SUCK, FUCK, KILL

The psychosexual nightmare of the erotic thriller

by Kurt Schiller

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None of us are what we seem. The meekest and mousiest of us may conceal hidden depths of rage and passion. The angriest, pushiest, most superficially dominant person may wilt like a flower on the inside, or rise to yet unseen heights when pushed beyond their comfort zone. All of us are twofold: there is the person we project, and the one we conceal.

Nowhere is this dynamic more pronounced than in our sexuality and desires. For most people, the sexual self lives mostly in secret, lurking beneath the surface like a revelation—or a threat. We can moderate these secret selves, constrain them or channel them or find healthy (or unhealthy) outlets in which they may be loosed upon the world. And some blessed few of us may even come to peace with this bifurcated existence, and fully know ourselves. But for the vast majority of people, the need to regularly conceal some or all of our inner selves is a persistent tension, like a spring wound tight and ready to snap.

It is precisely in this tension that the erotic thriller finds its power and resonance. A cinematic art form that flourished from the late ’70s to late ’90s, these tales of unleashed passion and violence capture every contradiction, every internal tension, every anxiety and anticipation and self-deception of our adult selves and emblazons it onscreen in a garish flash of overwrought, Gothic, absurd over-intensity. 

These are films where intrigue lurks around every corner, where every housewife and businessman and up-and-coming journalist and struggling account executive (much like its more genteel sibling the romantic comedy, the erotic thriller is populated with idealized depictions of adulthood that border on caricature) is an untapped sexual dynamo just waiting to unleash themselves in self-destructive orgiastic passion at the first longing glance and the merest tantalizing glimpse of flesh. It is the grown-up, accentuated version of our own childhood imaginings of relationships and sexuality, one that is every bit as absurdly overwrought—what stories of high-school sturm und drang are for children, the erotic thriller is for adults. It is a cinematic realm where our half-seen uncanny imaginings are literalized, and where the more quotidian events and incidents of adulthood are magnified and distorted to match the outsize emotional heft we feel when experiencing them personally.

The genre as a whole owes much of its DNA to film noir, another genre that explored similar (if usually less explicitly realized) ideas of sexual desire and the gothicism of class and wealth. Shadowed mansions of the super-rich, sleazy dockside bars, the illicit underbelly of polite society—these exaggerated archetypal sigils of the adult world make their own appearances in erotic thrillers, from the precarious seaside palace of Basic Instinct’s murderous femme fatale Catherine Trammel to the vertiginously shadowed yuppie strongholds of Poison Ivy, The Color of Night, and Sliver. But where classic noir often rides on tension alone, sublimating outright violence and sexuality into a constant background hum of tension and intrigue, these latter-day descendants take a page from gothic romance and the showy, lurid neon psychodrama of Italian gialli and dwell directly and unapologetically on the visual and visceral impact of sex and violence. This is Bogart unbound; all the cruelty and passion of noir, but without the barest concession to decency and decorum.

And it is no coincidence that these films, just like film noir before them, came to prominence in a time of rapid social and economic change. It’s easy to forget in 2023, but feminism, the sexual revolution, the rise of the young professional, and the notion of the “independent woman” were still hot topics when the erotic thriller crashed onto the scene in the late Seventies and early Eighties. While the social and sexual politics they explore may seem ham-fisted or reductive, these films—and the parade of sexually voracious, upwardly mobile young professionals that populates them—spoke to real, immediate, and above all libidinous concerns over what love, sex, work, and relationships meant in the modern day. What does it mean for women to have professional and sexual agency? How do ages-old emotions like jealousy and lust play out in a changing world? In a time when divorce, working women, and the very existence of gay people seemed revolutionary enough to polite society to be regular frontpage news, the erotic thriller provided a playground for the modern fears, anxieties, and appetites that accompanied them—simultaneously scandalizing and titillating audiences with the idea that their every salacious fantasy of modern life might be lurking just behind the closed doors of some shadowed high-rise or luxurious penthouse apartment.

