General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20266 min read

I Spit on Your Grave (2010 film)

I Spit on Your Grave is a 2010 American rape-and-revenge horror film directed by Steven R. Monroe, a remake of Meir Zarchi's controversial 1978 film Day of the Woman, which was retitled I Spit on Your Grave on re-release. It stars Sarah Butler as Jennifer Hills, a novelist who is gang-raped by a group of local men at a remote cabin and then hunts down and kills her attackers one by one.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Source	Remake of Day of the Woman (Cinemagic Pictures Inc., 1978), written by Meir Zarchi¹
Director / writer	Steven R. Monroe; screenplay credited to Stuart Morse by the AFI Catalog and to Adam Rockoff by Rotten Tomatoes¹^•²
Production	CineTel Films; producers Lisa Hansen and Paul Hertzberg; distributed by Anchor Bay Films¹
Release	New York opening 8 October 2010; 107 minutes; rated R¹
Reception	Metascore 27 (generally unfavorable); 32% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 63 reviews, 48% audience score³^•²
UK classification	Passed 18 by the BBFC after 43 seconds of cuts to rapist-perspective and camcorder shots⁴
Franchise	Followed by I Spit on Your Grave 2 (2013) and I Spit on Your Grave III: Vengeance Is Mine (2015)⁴

Spoilers

Plot and cast

Jennifer Hills, a writer from the city, rents an isolated cabin in the country to work on her novel. A gang of local men rape and torture her and leave her for dead. She survives and returns for vengeance, trapping the men one by one and inflicting pain on them with a ferocity that surpasses her own ordeal.²

Sarah Butler plays Jennifer. The supporting cast includes Jeff Branson as Johnny, Andrew Howard as Sheriff Storch, Daniel Franzese as Stanley, Rodney Eastman as Andy, Chad Lindberg as Matthew, and Tracey Walter.²^•⁵

Sequels

The remake was followed by I Spit on Your Grave 2 (2013) and I Spit on Your Grave III: Vengeance Is Mine (2015), both classified 18 by the BBFC, the 2013 film after 27 requested cuts across six scenes were made and the 2015 film uncut.⁴

Relationship to the 1978 original

The original film, made in 1978 as Day of the Woman, was inspired by an experience of Meir Zarchi, who wrote, produced, and directed it; appalled reviewers and its inclusion in the 1983 British list of "video nasties" (1980s British list of banned violent video releases) earned it cult status that gave rise to the remake.⁶^•⁷ Zarchi served as executive producer of the remake.⁷

Changes in the remake. Monroe removes the eroticized elements that defined Zarchi's film and instead emphasizes punitive violence.⁸ The remake spends less screen time on the sexual assault and more on the violent revenge, and the deaths of the attackers are more gory and prolonged than the more functional killings of the original.⁹ The British Board of Film Classification, which examined the remake in 2010, noted that it featured far less emphasis on female nudity than the original, but that its contemporary setting and higher production values rendered the rape scenes equally, if not more, disturbing.⁴

Scholarly work on the remake places it in the context of the late-2000s horror market. Laura Mee, a researcher at the University of Hertfordshire, argues in her chapter on the rape-revenge remake that I Spit on Your Grave and The Last House on the Left, remade just over a year apart, show how filmmakers adapted 1970s exploitation content for a broader horror viewership, coding the films explicitly as horror with heightened suspense and explicit torture scenes that align them with torture porn (horror genre emphasizing graphic, prolonged torture as spectacle).¹⁰

Reception

Critical response was largely negative. The film holds a Metascore of 27, classified as generally unfavorable, with 9 of 14 counted critic reviews negative, 4 mixed, and 1 positive.³ Rotten Tomatoes' critics consensus calls it "well-shot exploitation that has less purpose and utility than in 1978," and the film scores 32 percent on the Tomatometer against 48 percent from audiences.²

Reviewers divided over whether the changes improved the material. Philip French of The Guardian found it better made and more plausible than the original, with the sexual violations less drawn out and the vengeance more violent and elaborate.² His colleague Peter Bradshaw gave it one star out of five, arguing that the rape and revenge halves sit in false opposition and that the film offers audiences who like the spectacle of men being tortured and women being raped "a two-for-one deal."¹¹ Roger Ebert, the film critic who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1975, called it a despicable remake that adds "a phony moral equivalency," noting that less time is devoted to the revenge and more to verbal, psychological, and physical violence against the woman.¹² The Los Angeles Times review asked why anyone took the return trip, judging the apparent motivation to be a drastic increase in violence.¹³ Common Sense Media classes it as torture porn and judges that it does little to address the problems of the original.⁹

Commercial performance and classification

Rotten Tomatoes lists a US theatrical gross of $92.4K,² while the streaming guide WhereCanIWatch lists a box office of $573K against a budget of $2 million.¹⁴ Producer Lisa Hansen of CineTel Films confirmed in an interview that "the movie didn't do well theatrically, but it did do really well on DVD," and said a sequel was under consideration pending a story the producers believed in.¹⁵

In the United Kingdom, the BBFC classified the film 18 for cinema and DVD after 43 seconds of cuts. The cuts removed brief elements emphasizing female nudity and reduced moments presenting the attacks from the rapists' point of view, most notably shots in which the gang films its degradation of the woman through a camcorder, which the Board judged encouraged viewer complicity rather than appalled spectatorship. With the cuts made, the Board concluded the rape scenes horrify and disgust rather than eroticize or endorse sexual violence.⁴

References

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026