Partially inspired by the 1944 film Double Indemnity (itself an adaptation of James M.
Now, there are many gloriously unbridled erotic thrillers that you can, and should, seek out for your own titillation edification (many of them starring Michael Douglas and/or directed by Adrian Lyne), but if you’re a newcomer to the genre, why wouldn’t you begin with the very best, the perfect exemplar of the form, the throbbing loins from which so many lusty imitators have sprung? I speak of course of Lawrence Kasdan’s 1981 neo-noir morality tale of sex and betrayal in a Floridian coastal town: Body Heat. Thunderstorms soundtrack ecstatic lovemaking, expensive-looking clothes are ripped from heaving bodies, spouses are unceremoniously dispatched with blunt household objects, innocent family pets are slain, post-coital treacheries abound.
(Think of Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction, Body of Evidence, Sea of Love, The Last Seduction.) The best of them also make pretty liberal use of melodrama, pay homage to the classic tropes of film noir (femme fatales, double-crossing, chain-smoking, con artists, convoluted plotting, et cetera) and are, at least in their more lurid moments, knowingly over the top. If the protagonists of a film destroy themselves (physically, morally, spiritually), and one another, because of their insatiable carnal desires, well, there’s a good chance that film is an erotic thriller. Well, broadly speaking, an erotic thriller is a movie in which forbidden/illicit romance or sexual fantasy is central to the core dramatic conflict of the narrative. So how do I know if what I’m watching is an erotic thriller and not just a thrilling piece of erotica or a movie about a killer robot who travels back in time to stop Sarah Connor from having sex with Kyle Reese in a Los Angeles motel room? Ditto The Piano and Desperado and Queen and Slim and a thousand more. For instance, I would argue that Terminator is both erotic and thrilling, but it’s not an erotic thriller. A film can be erotic, and thrilling, and still not qualify as an erotic thriller. A suspenseful movie, of any stripe, with a graphic sex scene or two thrown in for good measure is not (necessarily) an erotic thriller, for the same reason a soft core porn movie (do these still exist? I truly hope so) with an unusually complicated dramatic plot is not an erotic thriller. Let’s start by clarifying what is does not count. What exactly counts as an erotic thriller? I am so glad you asked. (I will also accept 1998’s Wild Things as an end point, for those of you who prefer a messier climax to your cinematic eras). Its Golden Age was actually quite a lengthy period, beginning (I would argue) in earnest in 1981 with Bob Rafelson’s remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice and ending in 1996 with the Wachowskis’ Bound. While there have been a few notable additions to the canon over the past two decades ( In the Cut, Unfaithful, Gone Girl, When the Bough Breaks…em… The Boy Next Door) the sweaty heyday of the erotic thriller has been over for some time now. As we all know, the worst thing to happen to mainstream American cinema in the 21st century was the near-total abandonment of that most compelling and enigmatic of subgenres: the erotic thriller.