The back alley bastard child of noir, pulp, and Hitchcockian paranoia; the erotic thriller is one of the most indulgent and trashy genres in cinema, but it’s not without its merits. It hinges on the marriage of sex and death; mixing up seduction, deception, and violence into a decadently delicious cocktail that allows us to explore our basest animal instincts from a safe distance. And they’re not all about the sex (though they area lotabout the sex); the best erotic thrillers entangle their lurid affairs into compelling mysteries and dramatic tales of Which might sound a bit like the old “I read it for the articles” refrain, but Playboy always has had excellent articles, and erotic thrillers are built on gripping stories.
They’re also a dying breed. The once-popular genre has all but become a relic of the ’90s, especially in America; an absent voice in the modern cinematic landscape that is dearly missed. No doubt the rise of the internet and subsequent easy access to pornography have stifled the genre, which once offered a semi-respectable means of titillation without the cultural shame of a stop to the porn shop.
However, that escapist need for titillation has manifested once again in the form ofFifty Shades of Grey,E.L. James' wildly popular series of erotic novels and their subsequent film adaptations. The success of the Fifty Shades franchise (in addition to being an intoxicating economic fantasy in an age of recession) is largely due to that same safety net. Swaths of women who might otherwise still be uncomfortable with the blunt force vulgarity of pornography have found a means of exploring their darker sexual inclinations in a way that’s polite-society approved.
And while I’m all for a resurgence of the erotic thriller, there’s a problem. On top of just not being very well told, TheFifty Shadesstories are fundamentally broken on a moral level; encouraging the toxic idea of mental abuse and emotional manipulation as a form of romance and spurring on that age-old fallacy that the right woman can “fix” a broken man.
Not that the erotic thriller has even been the benchmark of moral integrity. In truth, it’s often been a rather harsh genre to women – especially single career women – awash with femme fatales driven mad by lust and the poor men who fall in their wake. However, if the characters and their behavior have never been exactly politically correct, they have always been unapologetic actual characters with desires and needs all their own, who are allowed to get as down and dirty as the men with their own agency. They’re not exactly feminist, but they reject traditional often reject traditional cinematic gender roles with brazen abandon.
With that in mind,Brian Formoand I have put together a list of alternate suggestions to get your erotic fix with a healthy dose of engaging storytelling and cinematic flourish. Check out our picks below.
Body Heat (1981)
Written and directed byLawrence Kasdan– yes, the very same ofRaiders of the Lost ArcandStar Warsfame–Body Heatis a seminal erotic thriller and one of the best neo-noirs ever put to screen.Body Heatbegins with an illicit love affair; the kind that burns you whole and leaves melted in the hands of your lover; and that’s the way of everything in the film. It’s all smoldering hot hot heat painted in a pallet of reds and oranges in the thick of a summer heat wave so sticky your glasses might fog up just from watching.
As the lovers in question,William HurtandKathleen Turnerbring all that sweaty passion to bear… and to bare, as the duo spends much of the first act naked, twisted up in each other’s arms. Hurt stars as Ned Racine, a cocky lawyer who fancies himself something of a ladies man until Turner’s Matty Walker saunters into is life, turning him into lust-drunk putty in her hands. In her film acting debut, Turner gives as commanding a performance you could beg for, and you would beg her for it if she wanted you to, enchanting and utterly fearless as a woman trapped in a loveless marriage who finds her passions rekindled by a handsome stranger. It’s right about the time Ned comes up with the idea to murder her husband that the truth behind that romance begins to take shape, and whereBody Heat’s best noir elements come to life.
WhileBody Heatis sexy as hell, it’s far from trash. In truth, all those sultry scenes in the beginning of the film are a cinematic sleight of hand as Kasdan subtly stacks the dominos while you’re watching these people fuck and fuck and fuck, and each frenzy of passion threatens to send them toppling. When they do finally start to fall, it’s a thing of beauty to watch. Kasdan lovingly builds on the backs of the hard-boiled thrillers of days gone by, playing familiar beats, but never in a way that feels tired or without innovation. –Haleigh Foutch
Basic Instinct (1992)
PaulVerhoeven’s Dutch films arelitteredwith casual sex and rape. In prude America, he was a hired hand of the violent spectacle and delivered two classics,RoboCopandTotal Recall, before he got the chance to engage his “sleazy” side stateside. Of course, the kink inBasic Instincthad to receive an exclamation point of violence because that was America’s accepted comfort zone. Sex puts butts in the seats, but violence (or melodrama) is what makes it a movie, because otherwise we could just stay at home for a skin flick and not be ashamed.
