Erotic Thrills (NSFW)

Freeze Frame of an Era: The Faded Glory of ‘90s Erotic Thrillers

Freeze Frame of an Era: The Faded Glory of ‘90s Erotic Thrillers

NSFW images, video recaps & audio for paid subscribers.

The First Penis

The first onscreen penis I ever saw belonged to Bruce Willis in Color of Night. I hid the VHS between Beetlejuice and Blank Check, in the towering pile of “2-for-1” day at the video store. I waited for my parents to leave on a quick errand and ran to the VCR, popping in the tape with shaky hands.

Color of Night made a splash in 1994. After the success of Basic Instinct and Single White Female, studios churned out neo-noirs, one more explicit than the last. Night was to push the erotic thriller genre to the breaking point. It was widely reported that for the R-rated theatrical release, the filmmakers had to cut a “full frontal” of Bruce Willis. In the early ‘90s, even the absence of penis was enough to make headlines. The movie bombed at the box office and to recoup costs, a director’s cut of the VHS promised to show it all.

Bruce Willis was an A-lister in his prime, a versatile, smirking hero, Tom Hanks with an edge. Handsome but not pretty, fit but not shredded, “straight as an arrow,” a man’s man, a Daddy…and I was about to see his cock!

The clunky fast-forward sounds filled the room until Bruce and his femme fatale fell into a crystal clear pool. She ripped off his shorts and they both got naked (the ‘90s loved a pool sex scene). I played, paused, played, rewound, played, paused. There.

Suspended underwater, the image wobbling in CRT color, Bruce Willis’s penis popping out the side of his leg. Circumcised, flaccid, anticlimactic, glorious. I’ve seen countless since, but Bruce’s pink mushroom is seared in my memory. 

In that era, pausing at the right moment was a puberty milestone. 

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A Vicodin-fueled Binge

While recovering from a mean dental procedure, I recently revisited these “grown folks’ movies” of the ‘90s. The pain and painkillers were perfect for these cinematic fever dreams. 

I watched Basic Instinct, Single White Female, Poison Ivy, Body of Evidence, Sliver, Disclosure, The Crush, A Perfect Murder, Wild Things, Eyes Wide Shut and offshoots of the genre like Sleeping with the Enemy, Indecent Proposal, Presumed Innocent, The Pelican Brief, The Net. 

And of course, Color of Night. 

I’m glad I didn’t watch it that afternoon at my parents’. It’s a garbage movie: A male therapist solves a murder within a group of mentally unstable sex addicts and “gender confused” patients. It’s ripe with transphobia and mistrust of female sexuality, made for the middle class straight white gaze. It’s nonsensical, sensationalist and offensive. In other words, a perfect specimen of the genre. As an adult I can laugh at it. As a boy, it would have fucked me up. Like so many Gay kids from the ‘90s, I spent enough time slinking in my seat in theaters at fag jokes and Queer villains.

Before 24/7 free internet porn, erotic thrillers were its respectable, tepid surrogate. The genre had been around since the Production Code censorship system, which was dismantled at the end of the ‘60s and replaced with the MPAA ratings system. X-rated and NC-17 films like Midnight Cowboy, Last Tango in Paris, American Gigolo, Body Heat, Body Double we're sensations but it was during 1985-1995 that these films felt the most necessary. 1960s “free love” and ‘70s “porn chic” crashed into the AIDS crisis and premarital sex and infidelity were not just seen as morally wrong but lethal. 

From the safety of their theater seat or living room, erotic thrillers exposed America to S&M and softcore. As the noirs of the ‘40s and ‘50s had pushed the Production Code, these neo-noirs pushed the ratings system. The MPAA counted the seconds of breasts or the number of thrusts  (the standard was 2.5: in, out, in, halfway out then cutaway). 

After porn studios made the X-rating useless, the new NC-17 rating could still tank a film before its release because no theater chains would run them (or their ads). It was in VHS of unrated or “director’s cuts” that these films found real success. They were rented from independent video stores before the media gentrification of the Blockbuster chain (which refused to carry most of them).

What is most shocking about these films now is how conservative they really were. Thinly veiled morality tales where being unfaithful to a spouse was the ultimate sin and “deviant” or Gay sex was still shocking and punishable. 

Erotic thrillers posed “big questions.” Can a man be sexually harassed? Would you sell your wife for a million dollars? Can cocaine be a murder weapon? Clumsily wrapped in potboiler mysteries with a little slasher flair. Timeless battles of the sexes where men were usually the victim, trying to make an honest woman out of a whore. 

Queers as Villains and Garnish

These not only gave straight Americans glimpses of sex, they also gave queers crumbs of ourselves, even if we were mostly villainous plot points or as a garnish of cosmopolitan danger. It was a perfect example of the abusive relationship we had with the media of that time: happy to be included regardless of the quality of inclusion.

We were the “harmless” Gay neighbor who was killed in Sliver and Single White Female, or the harmless teacher pistol-whipped in Sleeping with the Enemy, or the pitiful closeted man who cheats on Madonna and breaks the case in Body of Evidence (not even our greatest ally escaped the homophobic trappings of her film). Julia Roberts disguises herself as a man in Sleeping with the Enemy, played as an act of desperation. The femme fatale in Color of Night pretends to be a 16-year-old boy and the girlfriend of a nymphomaniac bisexual woman.

