Rape in film is a touchy and challenging subject. Even dealt with in ‘serious films’ like Jodie Foster’s The Accused, audiences may be rendered uncomfortable. Critics and the general public don’t seem to object as much when sexual assault is depicted in award-bait films. Someone will probably even get an award out of it. But the knee-jerk reaction when it’s shown in horror films is for the morality police to start screaming Objection! In horror, rape is considered extreme, prurient, and even exploitative. While there is exploitation in many horror films – the same could be said of any genre. How many times has rape been featured as a source of humor in a comedy film? Plenty. Think: Top Secret, Trading Places, Scary Movie, Idiocracy to just name a handful. There’s nothing wrong with shedding light on a touchy subject through humor or High Drama. But depict a rape in an honest, unblinking, and genuine way in a horror film and people get their knickers in a twist.
Monica Belluci in Irreversible
I argue that this uncomfortable feeling – this true horror we experience when a character is violated – is as it should be. Watching a fellow human being subjected to the worst kind of humiliating violation should not be enjoyable. This is one of the reasons that I champion darker, more-extreme horror flicks over other subgenres – because as unreal as they can get, when it comes to sexual assault they’re often brilliant. Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible is a prime example of this genius. The entire film is an experience told in reverse about the rape of a young woman (Monica Belluci) and the questionable vengeance carried out by the people who love her. It contains the single most difficult 10 minutes of film I’ve ever sat through – in a film that attacks every sense from its opening scenes. As I’ve often said, it is one of the greatest films I’ve ever seen that I never want to see again – a condemnation of violence bathed in brutality. It’s a masterpiece in every way that should have given Noe and Belluci awards into the next year.
But it’s a French horror movie… so no one outside Cannes paid attention. Meanwhile, nice, predictable, little films with positive messages and leave few with any lasting impressions (I’m looking right at you, Oscar-winner The King’s Speech) get all of the awards, all of the accolades, and all of the endless speeches about how brave everyone involved was for making such an important tale.
To hell with that. Show me painful drama. Show me reality. Show me the real darkness that exists in people without looking away because it’s hard to watch. It’s supposed to be hard to watch – it’s horror. Looking away is complacency – it’s the worst kind of insult to turn a blind eye to truth. All people are raped – men, women, children – all over the world. It is a universal fear shared by all human beings in one way or another – like death. So if horror films can deal with our fears of death, why not our fears of violation too? And while we’re at it – why not make it as dark, real, and ugly as we can? Not to titillate or excite but for the opposite purpose: To shine a bright light onto a terrible subject, to talk about it openly and honestly. To show the truth of it. Rape is not karma. Both the “good” and the “bad” can be victims of crime. Innocent, guilty, old, young, good, bad – there’s no such thing as an acceptable rape – no one “deserves” it, not even jailed prisoners.
The original (and best) Last House on the Left
It is my belief that as a whole, horror films are far better at expressing the true nightmares of sexual assault. While dramatic films whose stories are rape-based – like The Accused or Angelica Huston’s Bastard Out of Carolina – are meant to convey laudable messages of hope, survival, and justice. Horror films instead deal with the immediate terror, the savagery and shame, the after-effects, and the lifelong disorders. They don’t intend to uplift – instead, they often serve no other purpose than to make the viewer feel as unpleasant as possible in order to share the survivor’s ordeal. To share the pain, the shame, or even the madness and sometimes to be complicit in the desire for Eye-for-an-Eye vengeance. For this reason, I never rule these types of films out even though it means I might occasionally stumble upon one that makes me seriously question the filmmakers intent.
I classify depictions of rape into three different types in horror films. I’ve found that most fit neatly into these categories with a few exceptions.
- Story. Rape is integral to the story.
- The violent act is the focal point of the film as exampled in the classic rape/revenge tale. Films like The Virgin Spring, I Spit on Your Grave, France’s Baise-Moi and Irreversible, and both of Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left films (each re-tellings of Virgin Spring.) The Story calcification is not limited to rape/revenge (Alien – despite it’s sci-fi surroundings is essentially a film about the horrors of violation), nor is the Story always worthy of praise. 2008′s Deadgirl is an hour and a half of a group of teenaged assholes violating a writhing zombie babe (yuck, in every way); 1977′s Demon Seed is little more than watching Julie Christie get alluringly (!) violated (!!) by an AI so it can impregnate her (!!!) in between psychedelic-trip vignettes (!!!!) Films that tempt to turn the viewer with sexual crime like these would be unforgivable if they weren’t so appallingly bad.
- Character. Rape is integral to one or more characters.
Nasty man, Otis Driftwood. But funny!
