Day of the Woman
After it was all over... she waited... then she struck back in a way only a WOMAN can!
Country
Production
Budget
$650 000
Revenue
$0
Director
Meir Zarchi
Actors
Camille Keaton, Eron Tabor, Richard Pace, Anthony Nichols, Gunter Kleemann, Tammy Zarchi, Terry Zarchi, Alexis Magnotti, Traci Ferrante, William Tasgal
All actors and roles (10)
All actors and roles (10)
Scenario
Meir Zarchi
Producer
Meir Zarchi, Joseph Zbeda
Operator
Nouri Haviv
Composer
Artist
Audition
Editing
Meir Zarchi
All team (11)
All team (11)
Short description
Day of the Woman follows Jennifer Hills, a writer from New York who rents an isolated house in the New England countryside to work on her first novel. Her retreat is interrupted by a group of local men, one of them a mentally disabled young man who has been delivering her groceries. What begins as harassment escalates into a brutal assault, and the men leave Jennifer for dead. She survives, and once she has recovered she sets out to track down each of her attackers and take revenge.
The film was released in 1978 and was written, directed and produced by Meir Zarchi, who also produced it with Joseph Zbeda. Camille Keaton plays Jennifer, with Eron Tabor, Richard Pace, Anthony Nichols and Gunter Kleemann as the men, and Tammy Zarchi as Johnny's daughter. It runs 101 minutes and mixes drama, horror and thriller elements, with the assault and the revenge that follows as its central subject matter.
It was Zarchi's first feature as director, and he returned to the same story decades later with I Spit on Your Grave: Déjà Vu in 2019, again with Keaton in the lead. On IMDb the film holds a rating of 5.7 from more than 34,000 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 6 out of 10 from a much smaller number of votes. A critics' rating of 5.2 from 39 reviews places it below both audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Four actors involved in the film asked the director to allow them to perform nude in order to overcome their own embarrassment and in solidarity with actress Camille Keaton, whose character is shown without clothes for most of the scenes.
- Jennifer's scar on the left side of her face is real. It remained after a car accident that Camille Keaton was involved in as a young woman. In episodes following the group rape, makeup artists deliberately emphasized the scar. In the opening and closing scenes it was retouched.
- All close-ups were shot with a camera mounted on an ordinary shopping cart.
- The film's budget did not allow for the involvement of stunt performers or doubles, so all the stunts had to be performed by the actors themselves.
- The film doesn't have a traditional soundtrack. Meir Zarchi wanted to add music to the footage but couldn't find anything suitable.
- The rape scene was filmed at the home of Nuri Habib, the film's cinematographer and director Meir Zarki's friend.
- Screenwriter Meir Zarki recounted that he was inspired to work on this film by a particular incident. Once, he, a friend, and that friend's daughter were driving past a park and saw a naked, bloodied woman crawling out of the bushes. They picked her up, took his friend's daughter home, and argued about where to take the woman – to the hospital or the police station. They decided to take her to the police first. There, the officer on duty (who, according to Zarki, was simply disgracing the police badge) insisted that the woman answer questions about her attackers before going to the hospital, even though her jaw was broken and she could barely speak. Eventually, Zarki interrupted the interrogation and stated that he was taking the woman to the doctors. He later learned that the woman had been attacked while walking to a date and decided to take a shortcut through the park. Her father sent Zarki a letter of gratitude and an offer of a reward, which Zarki declined.
- During the filming of the second rape scene, one member of the crew resigned, stating they could no longer endure the violence. Midway through filming, the makeup artist, who had been a victim of gang rape herself in the past (she knew the film's storyline beforehand but agreed to work on it), also quit.
- After filming one of the rape scenes, Camille Keaton, being highly agitated, quickly went to the equipment van, more or less composed herself there, then returned and told director and screenwriter Meir Zarki that if he wanted to film a specific ending to the scene, he should undress and show her exactly what he wanted. Meir undressed (she allowed him to keep his underwear), showed her what he wanted from her, and Keaton agreed to play it that way, on the condition that the scene be filmed in one take.
- While filming Matthew's death scene, Richard Paeke, the actor playing the role, began to choke on the noose. Zarki initially thought he was acting very convincingly, but then realized something was wrong. Paeke wasn't choking; it was simply a panic attack, as he was afraid of heights.
- For the scene where the main character kills Stanley with a motorboat propeller (played by Anthony Nichols), both the propeller and the entire engine were removed from the motorboat, and a garden hose was connected to a tank of fake blood. When Camille Keaton ostensibly pulled the cord, air was simply blown through the hose, creating the appearance of blood in the water.
- The film initially premiered under the title "Day of the Woman," but box office receipts were unimpressive. In 1981, the distributor re-released the film under the title "I Spit on Your Grave," borrowing it from the 1959 French drama. This time, the film attracted audience attention. Against this background, film critic and television host Roger Ebert (1942-2013) and his friend, film critic and journalist Gene Siskel (1946-1999), even organized a public campaign against films depicting violence against women.
- The film's poster depicts a woman in rags clutching a bloodied knife. The woman is shown from behind, so her face is not visible, but Demi Moore was photographed for the poster. The fact is that when it came time to release the poster, Charles Band decided that the lead actress Camille Keaton was too thin and decided to film someone else. At that time, he was producing and filming the science fiction horror film "Parasite" (1982), in which Moore starred, and she, in turn, before entering the cinema, starred in explicit magazines. Band chose Moore, who, in his opinion, had a very beautiful back, perfectly suited for filming the poster as he imagined it.
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