Consider the 1995 film Jade, in which assistant district attorney David Corelli (David Caruso) is called to investigate the violent sexual murder of a wealthy San Francisco businessman. As Corelli delves deeper into the crime, he is startled to find connections to his ex-lover Anna (Linda Fiorentino, a stalwart of the genre), who is now married to his personal and professional rival. While the plot twists and turns and Corelli becomes the target of several mysterious murder attempts that wouldn’t be out of place in a more traditional noir, the film’s dramatic tension comes mostly from Anna herself, who looms large as an object of both desire and intrigue—is she a sexually voracious serial killer? A respected professional getting her kicks by moonlighting as a high-class prostitute? Or is she an innocent target of multiple mens’ salacious psychosexual fantasies?

Tellingly, in a film packed with outlandish imagery (including a bizarre and, it must be said, supremely entertaining car chase that ranges from death-defying motocross jumps to a nail-biting game of automotive cat-and-mouse on a San Francisco pier), the most evocative scene is a sexually charged back-and-forth that plays out after Anna’s husband learns of her side-gig as a sex worker. What begins as an apparently mutual fantasy that finds her husband equal parts angered and aroused by her infidelity quickly transforms into an awkward, supremely uncomfortable sex scene—one that culminates in a slow, agonizing zoom on Fiorentino’s disinterested face, while her husband flails about tearfully and passionlessly atop her. In the jaundiced eye of the camera, Anna is simultaneously a powerful figure that can bend men to her will and a victim who is entirely subordinate to their desires, a “powerful” temptress whose purported power only becomes available through her objectification by powerful, wealthy men—and from which she herself derives neither material nor sexual benefit.

The sexual self lives mostly in secret, lurking beneath the surface like a revelation—or a threat.

Unequal sexual power dynamics are a central pillar of the erotic thriller, and the genre returns again and again to the question of whether sexual desire grants or steals power from those who become its object. 1987’s Fatal Attraction, a film which won widespread acclaim and more than any other helped secure the genre its place in the mainstream, begins with a joyful (if extremely ill-considered) tryst between married lawyer Dan Gallagher (a sweat-drenched, twitchy Michael Douglas) and client-turned-lover Alex Forrest (Glenn Close). But what begins as a brief mutual fling turns into something quite different when Alex rejects Dan’s selfish assumption that this was, in fact, a one-time thing. While both Dan and the audience have been drawn into a whirlwind courtship that evokes teenage infatuation, Alex insists on re-centering herself in the film’s narrative, calling attention to Dan’s cruel unwillingness to regard her as anything other than the fuck-her-and-forget-her object of his extramarital fantasies. 

That Alex’s (quite reasonable) objection to her own thoughtless objectification rapidly escalates into slasher film territory—with her as its histrionic, over-the-top stalker-killer, relentlessly emerging from the shadows brandishing slit wrists, kitchen knives, and murdered pets—only highlights the internal contradictions in how such films approach the question of sexual agency and power. Is Alex a put-upon victim of one man’s thoughtless objectification? Or is she a deranged spurned lover, the very stereotype of an unhinged woman who “just can’t let go”? The film starts off quite sympathetic towards Alex (and depicts Dan as an unfaithful and inconsiderate cad), yet rapidly transforms her into a knife-wielding stereotype with no real inner life, who seeks only the destruction of Dan and his family (a task with which, it must be said, Dan does not appear to need any assistance). But this is Dan’s movie, not Alex’s; and so the psychosexual terror is from his point of view, not hers. The film ends on an ominous, accusatory note towards its unfaithful protagonist, but Alex herself gets no such moral complexity. She ends the film exactly as Dan originally perceived her: a one-night-stand who just doesn’t know when it’s time to give up and move on.

