REMAKING RAPE-REVENGE: NAVIGATING WARTIME MORAL ANXIETIES THROUGH THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972/2009) AND I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (1978/2010)
Creator
Troisi, Emily
Abstract
This thesis considers why two rape-revenge horror movies from the 1970s, The Last House on the Left (1972) and I Spit on Your Grave (1978), were remade within just one year of each other, in 2009 and 2010, respectively. These films were not high grossing at the box office nor were they favored by many movie-goers; if anything, they gained notoriety for their violent depictions of sexual violence against women and gruesome revenge scenes. Given this lack of commercial success, this thesis considers the cultural and political reasons why The Last House on the Left (1972) and I Spit on Your Grave (1978) were remade, and why they were remade in the late 2000s. Employing film analysis, interviews with the films’ directors, movie reviews, opinion polls, and newspaper articles, this thesis argues that the War on Terror and the moral questions it raised for Americans provided culturally fertile ground for The Last House on the Left (2009) and I Spit on Your Grave (2010) to emerge. The films’ plots, of protagonists who have been wronged and who adopt gruesome means to avenge those wrongs, allegorize the narratives of the Vietnam War and the War on Terror. While not necessarily allegorizing it, the films’ visual aesthetics, of extreme violence and human degradation, offer audiences a window into the violent nature of combat going on in Vietnam and Iraq. The utility of the films’ plots and visual aesthetics, as well as audiences’ emotional reactions to each, pushes viewers to question the supposed righteousness of America and to ask whether it ever actually existed.
Permanent Link
http://hdl.handle.net/10822/1043772Date Published
2017-04-19Subject
Type
Publisher
Georgetown University
Collections
Metadata
Show full item recordRelated items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
Tips on Navigating Your Research Proposal Through the Institutional Review Board
Kamienski, Mary (2000-04)