Posts Tagged ‘Thriller’

I Spit on Your Grave (1978)

//

I'm not only a writer, I'm also a spokesperson for the NRA.

I'm not only a writer, I'm also a spokesperson for the NRA.

In 1974, Meir Zarchi and his eight-year-old daughter were driving to a park when they saw a woman crawl naked out of the bushes. The woman had been raped by two men and Zarchi helped her to the police, where they had the misfortune of running into a singularly unhelpful police officer. It was this episode that inspired Zarchi to write and direct Day of the Woman. While the very fact that Zarchi chose to make a B-movie about rape is exploitative, in its first release, Day of the Woman wasn’t marketed as exploitation and didn’t create much controversy, but went mostly unnoticed. However, the film was re-released in 1980 as I Spit on Your Grave and sold on its, not insubstantial, exploitation trappings.

Inland Empire (2006)

//

This is a story that happened yesterday. But I know it’s tomorrow.

Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) relaxes at home.

Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) relaxes at home.

Shot on the cheap on digital video, Inland Empire was filmed without a complete script, and Lynch instead mostly made it up as they went along. Amazingly, this somehow works — fragmented, but still with a general, thematic cohesion. It stars Laura Dern as Nikki Grace, an actress who has just gotten the role of her life. The film they’re shooting, On High In Blue Tomorrows, starts bleeding into reality, and the nature of reality and fiction become even more confused when it turns out the On High is a remake of an old Polish play, 47, rumoured to be cursed.