Which is not to say that erotic thrillers never explore the distaff view. Call Me is a little-seen and unfairly maligned 1988 crime drama that stars Patricia Charbonneau, Stephen McHattie, and a young knife-wielding Steve Buscemi, and which exemplifies the most passionate and erotically charged tendencies of the genre, but from a woman’s point of view. The film follows Anna, a sexually unfulfilled journalist who finds herself swept up in the excitement of an obscene phone call that she initially assumes is a prank from her wet-blanket, work-obsessed boyfriend. The call culminates in her agreeing to meet her boyfriend at a nearby bar for a bit of faux-anonymous sexual roleplay; this in turn leads to Anna bearing witness to the murder of a sex worker by a police officer, and to the revelation that the voice on the phone was not her boyfriend but a faceless stranger—one that she suddenly finds herself irresistibly drawn to. 

Anna quickly becomes entangled in a series of interlocking psychosexual mysteries. Is the obscene caller someone she knows? Or is it the alluring and dangerous-seeming man that approached her at the bar? Is she in danger—and who from? The plot itself is something of a shaggy-dog story, but Anna’s escalating bouts of phone sex place her squarely in the nexus of a sexual power dynamic that at once confuses, frightens, and excites her. As she continues her telephonic dalliances with the anonymous caller, Anna gradually shifts from being the victim of unwanted harassment to holding sexual power over her would-be harasser. This dramatic transition climaxes in an outrageous scene where the mysterious caller instructs Anna to sexually dominate him with an orange—only for her to turn the tables and begin making sexual demands of her own, leaving the caller tongue-tied and speechless at the realization that his fantasy has suddenly become hers. Is she allowing herself to be manipulated by this unseen man? Or is she now the one in control, finally able to fully explore desires that she never could with her lackluster, disinterested boyfriend?

The answer, of course, is both; and it is to the credit of films like Call Me that they capture an aspect of sexuality that so often eludes mainstream films. Every individual is both the subject and the object of their own sexual desires; it is something which we cannot fully control, and yet which arises from within us, unbidden and at times unwanted. There is almost an air of body horror to the erotic thriller, as if our sexual selves are a sort of sublimated shadow-self, waiting to arise and seize control against our will, leaving us irrevocably changed.

And this is where the visual explicitness of the erotic thriller comes into play. Even at the height of their popularity, contemporary reviews frequently lambasted these films for their more gratuitous tendencies—desperate, sweaty, and above all prolonged sex scenes that play out in feverish permutations and exotic locales. But it is exactly this over-the-top eroticism that allows the genre to so deeply connect with audiences. Just as the protagonists of Call Me and Fatal Attraction find themselves simultaneously tantalized by and terrified of their own sexual appetites, the audience is similarly left both titillated and alienated. We are never permitted to fully lose ourselves to the on-screen sexuality, because the relentless tone of oppression and dread infects and twists every erotic moment. Like the characters on screen, we are both caught up in the passion, and terrified at the potential consequences and ramifications.

It is no coincidence, either, that sex and violence are so deeply and intensely intermingled in these films. The dramatic sexual murders of films like Basic Instinct and Jade are part and parcel to the eroticism that drives the rest of the film—they are, in a very real sense, part of the sex. For the characters in these films, giving oneself over to the shocking and borderline alien world of revealed sexuality is almost to enter another dimension entirely—one that flings them from the boring everyday into an outrageous gothic fantasia where intrigue and excess, both sexual and material, lurk around every corner. Like Tom Cruise in the erotic thriller-adjacent Eyes Wide Shut, it’s as if sexual fantasy opens a door into an unseen world that constantly surrounds us and yet eludes our detection—until it is too late and we are under its sway, just one more mangled body left in the wake of unbound passion.

The threat of our own hidden fears and desires only grows as we try to deny them.

