Ero Lit

Ero Lit

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What happened to Hollywood's sleaziest and, at one point, most bankable genre for adult moviegoers? We look back at 19 classics in the psychosexual thriller canon.
Photo : Paramount / courtesy Everett Collection
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“Basic Instinct,” “Fatal Attraction,” “Cruel Intentions,” “The Handmaiden”
The erotic thriller — the sleaziest and at one point most enduring genres of the 1980s and ’90s — seemed on the cusp of a comeback this year with the return of director Adrian Lyne. The master behind films like “Fatal Attraction” and “9 ½ Weeks” came back to screens (albeit small ones) with “Deep Water,” his first film in two decades since “Unfaithful” earned Diane Lane an Oscar nomination and one that firmly returns him to the erotic stomping grounds of his heyday.
Alas, the turgid drama, based on a Patricia Highsmith potboiler and starring a listless Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas as open lovers who detest each other, is a turkey, a straight-to-streaming dud that evokes better ideas from better movies and fails to be neither erotic nor thrilling.
Still, “Deep Water” can serve as a twofold instruction point: for Hollywood to dig deeper to come up with hopefully better erotic thrillers and for viewers to revisit or, for the first time, discover the movies that precipitated “Deep Water’s” existence in the first place.
Meanwhile, Karina Longworth is taking filmgoers back in time to the “Erotic ’80s” with the latest season of her “You Must Remember This” podcast, looking back on Hollywood’s quintessential erotic thrillers, body horrors, neo-noirs, and sex comedies. The first part of the season debuts April 5, with the follow-up “Erotic ’90s” set to debut this fall.
To get you started, IndieWire picks 19 of the best movies from Hollywood’s golden age of erotic thrillers, kicking off with 1980’s “Cruising” and ending with a few recent foreign titles that fit the bill.
Jude Dry and Samantha Bergeson contribute to this story.
Paul Schrader made Richard Gere a bona fide movie star with this glitzy vision of Los Angeles, a hyper-stylized sexual playground for Gere’s lover-for-hire Julien, who becomes embroiled in a criminal plot. The movie most famously features a full-frontal Gere at a time when onscreen male nudity was still an anomaly — leading to much specualation over his sexuality for years to come.
William Friedkin’s seedy gay leather scene thriller “Cruising” stoked protests from New York City’s gay community during its production in 1979. More than four decades later, this brutal and explicit film hasn’t lost its capacity to shock and confound. Al Pacino plays a New York cop who goes undercover as a member of the underground S&M scene to track down a serial killer of gay men. Friedkin doesn’t shy from either the gruesome murders or gay male sex act, as evidenced in one particularly pungent edit that draws a paralell between anal penetration and a knife ripping into flesh. What rankled many viewers (gay and straight) was the film’s suggestion that, by the end, Pacino’s character has been somehow “turned” by his time undercoer.
Casual moviegoers might be shocked to learn that “Body Heat,” Lawrence Kasdan’s Southern-fried neo-noir twist on “Double Indemnity,” is the big-screen debut of actress Kathleen Turner. Her sultry turn as Matty Walker, who enters into a murder-plotting affair with a crooked lawyer (William Turn), still burns a hole in the screen 40 years later. The film’s censor-pushing sex scenes were ultimately truncated in the final cut, but that hardly tempers the steam radiating off this ’80s classic that launched Turner’s reputation as a screen siren.
Brian De Palma’s exhilarating and erotic “Body Heat” proved the director was no Hitchcock copycat, as this film blends the voyeurism of “Rear Window” and “Vertigo” with his own X-rated, 1980s-tastic sensibilities. While the film’s graphic sex scenes were cut to achieve an R rating, there’s still an abundance of flesh on display — as well as a phallic drill that’s surely one of cinema’s most brutal instruments of murder. Melanie Griffith plays a porn star who leads out-of-luck (and out-of-a-girlfriend) actor Jake Scully (Craig Wasson) into the netherworld of Los Angeles’ adult entertainment industry. Rising star Griffith brings intelligence and even a dash of dark wit to a role that could’ve been sidelined in another actor’s hands.
The erotic thriller that launched them all, Adrian Lyne’s “Fatal Attraction” is much more than the sum of its stewed bunnies and grand guignol, last-act literal bloodbath. It’s a “Madame Butterfly”-esque operatic tragedy about two Manhattanites (Michael Douglas and Glenn Close) who let their libidos get the better of them when a weekend of wild adulterous sex turns obsessive. While Close’s Alex Forrest may be remembered by some moviegoers as the psychotic stalker lover from hell, Close plays her more as a tragic figure — which may have been lost in the edit and the movie’s “gotcha!” ending.
