REVENGE, SWEDISH STYLE: THE UNLIKELY INFLUENCE OF BOARNE VIBENIUS’ THRILLER For better or worse, Boarne’s Vibenius’ 1974 film THRILLER-EN GRYM FILM ushered in the "rape and revenge" genre to the grindhouse circuit (albeit in a cut drive in release under the title THRILLER-A CRUEL PICTURE). Regardless of one’s personal reservations on the subject matter, it is impossible to deny this quaintly produced film’s influence on the genre’s prototype. Although director Vibenius openly admits he constructed his film with an exploitative rigor (and the film does function best as pure spectacle), the resultant film is an unlikely prophetic one, certainly to the surprise (and dismay) of Vibenius himself. THRILLER’s enduring intrigue and influence materializes in its simplified story. The film begins with a threadbare expository sequence, in which a young girl, Madeline (Christina Lindberg) is raped by an elderly man. The police arrive, and the narrative then skips approximately ten years. Now a young adult, Madeline has been rendered mute from her traumatic childhood experience. Walking along the sleepy Swedish roads, she encounters Tony, a nearby businessman, who grants her a ride and dinner out, insisting that it’s "on [his] company." After the dinner Tony escorts Madeline to his home where they share a drink. The pleasant ambiance soon sours, however, when Tony takes the opportunity to drug Madeline. Awaking days later, Madeline realizes Tony has hooked her on heroin and that her only hope is to comply with Tony’s odious demands. Now Madeline is a component in Tony’s "escort" service, in which she must service various customers sexually. After a failed attempt of escape, Tony disciplines Madeline by gouging her eye out. Fear turns to fury as Madeline is determined to use what little funds she is allotted to put them towards her freedom and ultimate revenge. Taken at face value, the premise is nothing remarkable but THRILLER is still able to make a large contribution to the genre: the initially powerless protagonist. By making Madeline mute, Vibenius pre-loads the audience’s sympathy and, of course, increases the intensity of her various violations. Unsurprisingly, because the protagonist is mute, the film is deprived of dialogue and is a largely visual experience, which suits the film well. Given the lurid premise of the film and the inclusion of several hardcore sequences, it quickly becomes apparent that THRILLER is a film concerned with looking, forcing the viewer into the unrepentant voyeur. Viewed less favorably, Madeline’s handicap manipulates audience emotion quickly and easily, an essential stipulation considering the film’s brief runtime. This technique has been employed by far more revered directors for much the same effect. Take, for example, Roman Polanski’s REPULSION, in which a frigid, painfully shy and very vulnerable Catherine Deneuve suffers a fate somewhat parallel to Madeline’s. This shortcut of audience manipulation proved so successful that it would again be used in two subsequent pictures in the genre: Abel Ferrara’s MS. 45 (1981) and Meir Zarchi’s I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (1978). Ferrara’s film sports a remarkably similar protagonist, the mute Thana (played by the late Zoe Tamerlis), used for largely the same effect. Zarchi’s features a beautiful, naïve young woman (Camille Keaton). Although she has no malady similar to Ferrara’s or Vibenius’ leads, her naïve disposition performs the same task: building the audience’s sympathy, only to tear it down in the rape sequences. However, Zarchi’s modification of this model ultimately fails. Because Keaton’s character is so virginal, so jejune, it more resembles a caricature, not a breathing human being. Ferrari and Vibenius effectively downplay their characters’ disabilities, allowing the human in the characters’ being to pierce through. Humanity is achieved in Ferrara’s film in the sundry sequences where Thana interacts with her co-workers and in Vibenius’ film when Madeline speaks with another enslaved girl, Sally. THRILLER is able to achieve genuine poignancy in these scenes. When Sally, battered and traumatized, speaks bittersweetly of her dreams of escape and rehabilitation, we believe her, due largely in part to the repellent hardcore rape scenes’ indelible imprint on the viewer. Vibenius successfully exploits this relationship’s emotional weight even further: when we learn that Sally has been found out (and shot), the audience will undoubtedly cringe along with Madeline as she discovers her blood-soaked pillow. Vibenius corroborates, by means of this relationship between Sally and Madeline, that films in this genre are capable of something more than crass audience manipulation. However, THRILLER still clings hard and fast to its grimy exploitation roots. Never is that fact more substantiated than in the harrowing sexual scenes. Obviously, the staging of the rape and sexual scenes is key in the genre, and Vibenius chooses to stage them hardcore and with little other hyperbole for some advantageous reasons. For one, the explicit violation of Madeline speaks for itself, and any more artistic or exploitative flourishes would most definitely be too much, drowning these scenes’ basic, devastating impact. Similarly, Vibenius avoids a numbing effect on the viewer by scaling down the scenes’ running time. Although graphic, the scenes are obviously not meant to titillate, and without that component, a sex scene would overstay its welcome and the viewer’s interest would inevitably wane. This seems like a simple concept, but Zarchi’s film stumbles for omitting it. The rape scenes in I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE are excessively drawn out and tiring, absorbing approximately half of the film’s running time. The viewer already enters the theater with the knowledge that rape is a traumatic experience, and after five minutes of viewing the act for exploitation’s sake, the entertainment (dubious as it may be) is up. MS. 45 proves this theory exquisitely well. Although the film has two rape scenes in close proximity, they additively take up no more than ten minutes. However, the impact is not at all truncated, and Thana’s trauma and ultimate revenge is just as credible (in fact, more credible) than Vibenius’ or Zarchi’s femme fatales. The credibility of Thana’s bloody revenge and psychological metamorphosis, from a reserved individual to murderous avenger, introduces another unique hurdle for the genre that requires unique solutions, some better than others. The most successful technique, plied most influentially by Polanksi in REPULSION, is