A tipster sent us a link to Wrong Side Of The Art, an extensive gallery of B-movie posters. Sex, drugs, and rock & roll are represented here in spades, but we’re most interested in the bitches (some images NSFW).
Our tipster wrote, “you could write a PhD thesis on any single one of these,” and we’re inclined to agree. While not every movie here is strictly speaking “grindhouse,” they all show variations of the black-sploitation genre and include just about every -ism you can imagine. Unsurprisingly, some are hilarious, while others are just downright disgusting. Exploitation films are designed to be titillating – and not much else. That is their entire reason for existing. However, what we are titillated by is always worth examining. By now you should know: this is not going to be pretty.
“Bitches” is probably the term that best summarizes how these filmmakers feel about women. They are, with the exception of rape-revenge films, either portrayed as totally useless (i.e. victims/sex toys) or ruthlessly evil. This poster, for a French film from 1973, features some of the prettier art but one of the worst messages. Women are, quite literally, dogs. They are wild she-wolves, held in check by a powerful man.
Maybe I should have started with the woman-as-victim trope, since it is so incredibly common, but who could resist the allure of bitches? Furthermore, this category needs virtually no explanation. Horror films have a long history of killing off women in creative and gory ways. Even films that are not specifically about women often include a main female character dying in a mess of screams and tears. Or many, as The Incredible Torture Show most likely includes. At least, that is what we assume they mean by “orgy of the screaming virgins.”
This poster is for the original version of Black Christmas, which was recently remade as a horrible, boring teen slasher film. The 1974 movie is actually pretty great. It centers around a group of college girls being murdered one by one in a big empty house while receiving creepy-ass phone calls and occasionally getting wasted. There is not much else to it, but who doesn’t love doing away with sorority chicks?
Another important sub-category of women-as-victim: Rapesploitation. While the most famous rape-flick is probably I Spit On Your Grave, there are many others that capitalize on similar fears (or desires, depending on the viewer).
As many crappy screenwriters know, one of the best ways to bring together sex and violence is in the rape revenge film. However much you may secretly enjoy seeing women mutilated and tortured, this allows you to follow up that feeling with a righteous satisfaction in watching the women tear apart their abusers. It’s the best of both worlds, really. It also bridges the gap between women-as-victim and women-as-abuser quite nicely.
And despite being endlessly fascinated by this poster, I can’t help but think a vigilante could have come up with a better name than “The Rape Squad.”
Quite frequently, women are the perpetrators of horrible violence. In order to make this more palatable to male viewers, you get a whole slew of girl-on-girl violence. Or, in this case, woman-on-girl. Interestingly, “women in prison” is an entire genre of film. Like the chained dogs in Chiennes, this makes the desire to capture and chain the femme fatale a-okay because they have already committed some transgression. Some of the W.I.P. films feature women being raped in prison, which allows sexual violence to act as punishment for their prior sins in a reversal of the rape-revenge fantasy.