In the mid-1980s, Mickey Rourke was the poster child for erotic films thanks to Adrian Lyne’s psychosexual drama “9 1/2 Weeks” (not quite a thriller, but certainly erotic) and Alan Parker’s seedy, sweltering New Orleans-set neo noir “Angel Heart.” Rourke plays a New York City private eye hired by Robert De Niro’s unsubtly monikered Louis Cyphre to solve a missing-persons case in New Orleans. His dark journey into a string of brutal murders leads him to Epiphany Proudfoot, a disturbed young woman played by Lisa Bonet, whose hallucinatory sex scene with Rourke initially landed the film an X rating. As Bonet’s character was meant to be 17 (the actress was 20 at the time of the film’s release), this very-feel-bad movie would never be made the same today.
Peter Greenaway’s X-rated masterpiece threw acid in the face of arthouse moviegoers looking for a decorous period piece. Instead, this alternately repulsive and erotic chamber thriller — set in a Jacobean-inspired French restaurant out of time and place — mixes sex, violence, and death with giddy, crimson-colored style. Helen Mirren plays Georgina, the battered wife of despicable gangster Albert (Michael Gambon), who takes up a doomed affair with an erudite book dealer who frequents Albert’s establishment. All hurtle toward an awful, cannibalistic destiny — but they look fabulous doing it in Jean-Paul Gaultier costumes that are just to die .
Sex and death were the primary colors in the sick early novels of “Atonement” writer Ian McEwan, and “The Comfort of Strangers” is no exception. Paul Schrader’s adaptation follows an unmarried English couple (Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson, both drop-jaw gorgeous) on a charged vacation through the sinuous channels of Venice. It’s there they meet a twisted couple, played by Christopher Walken and Helen Mirren, who rope them into their S&M tricks and homoerotic mind games.
Barbet Schroeder’s “Single White Female” instantly became such a cultural touchstone that its title inevitably became a shorthand for getting completely sucked dry by the roommate from hell. Bridget cuts a cool figure as software designer Allie who, after a tumultuous breakup, takes on a roommate to share costs on her (quite stunning and spacious) Upper West Side apartment. That roommate, the mentally unstable Hedy (Jennifer Jason Leigh), soon plunges Allie into a waking nightmare. While the film doesn’t make Allie and Hedy’s “Persona”-like bond explicitly erotic, the question of whether Hedy wants to fuck Allie or be Allie looms over this sexually tense film.
“Basic Instinct” was a landmark for erotic thrillers, and few have bested it since. Paul Verhoeven’s twisted murder mystery grossed over $352 million worldwide as audiences fell for the psychological game between a cop (Michael Douglas) and a novelist (Sharon Stone) who might be an ice pick-wielding murderer. —SB
Louis Malle adapts Josephine Hart’s compact, nasty little novel about an upper-class London affair gone horrifically wrong to the level of a Greek tragic opera. Jeremy Irons is a fledgling politician who engages in volatile sexual assignations with his son’s fiancée, played by a deliciously soulless Juliette Binoche. Malle directs some of the most wildly choreographed sex scenes put to film, making this elegant adaptation a standout of early ’90s psychosexual thrillers.
Long before the Wachowskis became a worldwide sensation with “The Matrix” and before either came out as trans, the directing duo nevertheless showed an early interest in queerness with the erotic noir “Bound.” Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly star as ex-con Corky and femme fatale Violet, probably the best queer partners-in-crime cinema had seen up to that point, as they try to con an evil mafioso (Joe Pantoliano) out of $2 million. Their erotic chemistry has made the film a lesbian classic.
Not entirely thrilling and not entirely erotic, David Cronenberg’s J.G. Ballard adaptation “Crash” nonetheless deserves prime placement on a list of any 1990s erotic thrillers. Somewhere between softcore porn and body-horror freakout, this archly directed and chilly film centers on a quartet of clinically drawn nymphomaniacs who are aroused by the spectacle and carnage of car crashes. Deborah Kara Unger is perfectly dead inside as the wife of James Spader, whose open marriage spins out upon the introduction of Holly Hunter as a sexually insatiable doctor and Elias Koteas as a crash fetishist obsessed with mining sexual pleasure from reenacting iconic Hollywood deaths.
