top of page

From America’s Home of Cheese: The Sexualization of Women in Bill Rebane’s Blood Harvest

As the distance between me and my home became more apparent over the past semester, I found myself searching for remnants of Wisconsin–and to do so, I decided to scour Letterboxd for any mentions of my home state. What I found were unheard of and low-rated films that belonged to a single genre: horror. Initially, there seemed to be no obvious correlation between Wisconsin and horror, until I remembered how the infamous Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer plagued two of its cities.



Clicking on the first title I saw, Blood Harvest (Bill Rebane, 1987), a man with clown face-paint fills the screen and actor Tiny Tim sings in his iconic voice – the same man behind “Tiptoe Through the Tulips”. Along with Tiny Tim, who plays The Marvelous Mervo, the film features an amateur cast: Itonia Salcheck, playing Jill Robinson, the main character; Peter Krause, playing Scott, boyfriend of Jill; and Dean West, playing Gary, brother of Mervo, and the second antagonist.


Interestingly, by centering so much of its attention on Jill, Blood Harvest enacts a familiar slasher pattern in the topic of women. In a TED Talk by Morgan Podraza, she notes, “Cycles of representations that we see of the Final Girl in slasher franchises are really a reflection of how people think about [and] talk about real violence against women” (Podraza, 2022). Not to give too much of a spoiler, but Jill is the perfect example of the Final Girl trope and completely supports the point that 80s slashers have a thing for exposing vulnerable women’s bodies. Blood Harvest does not go against this theme; in fact, it goes above and beyond.


Although Blood Harvest is a classic B movie, it sits within a Wisconsin cult horror lineage through its director Bill Rebane, who also created well-known films such as The Giant Spider Invasion (Bill Rebane, 1975) that “doesn’t just have recognizable faces like Barbara Hale and Alan Hale, Jr. (no relation), but it is one of the most profitable movies of 1975, having grossed about $15 million dollars on a $300,000 budget” (Arbuckle, para. 4). Familiar with horror, Rabane decided to keep up with creating horror films with Wisconsin charm, soon creating Blood Harvest on a low budget – the exact figures are nowhere to be found, but from each scene, it is obvious that there was little funds to work with.



Going into the aftermath of a double homicide, Blood Harvest depicts the town's negative reactions to the foreclosure of many small farms. Following the uproar of farmers, a shot of Jill, a girl unmistakably ’80s in style,appears, showing her walking and the feeling of being home to her small, rural town as inspirational music plays in the background and actors’ names appear on the screen.



As Jill arrives home, she finds that townspeople painted graffiti on her home and her parents appear to be gone. The audience now learns that her family–the Robinsons–are not very popular in the town due to her father being the banker, blamed for the foreclosures. Opening her door, she is greeted with a dummy in a noose and an arrow sticking out of its chest; the townspeople really do hate this family. Then appears Marvelous Mervo, who only unsettles the viewers further as he uncannily gifts her flowers. Wanting answers but getting none, Jill becomes frustrated until Merv’s brother, Gary, appears and explains the chaos that ensues throughout the town at her father’s hands.


Needing some space to think, Jill is eventually shown alone and decides that a nice, hot shower is exactly what she needs. Much like many early horror films, the woman’s body is exposed in unnecessary detail to keep the viewers entertained.


The audience first is made aware of this trend when Jill completely strips for her warm shower–what does this give to the plot, one may ask…nothing! Cutting back and forth between Jill in the shower and Mervo, who is in her utility room, Rebane creates suspense, urging the viewers to watch closely. Soon, he follows the back and forth cuts with one long shot of Jill running, naked, out of her shower as the water turns frigid.



Changing into a short, silk robe, Jill sits in bed and reads her book. Deep in sleep, Jill is oblivious to the man sneaking into her room through her main-floor window. Following the course of oversexualization, the man hovers over Jill, uses chloroform, and rips her robe open to take photos of her exposed body and keeps them as mementos. While this scene is able to add to the plot, unlike the exposure in the shower scene, it also serves as another way to keep the audience engaged and watching, which is arguably problematic, as it is put next to the unnecessary scenes.


