her only from a spectator’s perspective. Following Jen’s death, the audience is no longer a viewer, but a participant. We are invited to experience the pain she feels and inflicts on the men. While all body horror or violence has the potential to invite sympathetic pain, the violence in the second half of Revenge encourages the viewer to participate in the image, utilizing the texture and soundscape to induce a physical reaction. This is similar to the intended purpose of haptic visuality. Haptic visuality creates eroticism not through pornographic or aesthetic imagery, but by using the image to evoke physical sensations of eroticism. In Revenge, we are not meant to simply be disgusted or disturbed by the violence, but rather to feel it, to participate in it, to experience it.
This is most evident in the scene in which Stan and Jen encounter each other in the desert. Jen spots Stan standing by his car from a distance, and shoots him. She hits his shoulder and is able to track him down using the trail of blood he leaves as he runs. Stan, attempting to tie a tourniquet to his shoulder while running, trips over his untied shoes and decides to take them off so that he may run faster. The chase ensues, with Stan eventually shooting at Jen and causing her to run. As she runs, she hits her flashlight against a rock, shattering the glass. What follows is a scene that even I struggle to watch all the way through.
As Stan runs towards Jen, the audio cuts out, as a bullet just grazed Jen’s ear. The audio returns just in time to hear the shatter of the glass as it hits the rock. We then see shots of Stan and Jen running, the only audio being their breath and their feet hitting the ground. We get close-ups of Stan’s bare foot and the glass ahead of him, indicating what is to come. However, when Stan does eventually step on the glass, we see it in a wide shot, rather than a close-up. The sound of the glass ripping through his skin is deafening. This is crucial to the haptics of the scene. Rather than visually show the act of violence — the glass penetrating his skin — the moment is focused on what will make the audience feel it the most. This sound invites the audience to visualize that moment, to feel the glass making that slicing sound in their own foot. The spectacle of the moment is replaced with the sensation of it.
The visuals follow, showing the gash in Stan’s foot in excruciatingly detailed close-ups. The screen is filled with texture: we see where the skin of his foot breaks away to muscle and the deep red blood gushes out of the wound surrounded by the bright red blood of his previous injuries. Stan reaches ever so slowly into the wound to remove the piece of glass, his fingers pushing past the layers of flesh and oozing blood. We repeatedly cut back to Stan’s pained face as well as the hot sun beating down, a constant reminder that this scene is as uncomfortable as possible. But even in these close-ups of the wound, the colors pop and glisten; the shots never lose the stylish aesthetics they have maintained thus far. While a “torture porn” film may encourage its audience to withstand grotesque imagery, this scene challenges its viewers with the sensations it evokes.
In the final scene of the film, Jen and Richard reunite back at the house where the film started. Richard, aware that Jen is hunting him and his friends, attempts to take a shower but leaves the shower to inspect the house for Jen. Still nude, he walks the perimeter of the house with a gun. It is almost as though he is now the one using his body to perform, showing off his strong, masculine body in the same way Jen showed off her sensual, feminine body. Jen suddenly appears, looking at Richard through the same blue glass window through which Stan stared at her upon their first meeting. In a shot that sets up the comical excess of this final scene, the camera pans up her body at such an angle that it frames the strap from her belt to look like a penis. She shoots at him, and the two engage in a final, blood-filled fight. Richard’s decision to be nude ultimately backfires: he cannot hide from or sneak up on Jen because of the blood pouring from his gunshot wound. The two chase each other across blood-pooled linoleum, slipping and bleeding and running in circles. Jen is eventually able to overpower Richard by sticking her hand inside his wound, controlling his body through an act of penetration which reciprocates the penetration forced on her both from the rape and the tree Richard pushed her onto.
Revenge ends its feature-length sensuous bloodbath with this sequence that again reinforces the idea that the rape-revenge genre doesn’t care about realism. If rape-revenge films were interested in advocating for rape victims and preventing future assaults, they likely wouldn’t spend so much of their runtime depicting said assaults, nor would they show victims becoming confidant, femme-Fatale heroines. Likewise, if rape-revenge films were solely misogynistic fantasies then there likely wouldn’t be so many women creating and engaging with the genre. Ultimately, rape-revenge films hyperfixate on a fantastical intersection of sex and violence. By heightening these elements to the point of excess, Coralie Fargeat creates a film that does not repress or deny this fantasy, but revels in it. Revenge explores the power dynamics created by these depictions of sex and violence and experiments with the filmmaking perspectives used to show them. Jen’s journey is ultimately not dissimilar to many heroines of the rape-revenge genre, and yet the film’s meta-commentary created solely through filmmaking makes Revenge unlike any other of its genre.