Few films capture this topsy-turvy sexual nightmare world like Brian De Palma’s 1980 thriller Dressed To Kill. Deeply indebted to both Hitchcock and giallo maestro Dario Argento, the film follows a psychiatrist, an escort, and a vengeful relative as they attempt to stop a serial murderer. But the draw of the film is less its plot (which lopes uneasily from scene to scene, and indulges in enough transphobia to have been widely criticized even at the time of its release), or even its suitably eyebrow-raising sex scenes, than it is the relentless, oppressive tension that suffuses the entire film. Under De Palma’s baleful lens, even overtly sexless scenes take on a distinctly libidinal terror—as in an extended daytime walking sequence in a packed museum, which somehow manages to feel both as tense and as viscerally upsetting as the climax of any horror film. Refusing to ever slow or let the audience so much as catch its breath, Dressed to Kill becomes an out-of-control carousel of oppressive anxiety and seething tension.

De Palma’s lack of restraint is unusually pronounced even for an erotic thriller, but it is merely a matter of degree. These are fundamentally films of the id: stories of hidden desires and our own deeply held, but poorly glimpsed natures, of our unrealized and unmentionable secret fantasies and unspoken fears. It’s inevitable, then, that they also reflect the submerged prejudices, contradictions, desires, and anxieties of the intended (one might say assumed) audience. Nor are these hidden beliefs always pleasant: the murderous temptresses of Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction function more as living, breathing manifestations of the fears of heterosexual men than they do as nuanced portrayals of women. The same goes for the genre’s frequent (and just as frequently fraught and reductive) depictions of transgender characters, who all too often reflect a kind of base reactionary fascination that frames them as the “ultimate other,” a menace lurking in plain sight (as in Brian de Palma’s Dressed to Kill) or as just one more lurid revelation among many (as with the sex worker whose violent death provides the key escalation in Call Me). That these same films can also show surprising compassion for the objects of their fear and fascination neither excuses nor erases their own reductive tendencies; rather, it becomes just one more contradiction among many.

It is also why, when the assumed point of view is different—when the subject of an erotic thriller is someone other than a tight-laced man in a heterosexual relationship, as is so often the case—they can take on entirely different means and ends. Consider the 1996 erotic heist thriller Bound, the debut film from Lana and Lilly Wachowski, in which the kept wife of a sleazeball mafioso (Jennifer Tilly) both seduces and is seduced by the lesbian ex-con (Gina Gershon) who has been hired to refurbish an adjoining apartment, leading them to plan a daring high-stakes robbery from Tilly’s money-laundering beau. Bound is just as concerned with eroticism, danger, violence, and the hidden self as other films in its cadre, yet this shift in perspective fundamentally changes the formula: the unexpected sexual release of Bound is not one of doom, but of growing and bewildering liberation, albeit one cut through with just as much danger. The secret self is revealed to be truer, more powerful, and more positive than the old life that was left behind. (Little surprise, then, that it is also one of the rare erotic thrillers that ends on an entirely positive note.)

Erotic thrillers are a contradiction. They are moral parables that relish in their own sin, displays of overt eroticism that wink knowingly at our own desires even as they shame and threaten us with the same. They are a reminder that we can never fully know anyone, not even ourselves. As our larger media culture becomes less and less comfortable with embracing our sexual selves as part of who we are, the contradiction at the heart of these films—and the one that is central to their allure—only becomes more pronounced.

But they are a contradiction that we ultimately must come to live with. There is no moral salvation to be found in this genre; no easy and pleasing hidden message to be taken away. These tales of sweat, and blood, and passion are every bit as unruly and off-putting as our own hidden desires and internal contradictions, lurking forever just beneath the surface, right where the water fades to black.

Perhaps this is the ultimate lesson we can take away from the erotic thriller: that the tensions inside us will not and cannot go away, and the threat of our own hidden fears and desires only grows as we try to deny them. The key lies not in the denial of ourselves, but in the revelation and the embrace of who we really are, in totality.

Otherwise, we may be forced to one day confront our own shadowy inner selves, lurking just around the next darkened corner—naked, sweaty, and with murder in mind.

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