- The violent act is not the focus of the story, instead it serves to highlight the underlying reasons for a character’s actions, mood, or personality. While often used to elicit sympathy for a character – my least favorite use of sexual assault in story – that’s not all that this classification has to offer. Takashi Miike’s Audition is a prime example of the potential for elevated storytelling. The past abuse of a character is what leads to it’s ultra-violent climax – but it is not the focal point of the story nor is it intended as a sympathetic plot device. Indeed, Audition is primarily the tale of a lonely, traditional man and how little he really knows about his deeply troubled new girlfriend. On the flip side, The Devil’s Rejects‘s Otis is a character who exists solely to violate the living, the dead, the law, society, and normalcy. He’s walking talking Rape in a world that rejects him, but the laughingly despicable, necrophiliac, rapist is only one of the players in the tale. The fact that the viewer almost sympathizes with the killers in the end of the film is a cruel bit of genius and one of the reasons I respect the film so much. It’s a nifty reminder that not all is black & white in this world – that you might find yourself liking a terrible person or disliking an innocent one. In more troubling waters is 1971′s Straw Dogs. In this controversial movie, Sam Peckinpah put the rape of a character into so much ambiguous light that its message (if there is any) is muddled. Did she set herself up for this? Did she enjoy it? Is Peckinpah stating that some victims are in fact asking to be raped? It’s a debatable argument and one which we’ll likely be discussing again soon as a remake is being made. One wonders if the stories will be watered down to appeal to a wider audience – like the recent remake of Last House.
- Shock. Rape is used as a device.
Aja's Hills unpleasantness
- Unlike the other two classifications, sexual assault when used for shock value is not used to further an existing story. The act of rape exists primarily to create an unexpected moment of terror in the current circumstances. Deliverance fits very well here. While the notorious “Squeal like a Pig!” movie may end with a bit of vengeance – it is primarily survivalist horror. Those men would have continued having major issues with the locals and environment whether or not the startling violation of a couple of characters had occurred. The acts serve to heighten terror and shock the viewer. Similarly, the assaults in both versions of The Hills Have Eyes did not add to the story but instead came across as unexpected moments which leave the viewer in a state of ‘WTF just happened ‘paralysis. For the remainder of the films, one stays in a hypersensitive state unsure of what appalling bit of insanity may be coming next. This classification for me is the one with the most potential for offending audiences. Japanese “pink films,” “women in prison” films, and quite a bit of Hentai tend to piss me right off. In films like these, women are little more than objects for the gratification of the men (and sometimes women) around them. A lot of these films promote thinly veiled messages of misogyny: Women are Bad; Females Don’t Have Right to Deny Males; Woman Serves Man; Raped Women Deserve It, and on and on. But these types of films are few and far between. Even shock in current horror has underlying connotations. The rape from Rob Zombie’s Director’s Cut of Halloween is not the gratuitous scene that critics panned, but a brief and unsexy scene which shocks the viewer while making a point of showing that it ends badly for the rapists and that Myers wasn’t interested in participating – something that separates him from many of his serial-killing counterparts.
What are your thoughts, readers? Is there a place for the worst of human nature in horror? Or are there some taboos that shouldn’t be crossed? Is there no limit in art or should there always be a clear moral compass?
It’s too bad that nobody’s responded to this article; it’s very interesting stuff. I always find it disappointing if I invest a lot in articulating something and then get no response. It does take time to pore through, though, and there’s a certain time limit before the article moves away from the titles featured on the home page, and I imagine after that the audience drops considerably. At least your website keeps these threads open – I hate it when I notice something interesting after the discussion is already closed. Under the circumstances, if you’re going to do something this dense, you might want to do it as a series of short installments to invite more input. It’s just a thought, which I humbly offer before I proceed to completely contradict it in the length of my own reply. But I did think this article of yours deserved a serious response.
Rape in films does seem to be a touchy subject, though torture has become routine screen fare and Attack of the Clones had the protagonist murdering children. That’s BEFORE he lost our sympathies in the following installment. And all this doesn’t even approach what we’re used to seeing in a standard horror film.
I agree with the points you raise about how rape is depicted; for those films I’ve seen, I think your analysis is accurate both in terms of what’s shown and what it implies about the filmmaker’s attitudes. It’s just that I could raise the same points about any number of other horrendous acts that we comfortably watch onscreen, so why single out rape? You speak in terms of character and narrative, and you raise a range of ethical questions. For me, these questions also occur on other levels.
My feeling is that fundamentally cinema works like a drug, a controlled dream-state where we vicariously play out different fantasies, and that we usually choose films based on what set of sensations we may expect (by genre, for instance). I think this is especially true of commercial cinema, which is genuinely pornographic in the way it trades in packaged hormonal responses.
Horror is fundamentally about violation, both in terms of what is shown onscreen and in the incipient threat that draws us, that something unspeakable may leap from the screen and lodge itself in the viewer’s mind (yes, that’s right – I am comparing John Hurt’s gazing into the egg to the experience of cinema).
You raise the question of boundaries. I think the clearest ethical issues here are those behind the camera – obviously, the notion of consent in relation to how the footage is achieved, but also the way projects generally are funded and distributed, what kinds of pressures this generates, and how this cumulatively shapes content, not in relation to a particular work per se, but certainly in relation to what gets produced in general, what is emphasized and deemphasized, and the broader cultural landscape that grows out of such conditions over time.