Verhoeven has fun with this. He opens the film with a sex scene that goes from hot to kink in a matter of second; a dominating blonde ties up her mate and as she arches back to achieve her climax, she grabs an ice pick she placed in the satin sheets and stabs the man to death (in ecstasy, of course). A beguiling blonde author who’s written about an ice pick sex maniac killer before, Catherine Trammel (Sharon Stone) is person of interest number one. After a famously revealing line of questioning, the detective’s (Michael Douglas) interest in Catherine puts him in her bed in an attempt to find the truth.Basic Instinctis a fun play on the man attempting to rescue a woman, because essentially he’s trying to prove that his sexual prowess is enough to satiate her without needing that extra stab to complete an orgasm. Of course this infatuation comes from Catherine being sexy and sexually free in a way that also frightens him and that fear of her allows her to always have control.
ThoughBasic Instinctisn’t particularly feminist, it does allow a woman to freely indulge in sex in a manner where her promiscuity isn’t judged, her extracurriculars are. The Hollywood lesson: a promiscuous woman won’t be harmed for sexual desires if she’s the one doing the harm. And there’ll always be a man willing to see if he can change her murdering ways by being an equal lay.— BrianFormo
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
The so-called last masterpiece fromStanley Kubrick,Eyes Wide Shut’s production is the stuff of legends – a record-breaking continuous 400 day shoot thatTom CruiseandNicole Kidmanreportedly signed onto with the agreement that they would work on the picture for as long as Kubrick wanted them to. The result is exactly the kind of technical mastery you’d expect from the genius filmmaker, but it’s not at all what you’d expect for the genre he’s working in.
Fittingly, the story is about obsession. The film follows Cruise as a high-society New York City doctor, whose life is thrown for a loop when his wife (Kidman) confesses her sexual fantasies about a young naval officer she glimpsed the summer before. His jealousy is tremendous and his imagination is ignited, leading him in short order to a secret sex club where model-esque naked women are on proud display in the midst of an all-out orgy. Once he’s discovered as an interloper, there is a constant threat of unknown consequences that drive the rest of the film’s actions as he desperately seeks to uncover the truths that evade him; both about the secret society and his own marriage.
Eyes Wide Shutis the odd erotic thriller in that it’s filled to the brim with sex – on-screen, imagined, and coursing through the subtext of every scene – but it’s not lusty in the slightest. Kubrick’s compulsive, controlling nature as a filmmaker sets a nightmarish and otherworldly tone, down to its very setting. The director insisted on filming in London, even the NYC exteriors, meaning a mini New York was constructed on the sound stages, giving those moments a touch of surrealism and counterfeit that further stokes the bleeding lines between reality and fantasy. Instead of the visceral heat we’ve come to expect from the genre, Eyes Wide Shut is all neurotic paranoia. It’s not hot, it’s haunting. Sex – especially indulgent and extra-marital sex– is treated as a deadly, destructive lure. The end result is either high-art trash or trashy high-art; the genre tropes twisted through Kubrick’s singular mind, and it all leads up to one of the cheekiest and most darkly comic final lines in cinema history. –HaleighFoutch
Unfaithful (2002)
What makesUnfaithfulquite different from other films on this list is that it sets you up to believe that you’re watching a thriller, but then, within a subgenre that’s all about red herrings, it treats the thriller setup of an affair and the private detective hired to tail the woman as the actual red herring.AdrianLyne’s film is actually just about a happy marriage (betweenRichard GereandDiane Lane) that is complicated by a lustful affair. Why would Connie (Lane) stray and why should Edward (Gere) stay?
