{Movie Review} Dicks and Nascar: The Emasculator (2024) and the Rape-Revenge Subgenre

“They’ve got some sort of porn snuff ring where they’re shooting stuff on VHS video.”

According to Wikipedia, the so-called “rape and revenge” or “rape-revenge” subgenre of horror and vigilante films is the “most controversial film hybrid-genre of the mid-20th century.”

Though the subgenre is emblematic of a broader “fascination with revenge in western culture” (Wikipedia again) that can be traced back to some of the earliest examples of storytelling, the ur-text of the rape-revenge film is probably Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring from 1960, which was loosely remade as Wes Craven’s 1972 debut, The Last House on the Left.

Of course, Bergman’s film had its own precursors. He based the story on a traditional Swedish ballad, sometimes called “Tore’s Daughters in Vange,” about a man whose daughters are killed by highwaymen while on their way to church, the vengeance he subsequently takes, and how he then atones for what he has done.

Akira Kurosawa’s classic 1950 film Rashomon – which also deals with sexual assault and revenge as part of its plot – was another influence, while the 1931 German film A Woman Branded (aka Dangers of Love) has been regarded as an early prototype of the rape-revenge subgenre, with its narrative of a woman who catches a venereal disease from her rapist and then kills him.

None of these early, relatively highbrow examples are what The Emasculator is reaching for, however. As the rape-revenge archetype began to gather steam, it crossed over with another burgeoning exploitation subgenre – the vigilante film. You can find a variety of exemplars that occupy various points within a larger Venn diagram of the two forms, from I Spit on Your Grave to Death Wish.

Besides their frank discussion of grim topics, rape-revenge films became known for their graphic depictions, not only of the rapes themselves, but of the vengeance that follows. In part, by making the initial assault as vicious and degrading as possible, the filmmakers were able to prime the audience to better root for the subsequent revenge, regardless of how graphic or cruel that revenge became.

Some filmmakers have attempted to subvert or otherwise experiment with this codified structure. Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible, for example, shows the revenge first, and only then the act that prompted it, toying with the expectations and the sympathies of the audience. Meanwhile, in the 21st century, a number of women directors have taken their own stab at the rape-revenge subgenre, a form that has always had a fraught relationship with both misogyny and feminism. Notable women-led rape-revenge films include Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge (2017) and Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale (2018).

And now Susana Kapostasy’s The Emasculator.

Shot on video using a variety of old cameras, fraught with analog glitches and a warped and warbling sound recording that sometimes makes the dialog virtually impossible to understand, The Emasculator is intended to be a throwback to a grimier, dingier, and less respectable era of filmmaking.

The flick is crammed with references to other SOV, exploitation, underground, transgressive, vigilante, rape-revenge, and horror pictures, the grungier the better. This is a movie where more than once a character will literally name off some of the films that inspired it, or you’ll get a shot of their VHS collection to drive the point home. And if you’re a relatively normal person – even if you’re a relatively normal cinephile – you’ll never have heard of most of them.

William Lustig’s 1980 grindhouse classic Maniac is probably the most mainstream film that ever gets mentioned here, amid a litany of SOV weirdness and actual pornography, including the notorious “enema bandit” porno from 1976, Water Power.

One of the few taboos that still remain in modern mainstream cinema is the on-screen depiction of unsimulated, penetrative sex. The Emasculator has no such scruples, though the hardcore scenes it shows are lifts from existing pornos, not actual unsimulated sex scenes filmed for the movie. But that gives you an idea of what you’re in for.

The Emasculator is the kind of movie that gets promoted by the distributor sending out rape whistles in the shape of bloody, severed penises. And it is a movie with a lot of bloody, severed penises in it.

The storyline follows a young woman who is raped as part of a poorly explained underground porn/snuff ring organized by the least credible cops in the history of film. When she seemingly takes her own life after the incident, her Army Ranger father begins a campaign of revenge, using the eponymous emasculator – a real-life tool used in the castration of livestock – that was left to him by his rancher father to do the job.

Is there something here about the enforcement of patriarchal norms passing down through generations? Almost certainly. Several early shots in the film also make it a point to show that the pellet gun that once belonged to the dad has had his name scratched off and his daughter’s written in.

Then there’s the twist ending that undercuts much of what has come before. I’m not going to get too much into it or what it might mean, but while it changes the dynamic of what we’ve witnessed in ways that are maybe not great, it also makes an inescapable observation about the predictability of patriarchal violence.

All of this is a lot to lay on the shoulders of a goofy shot-on-video cheapie that is chock-a-block with jokes about severed penises, though. One character’s entire personality is eating cheese balls out of an oversized container. Another is killed while reading Savage Sword of Conan in the bathtub – while wearing his sunglasses.

This is a movie with, like, six different instances of product placement for Garfield.

This isn’t The Virgin Spring, is what I’m saying, and it doesn’t want to be. It doesn’t even want to be Death Wish. It wants to be some bad taste, SOV knock-off that neither you nor any other normal person has ever heard of.

Does it succeed at that? Maybe. Though I’m slowly learning my way around the world of contemporary shot-on-video cinema, I am far from well-versed enough to be a connoisseur. So, when I say that The Emasculator didn’t work for me, that’s not saying a lot, as I’m emphatically not this film’s target audience.

What I will say is this: Along with The Emasculator, I also watched Susan Kapostasy’s previous film, the 2022 flick Night of the Zodiac, which takes a similar trash cinema approach to a very different kind of exploitation flick and, for my money, does so much more successfully.