Plot
New York short story writer Jennifer Hills rents an isolated cottage by a lake in the countryside to write her first novel. The arrival in town of the attractive and independent young woman attracts the attention of Johnny, the gas station manager, and Stanley and Andy, two unemployed youths who hang around the gas station. Jennifer receives a grocery delivery from Matthew, who is mildly mentally challenged, and befriends him. Matthew is friends with the other three men and reports back to them about the beautiful woman he met, claiming he saw her breasts.
Stanley and Andy start cruising by the cottage in their speedboat and prowl around the house at night. One day, while Jennifer is relaxing in her canoe, they surprise her in their speedboat and tow her to shore. As she tries to escape, she is met by Johnny, while Matthew hides in bushes nearby. She realizes they planned her abduction so Matthew can lose his virginity. Jennifer fights but is chased by the men through the forest. Matthew refuses to have sex with her, so Johnny rapes her. They allow her to escape but track her down shortly afterward. Andy brutally rapes her; and after she crawls back to her house, they attack her again. Matthew finally rapes her after drinking alcohol, but he says that he can not reach orgasm with the other men watching. The other men ridicule her book and rip up the manuscript, and Stanley sexually assaults her. She passes out, but after the men leave, Johnny realizes she is a witness to their crimes and orders Matthew to stab her to death. Matthew cannot bring himself to do this, so he dabs the knife in her blood and returns to the other men claiming he has killed her.
In the following days, a traumatized Jennifer pieces both herself and her manuscript back together. She goes to church and asks for forgiveness for what she plans to do. The men learn Jennifer has survived and beat Matthew up for deceiving them. Jennifer calls in a grocery order, knowing Matthew will deliver it. He takes the groceries, and a knife. At the cabin Jennifer entices him to have sex with her under a tree. As he becomes oblivious to his surroundings, she strings a noose around his neck and hangs him, then cuts the rope and drops the body in the river.
Jennifer seductively collects Johnny from the gas station in her car. She stops halfway to her house and turns a gun on him and orders him to remove all his clothing. Johnny insists the rapes were her fault because she enticed the men by parading around in revealing clothing. She pretends to believe this, lowers her gun, and invites him back to her cottage for a hot bath, where she manually stimulates him. When Johnny says that Matthew has been reported missing, Jennifer states that she killed Matthew, and as he nears orgasm, Jennifer takes the knife Matthew brought with him from its hiding place under the bathmat and severs Johnny's genitals, letting him bleed to death. She later dumps the body in the basement and burns his clothes in the fireplace.
Stanley and Andy learn that Johnny is missing and take their boat to Jennifer's cabin. Andy goes ashore with an axe. Jennifer swims out to the boat and climbs aboard before Stanley realizes what she is doing and pushes him overboard. Andy tries to attack her when she speeds past him in the boat, but she escapes with the axe. Andy swims out to rescue Stanley, but Jennifer plunges the axe into Andy's back and backs the boat up to Stanley, who grabs hold of the motor to climb aboard, begging Jennifer not to kill him. She repeats his own words he used against Jennifer while assaulting her: "Suck it, bitch!", starts the engine, disemboweling him, and speeds away in the boat.
Read more about this topic: I Spit On Your Grave
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)