Instead of providing explanatory dialogue or Freudian psychology,Unfaithfulprefers to observe behavior. We observe the cheesy (but new to her) seduction tactics of the man she stumbles into an affair with (Olivier Martinez). We observe their sex (which is new to her, but will also eventually be stale and predictable) and we observe Connie and Edward together at home. Cops do come knocking at their door, but ultimately,Unfaithfulis about brief obsessions that the mind wills the body to do. And how hard it is to stop once it’s begun. The success of the film rests entirely on Lane and Gere’s moments of reflection and we’re able to read their reasons for their actions without them needing to tell us. Outside of agreeing that the heat index on this one is perhaps the hottest mainstream American film of this century, the audience will probably come to different conclusions as to Connie’s why-she-does-it. And that’s far more exciting than being told or seeing their marriage punished by violence.— BrianFormo
The Handmaiden (2016)
The Handmaidenis the most downright gorgeous erotic thriller ever made. Liberally inspired bySarah Waters' British melodrama,Chan-wookParkgives the source material a cultural transplant to 1930s Japan-occupied Korea where Sook-Hee (Tae-riKim) takes a job as a handmaiden to the mysterious, troubled Lady Hideko (Min-heeKim), sparking a passionate affair that reshapes their lives. Our entry point to the twisted tale is through Sook-Hee, a theif by trade and family tradition who is in fact teaming with a fake count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo) in a scheme to defraud Lady Hideko of her fortune, but when Sook-Hee falls for her mark, the fiendish plan is thrown for a loop as new layers of deception and manipulation are uncovered at every turn.
The Handmaidenis elevated by Park’s trademark panache for lush, luxurious visuals, but it also bears his seedy sense of humor and tendrils of perversity hidden in the belly of the story.The Handmaidenis a puzzlebox, the true shades of the picture slipping ever more into focus with each new reveal, and hidden at its center is a deeply deviant tale of exploitation and revenge that gives the film it’s sharp, sordid edge.
As for the sex, and there is plenty,The Handmaidenis drenched in eroticism to the very bones of its story, and Park never misses an opportunity to get his audience all hot and bothered. Park dances on an uncomfortable razor’s edge with the sex scenes, directing with an indulgent male gaze but always respecting female sexuality more than he’s exploiting it. In the process, he turns every glance and gesture into seduction, turning something as simple as a bit of home dentistry in to a breathless sexual experience.— Haleigh Foutch
Cruel Intentions (1999)
For a generation of movie goers,Cruel Intentionswas their lurid, poppy introduction to the erotic thriller genre. A modernized retelling ofPierre Choderlos deLaclos18th century epistolary novelLesLiaisonsDangereuses,Cruel Intentionshas a different tonality from your average erotic thriller – not just for the prep-school setting and teenage dream cast, but because it comes from a different strain of DNA than your average Noir-based erotic thriller.
RogerCumble’s feature film debut starsRyan PhilippeandSarah Michelle Gellaras Sebastian Valmont and Kathryn Merteuil, two vicious and lascivious wealthy step-siblings who make sport out of seducing and disposing of their classmates. That is, untilReese Witherspoon’s Annette Hargrove comes into town, a consummately virtuous and honest young woman who Sebastian sees as his greatest conquest, but ultimately teaches him how to be human. Each conflicting agenda pulls on the intertwining threads of jealousy, greed, and longing until the house of cards built out of petty schemes and wicked indulgence comes crashing down, with some casualties.
Cruel Intentionsis at its best when it’s reveling in the wickedness of its lead characters, letting them toy with each other and everyone around them with such casual abandon for decency. Philippe and Gellar have an electricity that carries those scenes, giving them an allure beyond the petty scheming of a couple of entitled teenagers. Ultimately, that pulsing through line of seductive decadence gives way to a tidy moralistic ending (the film was aimed at teens, after all), but whenCruel Intentionsis firing on all cylinders, it’s a wildly twisted and fearlessly salacious romp.— Haleigh Foutch
The 4th Man (1983)
PaulVerhoeven’s final Dutch film—before cozily moving on to Hollywood big-budget subversiveness withRoboCop, Starship Troopers,ShowgirlsandTotal Recall—wasThe 4th Man. And though we identify him with subversiveness, nothing in his filmography is as subversive asThe 4th Man. It shows sex as all-consuming from the mind, but also too fleeting and physiological to actually inform a whole identity. Ideas make up your identity, not what’s between your legs.
An author, Gerard (JeroenKrabbé), begins an affair with an alluringly stark, yet androgynous woman, Christina (RenéeSoutendijk) who sells cosmetics, favors shears, and runs a night club called SPHINX. The SPHINX’s neon sign is burned out and only spells SPIN (Dutch for “Spider” and after meeting her at the bar, he’s placed into a web of confusion). Gerard, who is in a difficult long-term homosexual relationship, is at first attracted to Christina in an attempt to get closer to the younger man in her life (Thom Hoffman). But after experiencing a very different type of orgasm with her, he starts having strange nightmares and a crisis of identity.
