The Legend of Demi Moore’s Backside, or, I Stripteased on Your Grave
Growing up, the VHS box for writer-director Meir Zarchi's notoriously seminal 1978 rape-revenge film I Spit on Your Grave always caught my attention whenever I spied it at the video rental store. Featuring a shot of a woman holding a large hunting knife, with her scratched, bloodied, and bruised back to us and her face completely obscured and cut off at the top of the frame, the image conveys the film's plot perfectly: a woman is brutally and repeatedly raped by a gang of men before exacting her own bloody revenge. I was far too young to rent the film but nevertheless the provocative image and that lurid title intrigued me; the expression "I spit on your grave" is so incredibly visceral.
Was this '80s legend - Jules! - the woman on the poster for I Spit on Your Grave? Inquiring Gen X minds wanted to know!
Part of being a kid in the 1980s meant you heard an awful lot of fantastical rumors about celebrities, many of them so absurd that you had to laugh as you got older and smarter - the infamous Rod Stewart and/or David Bowie stomach-pumping myth being a perfect example. One such rumor that started circulating at some point, and seemed completely random, was that the prominently displayed posterior on the poster/VHS box art for I Spit on Your Grave actually belonged to the beautiful and talented actress, Demi Moore. This photo would have been taken several years before Moore's ascension to stardom in 1984 with St. Elmo's Fire. She would have been a teenager at the time.
Young and foxy Demi Moore, sometime in the 1980s.
The funny thing about this story is that I've polled several fellow Gen Xers about it—including Vanity Fear's Allan Mott and this site's Grand Poobah himself, Jon Cross - and none of us can remember when we first heard the rumor, but we all feel like we've always known of it. So, like many things in our lives, maybe it began in the 1980s? That is likely the case, because Moore became a star that decade, and the image of her on the I Spit on Your Grave poster actually debuted in 1980, two years after the film was first released. Filmed with the title Day of the Woman, it was renamed and given new art for the 1980 re-release. That's when the cover model first appeared, holding a knife, her clothes torn nearly off her bloodied and bruised body. It's a stunning image, both exploitative and empowering, and as visceral as the film's renamed title. The tagline is just as unforgettable: "This woman has just cut, chopped, broken, and burned five men beyond recognition ... but no jury in America would ever convict her!"
When Moore starred in Striptease she considerably bolstered the sample size for our research.
Well, as young people do, we began obsessing over this rumor, which really meant we were obsessing over Moore's rump. It seemed clear that the woman on the cover was not the film's star, Camille Keaton, and the model's body certainly bears more than a little resemblance to Moore's own. We proceeded to do endless amounts of research. It was a hard job but somebody had to do it. Pouring over shots of Moore's derrière with the sort of intense determination we'd never applied to our actual school studies, many of us came to the conclusion that, yes, it had to be true. Maybe we wanted it to be a true a little too much. Can you blame us? For years, decades even, we found no exact confirmation. Then, Moore finally confirmed it in her memoir Inside Out: that is her scratched up back and tush, alright. Thank you to Allan Mott for the heads-up on this, and for recommending I listen to Inside Out as an audiobook read by Moore in her trademark husky, sexy voice.
Editor’s Note: It has also been confirmed in recent years by notorious B Movie producer Charles Band, who owned Wizard Video at the time of the re-issue of the film and was involved with the photo shoot AND by Moore’s one time boyfriend, Jon Cryer.
After seeing I Spit on Your Gave for years at the video store, I was finally old enough to rent it. What a difficult film it is to watch in parts, too. It was dismissed as exploitation trash, with Siskel and Ebert ranking it the worst film of the year, and Ebert noting in his review that it was "a vile bag of garbage ... without a shred of artistic distinction." But, as often happens, the critical tide has turned in the film's favor during recent decades, thanks in no small part to Drive-In legend Joe Bob Briggs's consistent championing of it. Now it's widely considered a transgressive classic. For many people my age, this was a mythical film, often spoken of in hushed tones, at a time when we were too young to actually watch it. For that reason, in those pre-internet days, the film's stunning poster art - which we now know did indeed feature Demi Moore's bodacious backside - certainly contributed greatly to the mythology that grew around the film. And even though the legend surrounding Demi Moore's appearance on the poster has been confirmed, the whole thing still feels as mythic as ever.
