I Spit on Your Grave
I Spit on Your Grave is a 1978 film from the USA, directed by Meir Zarchi, running 101 minutes. reelscum files it under video nasty and rape-revenge.
- Year
- 1978 · 1970s films
- Country
- USA
- Runtime
- 101 min
- Director
- Meir Zarchi
- Updated
- 10 Aug 2026
- Obscurity
- known (15/100)
- Also known as
- I Spit on Your Grave · The Housatonic Revenge
- Banned in
- UK · Ireland · Norway · Iceland · West Germany · Australia
Defined in the glossary: Video nasty, Rape-revenge
A prosecuted DPP video nasty, banned outright in Ireland, Norway, Iceland and West Germany, and pulled from Australian sale from 1997 to 2004.
The most argued-about film on this site. Read the glossary entry before deciding.
The most argued-about film in the whole category. A writer is gang-raped in the country and returns, methodically, to kill the men responsible, and the assault occupies a punishing stretch of the runtime. Roger Ebert called it a vile bag of garbage; later feminist critics, including Carol Clover, argued its refusal to make the assault watchable is what separates it from the films it gets grouped with.
Both readings come from the same footage, which is the whole difficulty. It is bleak, clinical and extremely hard to sit through, and it has no interest in being enjoyed.
Read the arguments before you decide. Then decide carefully.
Trailer
The numbers
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Where to watch
Legal options in USA
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Written about
- The best exploitation films and what makes a canon
The best exploitation films are picked by censors, restorers and polls before anyone ranks them. What that machinery leaves on the shelf.
- Exploitation films of the 1970s, the boom and the bust
Exploitation films of the 1970s explained through the ratings gap, the drive-in double bill, the cycles that ran fast, and the censors who cut them.
- Exploitation film examples, cycle by cycle
Exploitation film examples grouped cycle by cycle, from Freaks in 1932 to the video nasties, with the real dates, cut durations and censorship rulings.
- Banned, cut and confiscated
A Fulci print flown out of the country, an Australian rating that just means no, and a German court that filed The Evil Dead under criminal violence. Three states, three machines for making a film disappear.
The cycle in depth
- The Exorcist was banned on video in Britain by one censor
The Exorcist passed uncut for British cinemas in 1974, then had no legal UK video release from 1988 to 1999 because one censor would not certify the tape.
On these lists
- Nastiest of the nasties
The tapes the DPP put on its seize-on-sight list. Prosecuting them in a country with ferries to France was the best advertising any of them ever got.
Filed alongside
The Last House on the Left
Bergman's Virgin Spring, brutalised. Genuinely unpleasant and knows it. Tonally a mess.
The Hills Have Eyes
Craven's meanest. The suburban family turn out to be the better killers.
Zombi 2
A zombie fights a shark. Fulci's splinter shot is still the worst thing here.
The Beyond
Makes no sense whatsoever and is Fulci's best film. Dream logic, fully committed.
Possession
On the nasties list by pure bureaucratic accident. An actual masterpiece about divorce.
Tenebrae
Argento's coldest and cleverest. That crane shot earns its reputation.
City of the Living Dead
The drill scene. Otherwise thin, but the atmosphere is thick.
Irreversible
Noe runs the night backwards so the horror lands before the love does, and half the cinema left before either.
Cannibal Ferox
Lenzi chasing Deodato with none of the argument. Real animal deaths, no defence.
The Burning
The raft scene is the best kill in any slasher. The rest is fine.
Cannibal Holocaust
A serious film about media atrocity that committed real atrocity.
Mountain of the Cannibal God
The cannibal cycle in a dinner jacket, ex-Bond girl and real animal deaths included.