Best Served Cold: Favorite Revenge Films

“Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” – Confucius

I once heard someone say that vengeance and opposable thumbs are what separate us from the animals. Revenge is an emotion everyone can relate to and understand because we’ve all felt it. The need to correct a perceived wrong against our person is, after all, the basis of our justice system. It is those tales that are set outside the legal system that have intrigued us the most. Perhaps we don’t like to admit it, but when our heroes seek and carry out their revenge, we love to cheer them on. Revenge films offer us a safe place to live out one of our basic human desires – to get even, the cost be damned. Here are some of notable revenge films that should satisfy your “eye for an eye” appetite.

The Virgin Spring (1960) / The Last House on the Left (1972) dir. Ingmar Bergman/Wes Craven

Based on a 13th Century Swedish ballad called “Töres döttrar i Wänge”, Ingmar Bergman’s Academy award-winning film The Virgin Spring is still potent because it plays on our primal urge to protect our children at all costs even when these attempts are futile. Bergman’s stark imagery marries with the film’s horrifying tale of a young girl who is raped and murdered by a nomad band of goat herders. The herders unwittingly take refuge at the farm of the murdered girl and when her parents discover their crimes, they pay the ultimate price.

Max Von Sydow plays the murdered girl’s father, Töre, who struggles not only with the death of his only child, but with his subsequent actions. Bergman frames murder and revenge within a crisis of faith as Töre struggles to understand why bad things were allowed to happen.

A Swedish film by Ingmar Bergman seems an unlikely inspiration for horror director Wes Craven, but Craven used most of the elements of The Virgin Spring for his directional debut The Last House on the Left and the result is, perhaps, a purer, more disturbing portrait of violence. In Craven’s version, two friends, Mari and Paige, set off to the city for a concert, but are captured by a group of recently escaped convicts and, as in Bergman’s version, suffer all sorts of torture before finally being murdered.

Craven’s film drops all the religious aspects found in Bergman’s version and focuses instead on the violence as Mari’s parents brutally murder each gang member one by one.The violence becomes almost an instinct as Mari’s parents descent into a kind of homicidal madness where middle-class values and the rules of society become optional and that is what is truly horrifying.

Cape Fear (1962) / (1991) dir. J. Lee Thompson/ Martin Scorsese

In J. Lee Thompson’s film noir classic, attorney Sam Bowden (Gregory Peck) and his family are terrorized by ex-convict Max Cady (Robert Mitchum) because Cady blames Bowden, the attorney who put him away, for taking away precious years of his life. While inside, Cady educates himself on legal statutes and conducts his revenge plot so that it is just on the edge of legal, leaving Bowden helpless to defend himself via legal channels.

Mitchum is his most menacing in this (perhaps only outdone by his turn in 1955’s The Night of the Hunter) as his presence on screen is equal parts alluring and frightening, but one can’t stop looking at him. Martin Scorsese remade the film in 1991 with Nick Nolte taking on the role of Bowden and Robert De Niro as Max Cady, but in this version, Bowden was Cady’s ineffectual, serial philandering defense attorney.

As in the original, Cady stalks Bowden’s family but he also gains access to the home through Bowden’s troubled teenage daughter who becomes the focus of Cady’s attention. If there was one actor who could best Robert Mitchum in the creepy/menacing department, it is De Niro who simply oozes bad intentions.