What isn’t erotic and thrilling about Roger Kumble’s 1999 spin on the French epistolary novel “Dangerous Liaisons”? It’s the sexiest teen thriller ever made and surely still one of the most transgressive — and defining for many a gen Yers’ sexual awakening. From Ryan Phillippe’s iconic backside to Joshua Jackson and Eric Mabius naked in a bed and the twisted dynamic of Phillippe and Sarah Michelle Gellar as way-too-close stepsiblings, “Cruel Intentions” is a hot and heavy riot, smartly mining the bawdy original’s baked-in sauciness.
Cameron Crowe’s twisty and erotic lucid dream “Vanilla Sky” met a mixed response at the time — perhaps because filmgoers were expecting something on the level of his prior film “Almost Famous” — but his vision of a New York media mogul’s (Tom Cruise) ego death remains a loopy trip. Cameron Diaz is memorably unhinged as his psychotic paramour (“the saddest girl to ever hold a martini”) while Penélope Cruz delivers outstanding work as the woman he truly loves but can’t attain. Most of the film’s sex scenes are more disturbing than hot, but “Vanilla Sky” stands as a great example of early-2000s, high-budget, high-concept movies for adults only during arguably the genre’s last dying breath.
Adrian Lyne’s return to the erotic stomping grounds of “Fatal Attraction” and “9 1/2 Weeks” rightly earned Diane Lane an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of a restless Connecticut housewife who throws her life down the toilet for a devastatingly handsome rare book dealer played by Olivier Martinez. Richard Gere is memorably tragic as the sappy cuckold, but Lane and Martinez’s often brazen sex scenes make this a scorching essential in the erotic thriller canon.
Wildly misunderstood upon its 2003 release and mostly excoriated by critics, Jane Campion’s moody, oozy psychosexual slasher movie “In the Cut” is perhaps the first great narrative feature response to September 11 and the malaise permeating NYC at the time. Campion lurks in the Lower East Side underbelly of Manhattan, following high school English teacher Fanny (a haunted and introspective Meg Ryan) down the black hole of desire as she takes up a masochistic affair with a grizzled detective (Mark Ruffalo) who might also be a serial killer.
Alain Guiraudie’s “Stranger by the Lake” unfairly earned a bad rap from gay viewers who thought it perpetuated the trope of gay sex leading to tragedy, a great injustice to such a finely tuned erotic thriller. Set mostly in the single location of a French lakeside cruising ground during one lazy summer, it follows Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) on his daily exploits as he befriends the older Henri (Patrick d’Assumçao) and finds himself attracted to the menacing Michel (Christophe Paou). After witnessing a shocking event one evening, Franck pursues Michel anyway, well aware of how dangerous it may be. Guiraudie cuts the tension with humor, letting it simmer just beneath the surface. Through Henri, Guiraudie explores the ripe territory of a non-sexual relationship in a cruising context, as well as cross-generational gay friendships. It’s a rare look inside a world open to so few. Guiraudie never forgets Franck risks his life with each anonymous encounter, and this unsettling tension drives the film to its inevitable conclusion. — JD
One of the best movies of the 21st century, Park Chan-wook’s inspired adaptation of Sarah Waters’ novel “Fingersmith” is also one of the hottest. Moving Waters’ lurid con story from Victorian England to Japanese-occupied Korea, Park and period costumes are a very pretty match indeed. From the opening shot in the rain to stunning erotic poses as pretty as a painting, the imagery alone is enough to stimulate certain cinephiles. But the star-crossed romance between the sheltered Lady Hideko (Min-hee Kim) and her sprightly handmaiden, Sook-hee (Tae-ri Kim) provides plenty of loaded exchanges. Park strays from the source material, pushing the story to lewd extremes with the mysterious all-male gatherings at which Hideko’s evil guardian auctions off his rare erotica collection. But the sexiest scene has to be the consummation of Hideko and Sook-hee’s flirtation, which graciously holds nothing back. (Even if that inverted bridge scissoring position is totally ridiculous). — JD
This Article is related to: Film and tagged adrian lyne , Brian De Palma , Jane Campion
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Just a lttle humor to lighten the day.
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Upon entering the brothel, the patron would peruse the numerous erotic paintings with varied intentions on the wall. When the customer discovered a painting subtable to his intention, he would point to that painting to indicate to the host what he wanted. Then a woman, or man I suppose, would appear. I do not believe the customer chose the woman. Luck of the draw I guess. Then it was off to the bedroom.
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Thank you so very much Lestat DeDarkness for this cover!! I am so pleased to see my picture on your amazing GROUP ! 🌻🌻💕
Hand drawn - charcoal on white paper - scanned then color and saturation changed with Photoshop.

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