A Veritable Goldmine of Erotic Thriller Scholarship
A Veritable Goldmine of Erotic Thriller Scholarship
All the dangerous/deceitful/fatal kind of passion/attraction/seduction we can handle 🔪 💋
Happy October, friends. If your idea of spooky involves overblown saxophone solos; gigantic tousled manes of tossed-back hair; glossy lips licking and biting themselves into oblivion; billowing white curtains blowing out of wide open windows inviting all to gaze in as sultry, yet somehow judgmental overhead fans spin above; satin pajamas dropping to the floor only to reveal a glinting knife tucked into an entirely superfluous garter belt; a bathtub entirely surrounded by a truly absurd abundance of white candles and possibly containing a corpse; and a luxuriously stark mansion filled with all of the above plus floor to ceiling mirrors plus enormous permanently rumpled yet sumptuously appointed beds that invite you to explore your tawdriest of fantasies (perhaps pronounced FONtasies, I don’t know), but don’t get too comfortable/uninhibited/murder-y just yet because the place is inexplicably entirely wired, tapped, and bugged for the nosiest and most damning sort of surveillance possible…you’re in luck. The erotic thriller is enjoying a true renaissance of appreciation and scholarship and I’d like to talk about it with you this week.
The mighty Criterion Channel did its own 18-film retrospective of the genre from April to June of this year, featuring everything from its earliest ur-films like Brian DePalma’s Dressed To Kill and Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion to artsy slow burners like The Comfort of Strangers and Fleshtone to the well known Hollywood blockbusters like Basic Instinct and Single White Female. The Criterion site included a great essay, “The Wet Dreams and Twisted Politics of Erotic Thrillers” by Beatrice Loayza, who calls erotic thrillers “the love child of porno chic and film noir” and notes that the 1980s gave rise to the genre that so deftly combined sex and danger for a variety of cultural and technological reasons.
Director Anthony Penta has made what is surely the apex of erotic thriller scholarship in his three hour long documentary We Kill For Love. I got my copy from Vinegar Syndrome this week and gave it a watch. It has a fun set up in that “talking heads” interview sections and copious clips from the movies in question are couched as the findings of a character called “The Archivist” who is seemingly finding and assembling the clips from the very sorts video tapes that made these movies popular. In an interview with Sonny Burch on the podcast The Bulwark Goes To Hollywood, Penta notes that he realized the erotic thriller output of the 1980s and 1990s was roughly the same size and shape as film noir of the 1940s and 1950s, was a specifically American genre and yet hadn’t been discussed and studied as a reflection of and response to cultural upheaval with its own themes, tropes, and storytelling mechanisms. He went on to track down over 500 examples of exotic thrillers and notes that like film noir, erotic thrillers have their own pantheon of actors who pretty much only appear within the genre and are a “boutique collection” of performers, including Shannon Tweed (perhaps the most well known of them all?), Andrew Stevens, Monique Parent, and Kira Reed, all of whom I immediately recognized even if I hadn’t known their names. It goes back and forth between interviews and analysis and I was on board the entire time. It’s very dense in the best possible way.
If you don’t want to watch the entire movie you can read Penta’s article “Crimes of Desire: A Casefile of the Erotic Thriller” from Lo Specchio Scuro. It, too, is a thorough and entertaining work that explains how cable television and the home video market made a new kind of movie making possible just as popular culture was trending more glamorous, luxurious, and specifically championing conspicuous consumption. What Penta calls “softcore content” made its way into a variety of genres developed for the home video market; he thinks the thriller took off because it takes itself seriously, erotica and danger pair well together, and it appealed to both men and women, particularly since the stories centered women’s sexual experiences and pleasures and often made them the villains as well as the protagonists. I was attracted to the movies as a teenager in part because they featured a different kind of female character than I had seen before, usually presented as living in a bizarre heightened reality that I found really fun and compelling. As Beatrice Loayza put it, “characters like Bridget [from 1994’s The Last Seduction] and Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone), the heroine of Basic Instinct (1992), aren’t supposed to seem human; they are skyscrapers. Bridget is essentially the world’s greatest con artist. She is a vision of cool … [Linda] Fiorentino plays her with the mordant charisma and cocksure sensuality of a young Lauren Bacall. Catherine, a bisexual heiress with the IQ of a super-genius, is the equivalent of a female Bond villain. However reprehensible their actions, these female caricatures are also immensely satisfying to watch. We want them to triumph.”
Another interesting component of erotic thrillers is their obsession with surveillance. It makes sense that as an home video exploded and a reasonable expectation of privacy became complicated and compromised, an entire genre focused on sex and crime would be among the first to predict the “always being recorded, never really alone” reality in which we now function. Sharon Stone famously followed up Basic Instinct with Sliver, in which she takes up with a creepy William Baldwin who has wired an entire apartment building for pervy and possibly (definitely) murder reasons, but did you know erotic thriller genre king Andrew Stevens predated this with 1990’s Night Eyes, which he explains in We Kill For Love was inspired by…as actual surveillance company called Night Eyes?! There’s two Night Eyes sequels and I’m going to be obsessing about them and the role of surveillance in erotic thrillers for the next several years in case any agents want to get in touch and get in on what will surely be an extremely lucrative blockbuster of film history.
You can learn more about ‘80s and ‘90s erotic film, including thrillers, thanks to the last two seasons of Karina Longworth’s You Must Remember This. Standout episodes include ‘90s Lolitas: Drew Barrymore, Amy Fisher, and Alicia Silverstone, which gets into the truly fucked up ‘90s obsession with teenage sexuality, which I thought was extremely cool and normal as a ‘90s teenager and now look at pretty fucking askance for a variety of reasons [the Poison Ivy of it all!!!] and Red Shoe Diaries and Sex on TV In The ‘90s, which gets into the work of genre master Zalman King, David Duchoveny’s star turn as series narrator Jake, which coincided with his casting on The X Files, and the ways in which TV and its lack of MPAA ratings influence.
Why the sudden interest in erotic thrillers, anyway? People got real hyped up for Fair Play when it premiered at Sundance in January but now reviews are not so great. I haven’t watched it yet — have you? I want to but is it really a “twist” to have the subject of the movie be “to shine a light on emotional terror — like that was really the purpose for me, to explore all the ways in which women have to play ugly to survive,” as director Chloe Domont told Radio Times? There’s plenty of bait for clicking thanks to its release, anyway. As Penta pointed out in his interview with Burch, erotic thrillers have never really gone away. “Women’s television” like Lifetime continues to produce them. Furthermore, he says, “Another group that picked up on the erotic thriller was Southeast Asia, Bollywood. In the early two thousands, Bollywood began picking up on the erotic thriller, the classic direct to video erotic thriller, and they began making all these movies like Hate Story, Murder, Awas, Raja Tomho, there’s a whole bunch of them. And they’re legibly erotic thrillers…In the early 2000s, Black audiences began picking up on the themes and tropes of the erotic thriller, and movies like The Perfect Guy, Obsessed, Trois, Trois 2, Trois 3, Asunder…these films never went away. If you look at Tubi, you’ll see a lot of them.” I’m in.
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The “You Must Remember This” pdcast has done a great couple of series title the Erotic 80s and the Erotic 90s.