In terms of what content is shown, and the question of boundaries there, I think what we see is perhaps less of an issue than how we respond. In this way I think “the worst of human nature” is already quite prevalent across different genres, albeit in a more disguised form, not as much in terms of what is shown, but rather in what position the viewer is invited, and agrees, to take in relation to this. I think a person can watch just about anything, as long as they’re willing to acknowledge and take responsibility for what they’re getting out of it, instead of projecting blame onto the filmmakers. That’s not to say that filmmakers aren’t accountable for how they portray subjects (they have a right to free speech in what they depict, of course, as do those who call them to account).
However, generally I think the viewers may have a greater responsibility in how they process their own reactions. You’re right that honesty is the thing that tends to bring controversy; it’s amazing how hypocritical people can be when they can sit back and hide behind the mantle of “bystander”. Most honest conversations about film should probably begin with an acknowledgement of the impulses the audience hopes to indulge by watching, and that’s just fine, as long as we’re adult enough to own up to it.
I think there are ethical aspects to viewing, but ultimately the matter of ethics emerges in how we treat one another in the real world. I imagine your concern stems from the notion of attitudes that correlate with the sorts of messages you’re criticizing here, and how those attitudes manifest themselves in relationships and the general treatment of women in society. I completely agree, which is why I think the viewer’s denial of their own complicity is the most immediate problem here. It seems to me that someone who refuses to acknowledge and examine their own pleasure is more likely to confuse the lines between responding to fictional, constructed representations, and interpreting real life scenarios. Critical self-examination is more likely to help here than abstention and devotion to “family fare” (which is often at least as problematic in terms of any messages it may contain).
Horror and pornography occupy a ghetto of disrepute because I think we feel more exposed as viewers, more implicated than usual with the question of why we’re watching in the first place. One thing I respect about a genre like visceral horror is that it’s so up front about what it’s really offering.
I share your taste for this sort of extreme fare. You say that such subject matter ought to pack an emotional wallop. It seems that you admire a work like Irreversible for a certain integrity it brings to its material. I sense a sort of Artaudian ethic here, seeking a kind of overwhelming “attack” on the audience’s senses, almost like a spiritual purging, that might possibly jolt them into a new way of seeing. I’ve thought a lot about this – it’s sort of like the scene where Tyler Durden burns the Narrator’s hand, telling him to savor the “reality” of the pain. This idea is appealing, but it leaves me with this question: is it really a path to truth, or just a shock that’s able to awaken an overused nerve ending, a dosage high enough to briefly interrupt the over-stimulated numbness, before the threshold of tolerance rises yet again? Is that the same thing as truth? If they’re different, then how does one recognize the difference?
I thank you for this thoughtful response.
Thankfully, there was a bit of response on our Facebook site – so i never felt unappreciated for writing this piece. However, it’s gratifying to read such an intelligent and educated reply. You make several excellent points, and bring up valid topics for debate – including the question of why single out the topic of rape above other horrendous acts in film?
This one i can answer.
GoresTruly approaches horror from a woman’s point of view. While rape is not a crime against women only, we do make up a large percentage of the statistics – so it’s a natural fear/stressor and one that filmmaker’s exploit (for good and for not-so-good). From that point of view, it would be a disservice to ourselves and our readers if we didn’t discuss the topic in relation to our love of (and interest in) horror films. That being said, i tend to agree with you – horrific violence is horrific violence, no matter what the act being portrayed.
I’m a little ashamed to admit that i had never thought of these types of films in theatrical terms, outside of Grand Guignol. Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty” certainly applies here, and may be a more accurate description than anything i’ve written here.
I generally know what my limit is, but i admit that it’s possible that each new “more extreme” movie may tip those scales with younger audiences. Then again, critics and nervous-nellies were afraid of that in the 70′s when shockers like TCM and Last House were scaring the bejeebus out of people. I like to think of it in terms of film history – in that films typically represent the times in which they’re made. The 70′s were a dark, eye-opening, trust-no-one period in our history – and so far, the 2000′s are similar and resulting in similar fare.
Btw, “visceral horror”? Best term for the subgenre that i’ve heard yet.
Thank you for your generous comments.
I actually think your term, Grand Guignol, is a more accurate description of most of these films. Here is how I understand the terms:
Grand Guignol – a theatre of morbid titillation, akin to the peep show or the freak exhibit at a carnival, a commercial entertainment, in that the focus is primarily on giving the audience what it wants to sell more tickets.
Theatre of Cruelty – an endeavor to change the world, owing much to the Surrealists. An attempt to help the audience to “break on through to the other side” by shocking them, overwhelming them, and breaking down their defences, making the spectacle into a a sort of religious experience. Ken Russell’s The Devils comes to mind, or even that short Wolf Man video on YouTube.
In fact, I had used the term “Artaudian” to describe not the films in question, but the perspective that you were bringing to your posting. Now that I think about it, though, and looking at your article again, it seems to me that in this post your ethic is more that of a Naturalist, like Zola. Your support for extreme, painful drama is not based on the notion that the audience needs to break down its inhibitions; rather, you make your arguments based on the subject matter addressed, saying that if such topics are to be treated properly, we must look unblinkingly and resist the urge to sanitize, because we need all the details to make a full diagnosis – much the way a muckraking journalist or physician would.
Well written about a sensitive subject,Deven.
I knew I liked you when i found out you enjoyed Dead Snow