to draw the viewer into the wounded protagonist’s claustrophobic parameters. In REPULSION it was Deneuve’s lonesome apartment, in THRILLER, it is Madeline’s assigned room in Tony’s headquarters, and in MS. 45 it is again a cramped apartment. The stuffy setting is an effective projection of the victim’s mind, as the proverbial "cabin fever" sets in. The viewer becomes aware of the character’s mental deterioration by observing assorted items of neglect, such as REPULSION’s rotting rabbit dinner. In MS. 45, Thana’s professional life suffers, as she is increasingly maladroit at performing simple tasks and grows even more reclusive. Such occurrences lessen the credibility gap that occurs between point A (the healthy young woman) to point B (the cold-hearted, vengeful murderer). Again, Zarchi’s film suffers from ignoring this theory. There is no dramatic glue joining the two "halves" of Keaton’s character (one docile, the other vengeful). She simply launches into her revenge without any tangible evidence as to why she would suddenly turn murderous. In addition to jumping through the genre’s miscellaneous hoops, directors in this genre often coat the films with a "message" that either condones or scorns the actions in the film, or something else entirely. Perhaps the most famous message appeared on the posters of Zarchi’s film, boasting "This woman has just chopped, broken and burned four men beyond recognition…but no jury in America would ever convict her!" Besides the obvious exploitation value, the quote hints at the film’s politics which are quite symptomatic of the era (the mid 70’s). Thus Keaton is dressed as a woman involved in the woman’s movement, as she is a feminist writer. And it is obvious that the backwoods goons that rape her are stand-ins for the venomous critics of the movement. However, does this political screen add dimension to the film? Unfortunately not. Little more attention is given to Keaton’s political leanings than some skimpy exposition, and the film’s impact remains the same regardless of whatever political agenda Zarchi had. Far more effective is Ferrara’s treatment of Tamerlis’ character. Once Thana achieves her murderous momentum, it becomes apparent to the viewer that she is not merely stalking the New York City streets claiming random victims, but rather eliminating the same type of misogynistic males that wronged her. Thus she becomes, as some foreign releases dubbed the film, an "Angel of Vengeance." By granting Thana this extra dimension of unlikely "charity" to women, Ferrara expands on the revenge theme, making her murderous spree transcend simple revenge and into the realm of catharsis, and endowing the film with an emotional complexity absent from other entries. THRILLER does not offer such political or emotional elaboration. It does, however, offer up some intriguing technical blossoms. Composer Ralph Lundstern makes good use of reverb on the audio track, indicating Madeline’s martyrdom. A crude, but surprisingly versatile trick. However, the most fascinating wrinkle in the film is Vibenius’ camerawork during Madeline’s childhood encounter with the threatening elderly man. In the opening sequence, the man who rapes young Madeline is shot in jittery close-ups. The kinetic camera is an efficacious extension of Madeline’s nervous disposition at the time. Vibenius adds continuity to the film by repeating the technique again during some of the sexual scenes. The most celebrated effect is undoubtedly the slow-motion shoot-outs between Madeline and her former captors and sexual clients. Vibenius encapsulates the beauty of a Peckinpah action set piece and anticipates the stupefacient "heroic bloodshed" of John Woo’s best films. The slow motion works exceptionally well to convey the emotional intensity surging through Madeline’s mind. It worked so well, in fact, that Ferrara would use it again in much the same manner for the climatic showdown in his MS. 45. This effect lends itself to the assumption that Madeline is weary of all men and that all men are untamed sexual beasts. However, that conjecture is deflated when Madeline successfully gleans essential knowledge from various professional men (one a karate instructor, another a race car driver, and another a military officer) which ultimately help in her getaway. Despite this fact, other films in the genre often present a hostile world populated with ill-willed, misogynistic men. The most potent example is Ferrara’s film, in which there is not a single benevolent man. Even a trusted acquaintance such as Thana’s boss finally betrays her by seducing her. This technique of projecting the protagonist’s schema into the physical world is another inroad of engaging the viewer in the plight of the avenger. An interesting footnote to the genre is Wes Craven’s crude but powerful LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972). Craven’s film achieves much the same goals as other entries (suspension of disbelief, audience involvement) in very analogous means, with one major exception: the victims (two teenage girls) do not dispatch the revenge, but the parents of the victims. Because of this crease in the genre fabric, LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT does not technically belong in the same category as other genre entries such as MS. 45, I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, THRILLER, or REPULSION. Despite the deviation, Craven’s film does anticipate future trends in the genre, most notably the dubious sense of satisfaction granted the "hero" after the vengeful act. At the film’s conclusion, the town police encounter the bloodied parents of the slaughtered girls. The film ends with the parents exchanging a guilty glance with the police. The message here is clear: does vigilante justice truly work and provide spiritual closure? This dilemma proved so powerful that it is repeated throughout all the subsequent works of the genre. Without fail, the vengeful anti-heroes are relegated to a somber, unsatisfactory fate: either death (as in MS. 45) or an uncertain future (as in THRILLER or I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE). Despite its plenteous cinematic influences, THRILLER is not an exceptional film. In fact, it is often barely competent. Assembled exclusively as a shock machine by its director, the film’s cogs and gears admittedly grind without a healthful lubing of sleaze, but THRILLER still does enough right to surpass lesser genre titles and provide at least a few excellent solutions for the genre. RETURN HOME Copyright 2002 Stephen Gladwin   RELATED READING Last House on the Left in-depth review