Gayness was played as a literal nightmare: after Michael Douglas is emasculated by Demi Moore in Disclosure, he has a stress dream of his male boss kissing him in an elevator. He wakes up screaming. Bridget Fonda kisses her lesbian psycho killer roommate to buy herself time as a hostage in Single White Female. Drew Barrymore kisses Sara Gilbert, pretending to be her mom in Poison Ivy. In Basic Instinct, the three murderers are bisexual women, which led Queer groups to disrupt the filming in San Francisco. During outdoor scenes, protesters held signs that said, “Honk if you love the 49ers.”

The Pelican Brief and The Net may not be erotic thrillers per se, since there is little or no sex, but they float in the same hot dog water as Basic Instinct, linked by homophobia. In Pelican, Stanley Tucci (everyone’s favorite straight Gay guy) plays a Queer-coded villain who murders a Supreme Court justice in a Gay porn theater. As he strangles the judge with a rope he wore as a belt, he watches the porn on screen. In The Net, the villain hacks into the Secretary of Defense’s medical files, making him believe he has AIDS. He shoots himself and the film considers this murder since, in this moral universe, he had no choice.

Technological Anxiety

Erotic thrillers were reflections of ‘90s anxieties and were most prescient in their paranoia of technology and surveillance. Body of Evidence opens with a camera pointed at a dead man, watching a porn of himself while Madonna rides him. Narcissism as death.

In Sliver, a rich, handsome landlord bugs an entire apartment with hundreds of cameras, indoctrinating Sharon Stone into his voyeuristic violation. In Disclosure, Demi Moore stalks Michael Douglas in a virtual reality world. In Single White Female, Bridget Fonda is nearly raped by her boss while she works on an image editing software. At the end of that film, The Net and Disclosure, the female protagonists delete an entire company’s files. Technology, much like female sexuality, is presented as mysterious, shiny, and combustible when combined with a scorned woman.

Rape Culture Manifestos

These films had a fanatical obsession with monogamy, hidden behind deep misogyny. They’re a tapestry of rape culture, desire for underage females and ambiguous sexual assault. 

The director’s cut of Basic Instinct has a brutal anal rape scene as does Body of Evidence (the women “come around to it” by the end of the scenes). In Color of Night, Bruce Willis fawns over how young the 20-year-old’s femme fatale’s backpack makes her look. Poison Ivy is about a 15-year-old girl who seduces a 60-year-old man. He performs oral sex on her on his wife’s death bed. 1993’s The Crush, follows a 14-year-old Alicia Silvestrone stalking and murdering for the love of a grown man. 1999’s Wild Things focused on murderous teen girls and their pool sex scene with their guidance counselor rivals Color of Night (though Kevin Bacon’s full frontal didn’t cause the same stir as Bruce’s). 

In the end, all of these women “liked it” or “deserved it” and the films make sure to leave that gray area as gray as possible. To watch these in one fell swoop is to understand that the current discourse over Gay grooming of minors is just projection from hetero culture. 

The following exchange is from Disclosure (imagine this if it was two men talking):

Female Prosecutor: Doesn’t “no” mean no? Isn’t that what we tell women?

Demi Moore: Sometimes “no” means the person wants to be overwhelmed, dominated. But we can’t talk about that, the way we’re supposed to have sex nowadays, we’d need the U.N. to supervise it.

Is this freedom from “political correctness” or “the thought police” (the decade’s “woke”) or just a rape culture manifesto? The strength of these films now is how they can be twisted, flexible as the limbs in their sex scenes. We could also see them as revenge fantasies, bisexual femme fatales and Queers taking back power, depending on who is filming and watching. 

The Swan Song

In many ways, Color of Night was the swan song of the genre. Not because it was a box office failure; the film ended up one of the top rented movies of 1995. By the mid-‘90s, there was just less use for the genre. Internet porn was born. Other genres would break explicit sex barriers, raunchy comedies like There’s Something About Mary and American Pie.

Late-night premium cable brought softcore and explicit docuseries like HBO’s Real Sex. Sex and the City premiered in 1998, changing how female sexuality was depicted. New treatments made HIV a chronic illness and not a death sentence, defanging one of the most insidious boogeymen of these films.

It’s fitting that the ‘90s closed with Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, an erotic thriller with the veneer of a prestige film. Eyes is an amalgamation of all of the genre’s tropes, down to the child prostitute and HIV scare. The temptation for marital infidelity as a gravitational pull. Tom Cruise has a meltdown because his wife had a fantasy over another man and a sex dream of getting gangbanged. This leads him to wander the streets of New York in search of a secret, creepy orgy (naturally.) 

These moralities and fears feel camp now. Audiences may not have gotten more sophisticated but we got used to antiheroes. In 2014’s neo-neo-noir Gone Girl, the female protagonist cheats on her husband with an old lover, stabs his throat and rides him as he bleeds on her, shots lifted directly from Basic Instinct and Body of Evidence. Except she’s not killed in the end or “made a good woman.” Though she does get pregnant to stay married. Some tropes never die. 

It’s not always useful or healthy to judge old media through the lens of modern culture and morals. However, we should revisit it to see how it molded us. I still remember the protests over Basic Instinct, the angry lesbians and patronizing news anchors. The same folks who grew up on Gay/Bi/Trans killers are now old enough to vote on Gay rights and Trans legislation. The same boys who watched women say no while maybe meaning yes, grew up too. 

Erotic thrillers are a relic of pre-internet entertainment at the cusp of Y2K, as the shadows of that decade lifted, diluting some fears and deepening others. Questions and desires of an era, frozen in wobbly TV scanlines. 

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Color of Night, Disclosure, Poison Ivy, Body of Evidence & Single White Female