We Need Rape Revenge Films Now More Than Ever

The Cornell 7. The UChicago fraternity. The death of a FIT undergrad student after being drugged and raped in her dorm. Shane Gillis’ terrible excuse for jokes during his SNL monologue. This has all happened in just a few weeks: a slew of horrendous gendered violence all targeting female sexuality and bodily autonomy. It’s a never-ending hell where women everywhere are reminded of the sheer terrors of existing as female in a world that deeply hates us, and survivors of sexual violence are constantly reminded of their own trauma. As a sexual assault survivor myself, it’s felt like being trapped in a cage that keeps getting smaller with no escape in sight. I’ve been beating at the bars of my enclosure like a feral animal, screaming for relief from a world where hatred for women only seems to grow by the day. We need something, anything, to make us feel seen or heard for even just a moment.

This is why, I think, we need rape-revenge movies now more than ever before.

Now, when I say rape-revenge movies, I’m not talking about I Spit on Your Grave (1978) or The Last House on the Left (1972). These films have their place in cinematic history, and do offer catharsis to some survivors. But for my current purposes, when I say rape-revenge movies, I mean movies directed by women, queer people, and survivors themselves, films that are raw, deeply personal, complicated, flawed, but ultimately honest about what it means to actually achieve vengeance. I’m talking about films like Madeline Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli’s Violation and Ellie Foumbi’s Our Father The Devil. 

What exactly are my qualifications to make such a claim, you may ask? Well, besides the trauma, I wrote my Master’s thesis on the rise of the female-directed rape-revenge film (focusing on Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge), and I also directed a rape-revenge film, released in 2025, called Bystanders. I’ve done perhaps too much thinking about this subgenre and its massive evolution over the decades.

Rape revenge started as a type of film that relished in female pain as spectacle, but has since become something much more introspective and complicated, a subgenre that isn’t afraid to shy away from the mess of what it means to get revenge even after such horrendous trauma. It’s not a subgenre for everyone, but I do still think it’s a crucial one for processing and understanding the complex emotions that arise in the face of unending atrocities of sexual violence. They’re a place to find catharsis, without sugarcoating the of that catharsis.