The 4th Man is a combination of many of the great things that existed in Verhoeven’s foreign work—dark eroticism, lounging nudity, shocking sexual violence—but it’s his most demented religious film as well. “Being Catholic means having an imagination,” Gerard answers during a Q&A, when asked how someone can still be religious during an age of expanding science. After having his mind blown by sex with Christina, Gerard is unable to differentiate between what horrors that haunt him are real and which are made-up horrors he’s stored away for future writing. Biology led his penis, but he allowed Catholicism (and its rituals and symbolism) to lead his imagination to punishment.— BrianFormo
The Last Seduction (1994)
For my money,LindaFiorentino’s femme fatale Bridget Gregory is one of the all-time great film characters. A downright dastardly seductress, Gregory is a woman who always gets what she wants, but is never satisfied. Wife to a successful doctor (Bill Pullman), with a beautiful life in New York, Bridget wants more – a bigger house, to be specific – so she and her hubby do a drug deal to the tune of $700,000 and they’re poised to get away clean… until he slaps her. That’s when she decides to keep the money and ditch the husband, stealing the whole haul and hiding out in a small cow town where she meets Mike (Peter Berg), a well-hung but not-too-bright local who becomes the pawn in her next big con.
Gregory is deliciously deviant and ice cold in her fluid manipulations, moving from one con to the next with a spirit of despicable genius. Her caustic sexuality is a refreshing spin on the femme fatal archetype; she doesn’t just wield her sexuality as a weapon, she gets off on it without an ounce of remorse or shame.
DirectorJohn Dahl, who caught a second wind in his career as a prolific television director, helms the picture as a classic noir thriller with an updated and deeply nihilistic bent.The Last Seductionhas a hard-boiled ’40s flourish, but it’s also devilishly playful and full of wit. Everything Gregory does is morally bankrupt, but there’s a naughty thrill and delight in watching her get away with it. –Haleigh Foutch
Secret Things (2002)
Long ago, the French invented a more adventurous way of kissing, and they’ve similarly led the way in film sexiness that doesn’t actually punish (or rescue) women for enjoying sex, contrary to most of American mainstream erotica.
Secret Thingsis an immediate motor-rever, as it begins with a woman (Coralie Revel) masturbating to an opera on a stage. Give it a few minutes and you see that she’s performing for a high-class audience. Later she teaches a young woman who tended bar at the public pleasure event (SabrinaSeyvecou) on how to unlock her own sexual confidence. They’re both seduced by making more money and decide to get jobs at a bank. They sleep their way to the top. But the man at the top is a sadistic voyeur. He attempts to make them jealous of each other. And directorJean-ClaudeBrisseaudares to present their progress as a sexual hijacking that’s aided every step of the way by the false idols at the top. If you liked just once scene only fromFifty Shades of Greyit was probably the body contract scene between Anastasia and Christian, where she takes control in a corporate setting about her body.Secret Thingsis like that scene as a better movie with more psychologically interesting sex and self pleasure. It’s a simple glass ceiling/glass house parallel with a climactic orgy, but it oozes confident sensuality and, because Brisseau doesn’t distance himself from the two women at the center,Secret Thingseven offers a nice little memo on pleasure going two (or more) ways.— BrianFormo
Wild Things (1998)
Trash. Pure trash. But hey, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.Wild Thingsis a sleazy, salacious camp film that has earned its reputation as a bargain bin thriller, but it knows exactly what it is so it plays to all of trash cinema’s best qualities.
The film starsMatt Dillonas a guidance counselor at the kind of fabulously fictitious high school where the children of millionaires matriculate alongside trailer park kids. When two of his young students, one from the local trailer park (Neve Campbell) and one the local princess (Denise Richards), accuse him of rape, the sex crimes investigator (Kevin Bacon) becomes obsessed with his suspicions of conspiracy. Set in the sticky swamps of Miami, there are predators everywhere (as the constant presence of alligators is keen to remind you) andWild Thingsdelivers twists and turns at rapid-fire in a sexual power struggle that always leaves the audience just a few steps behind, panting to catch up.
John McNaugton, who helmed the controversial, hyper-violent 1980s horror filmHenry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, takes on a different kind of provocation here with sex scenes so smutty they dabble in softcore territory at times. The film’s enduring legacy is the three-way sex scene, which is somehow more shocking all these years later – a truly brazen act of on-screen eroticism.Wild thingsis no piece of high-art, but it is some of the damn finest junk food cinema of all time. –Haleigh Foutch
