I Spit On Your Grave caused a lot of controversy when it came out in the seventies – and even its lead actress was worried about it.
Camille Keaton shot to fame in 1978 when she appeared in the brutal “rape-and-revenge” Hollywood film, playing Jennifer Hills. The movie follows writer Jennifer who heads out of the city to work on her novel in an isolated cottage.
Things take a harrowing turn though when four local men rock up to her cabin. There they tragically and brutally gang-rape Jennifer before leaving her for dead.
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Traumatised but alive, Jennifer vows to seek revenge on the men that hurt her. And the end result is some of the most gruesome and graphic scenes ever captured on film.
(Image: YouTube)
As expected, its release ruffled plenty of feathers all over the globe back in the ‘70s. It was dubbed the most x-rated film ever made by critics and at first, the movie was banned in UK cinemas – before getting extensively edited.
And it turns out Camille had a rough time shooting the movie – and was even worried about its reception at first. Speaking to Medium in 2019, she said: “I did have a meltdown one day.
(Image: YouTube)
“It was not an easy film to make. It was not a fun film to make. How can it be fun to make? It’s not comedy.”
Film critic Roger Ebert at the time, went on to dub I Spit On Your Grave as a “vile bag of garbage.” He also called it a film “without a shred of artistic distinction.”
Hearing the criticism upset Camille at first. She told Little White Lies: “Ebert sure didn’t like it, I heard him talk about it and it really hurt my feelings.
(Image: YouTube)
“But [writer/director] Meir [Zarchi] told me not to worry about it: ‘Camille, this is the best publicity that we could ever get!’ And he was right. That made everybody want to go see it.”
After Jennifer is attacked in the film, she tracks down her rapists one-by-one and kills them off. Two of them get chopped into pieces by a speedboat on a lake while another is hung from a tree with his underwear hanging by his ankles.
And in a memorable and gruesome scene, Jennifer castrates a third man in the bath – making Saltburn’s now-iconic bathtub scene look timid. Speaking about shooting that scene, Camille told Starburst: “The thing I remember most about the bath scene was we’d already shot a scene for after bathroom scene and my hair is up, when I’m rocking in the rocking chair.
“But Meir wanted my hair down. I said you can’t have me walking out of the bathroom with my hair down then all of a sudden it’s up! The other actor, Eron Tabor, wasn’t nervous at all about doing that scene, I think I would have been if I was in his shoes!”
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Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