Waking up from her slumber, Jill is greeted by her boyfriend, Scott, and finally feels like she is safe in her home after having various suspicious events occur during the beginning of the film. While the scene starts as wholesome, it soon becomes another addition to the numerous scenes of sexualization of Jill.As the couple has fun, Jill is the oneexposed, while the camera sees only the back of Scott. Interrupted by the phone, Scott decides to go into town and sort things out with the Sheriff, and leaves Jill on her own once again.



Not even one minute after Scott has left, Jill begins dancing in only her underwear and an oversized white shirt. As she dances, Rabane focuses the camera on her crotch, which at this point is unsurprising, yet completely unnecessary to the plot, where Jill is terrorized by Tiny Tim’s character and another masked individual. This dance sequence goes on for a couple of minutes, and various other gory activities occur in between the shots of her dancing.


In order to calm Jill, her old friend Sarah visits her. Unfortunately, she has to work the night shift at the diner–Rebane really plays into the small-town narrative–and she is shown going to her car, then finding that it is locked. Striking from behind, a man in a mask made of pantyhose chases Sarah to an old barn and shoots her hand with an arrow. In shock, Sarah tries to continue running but fails as the masked antagonist attacks her and rips her shirt off–because why would she need that? As she hangs from the top of the barn by a rope attached to her feet, the man proceeds to cut off her jeans, leaving her in only her underwear. He then moves his knife around her body in an arguably sexual manner, to then slit her throat. Meanwhile, Jill remains oblivious as she gets ready for bed and yes she is still without pants.



After being chloroformed once again, Jill wakes up on the couch, goes to her fridge, and has a bucket of blood dumped on her. Coming to her rescue, Greg appears and helps her wash the blood off; again, she is completely naked. Still woozy from the chloroform, Jill does not have much control over her body, and Greg uses this to his advantage as he begins to inappropriately touch her. He doesn’t stop there, and he decides to also get completely naked and lie on top of her. To this, Jill wakes up and tells him that he needs to get off because she has a boyfriend, whom she really loves. Greg is not very happy about this and starts to have a meltdown, to which Jill tries to make him feel better by explaining that she does love Greg, but like a brother, not like a boyfriend.


This scene depicts a harsh reality that women feel the need to explain why they don’t like a man, even after she was taken advantage of and sexually assaulted. In a relevant article for Fourth Estate, Stephanie Martinez shares, “In Sam Raimi’s version of 'Evil Dead, we see Ellen Sandweiss’s character violated by a tree. A literal tree. The scene is violently graphic, and it leaves me in disgust at how someone could come up with that. Only after that scene garnered some backlash, Raimi claimed he did not want to offend anyone and said he only wanted to “entertain them”' (Martinez, 2023, para. 8-9). The act of sexual violence against women in slashers can often be pushed aside as entertainment, like Raimi argued, which ends up pushing back women’s efforts to fight against the normalization of that violence in real life.



Even though the rest of the film has fewer sexual scenes, the ones described are what the audience will remember most, and with mediocre-at-best acting, Blood Harvest marks the epitome of low-budget, 80s slashers. Honestly, the off-beat and reading-of-a-script acting adds to the uncanniness created by Tiny Tim’s character, sculpting a classic slasher that leaves everyone with an unsettled feeling. Perhaps that’s what makes Blood Harvest so haunting; not its violence or its clown, but the uneasy thought beneath its low-budget absurdity. It reflects something uncomfortably real about the way horror, and maybe even we ourselves, choose to look at women.



Works Cited


Arbuckle, Geoff. “Blood Harvest (1987).” B, 12 Sept. 2024,


Martinez, S. (2023, October 3). The sexualization of women in horror movies. The Fourth Estate.


Podraza, M. (Narr.). (2022, December 27). What happens to the final girl after the movie ends?

[Video podcast episode]. In TEDx Talks.



Sam Witt is a freshman at Barnard College studying film and history. In her free time, you can find her taking photos, listening to music, taking a long walk in the park, or writing unserious Letterboxed reviews.

bottom of page