The Highs and Lows

after two decades luring in theatergoers with the prospect of seeing a tit, erotic thrillers disappeared from the big screen. Now, filmmakers are trying to bring them back. How did we get from Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction (1987) to Adrian Lyne’s Deep Water (2022)?

the deflowering

1981 Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill is released one year prior, but Body Heat is the blueprint for the genre. It features Kathleen Turner as the femme fatale who delivers the biting line: “You’re not too smart, are you? … I like that in a man.”

the wet years

1980s The erotic thriller goes mainstream. Movies like Fatal Attraction rake in more than $320 million at the box office. Film historians cite the decade’s fear of AIDS as the driving force behind the genre’s popularity; sex is tied to the threat of bodily harm in cinema and in life.

the climax

1992 Erotic thrillers are everywhere this year. Sharon Stone launches a thousand puberties by uncrossing her legs in Basic Instinct. Poison Ivy portrays Drew Barrymore’s obsessive pursuit of a DILF; Single White Female queers the genre.

america loses its boner

1995 The release of Showgirls— a film so overwrought even Kyle MacLachlan in a pool with Elizabeth Berkeley wasn’t enough to entice audiences—tips into parody. It bombs, and so does the genre.

sexual experimentation

THE LATE 1990s Stanley Kubrick and David Cronenberg modify erotic-thriller tropes for art-house audiences. Cronenberg’s Crash (1996) follows a group of people turned on by car crashes. Eyes Wide Shut extols the virtues of marriage against a backdrop of mansion orgies.

the last gasp

2002–3 By 2002, DTV and porn make it way easier for consumers to view sexual content, meaning there is less incentive to shell out theater prices for smutty fare. Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful comes along as one last resurrection, followed the next year by Jane Campion’s poorly received In the Cut (which was later lauded as feminist).

attempts to break the drought

2022 For the first time, there’s a real movement afoot to bring the genre back. Lyne broke his 20year dry spell with Deep Water; reboots of Fatal Attraction, American Gigolo, Jagged Edge, and Damage are in the works, all with female-centric twists.

or being pursued (stalked), can be thrilling to watch and not just scary. It’s too uncomfortable to examine a feeling of “This is terrifying and probably not okay, but it’s also hot!” even with the distant gaze of fictional characters. When Fatal Attraction was written, you could see why my girl Alex was so frightening to men, and to women too. One of the biggest stories the year prior was a Newsweek cover article that said a 40-year-old, single, white, college-educated woman was more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to marry. With such statistics, it’s easy to create a scary narrative about the lengths single women would go to get a man. (The cover story was retracted almost 20 years later, though are we over that statistic?) I recently rewatched Fatal Attraction, and instead of seeing Alex as a threat, Isaw Dan as a sinister, entitled manbaby. Alex’s motivations make sense from where I’m standing—a time when a West Elm Caleb can’t send dick pics to the same 15 women and get away with it. When Alex asks, “If your life’s so damn complete, what were you doing with me?” the film doesn’t answer, but we know the answer now: whatever he wants to, because he can. Now, during the last shot of the movie—a slow pan over a family photo— you don’t feel a sense of peace because the family unit is restored. You feel a creeping sense of doom because Gallagher got away with it. He’s in black, and he’s set a little bit away from his family; his eyes are hard. The music never settles into less sinister tones. The villain lives to fuck someone else again in six months. So much of Fatal Attraction is outdated, but the core threat is still relevant. (Last year, Paramount+ announced it would reboot the film as a TV show, with Lizzy Caplan in Close’s role. You have to imagine it will attempt to restore the feminist parable the original film was meant to be.) “There is big ‘Are men okay?’ energy in a lot of these movies,” says Longworth. “That’s still a question on a lot of our minds.” Maybe, as Martin recommends, we need to toss out most of the playbook. She has some suggestions on how to do it: Erotic thrillers should have glamorous set pieces and precisely five sex scenes per movie. There should be a variety of bodies, ages (no teenagers), ethnicities, and intimacies. Fantasies of danger could be about engaging in new sexual practices rather than the fear of being murdered. More sex, less violence. I think she’s right, and, please, someone, get on it. If erotic thrillers are best viewed as a time capsule, I’d hate for people 30 years from now to watch ours and say, “Damn, was anybody interested in fucking?” ■