Freeze Frame of an Era

The Faded Glory of 90s Erotic Thrillers

Short video recaps of these films on my IG @herreraimages. Paid subscribers: Scroll down for an NC-17 gallery, including the infamous Bruce full frontal…

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

The first onscreen penis I ever saw belonged to Bruce Willis. I hid the VHS copy of Color of Night between Beetlejuice and Blank Check, in the towering pile of “2-for-1 night” at the video store. The next day, 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 quite the media splash upon its release 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-list star 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 then but Bruce’s pink mushroom is seared in my memory. Pausing at the right moment was a puberty milestone. 

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I recently had a wisdom tooth pulled and while I recovered, I revisited Erotic Thrillers of the 90s. What were considered “grown folks movies” when I was a kid. The restless, dull pain and weird horny of the painkillers was ideal 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. 

I watched Color of Night too. I’m glad I didn’t see it that afternoon at my parents as a young teen. 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, created for the middle class straight white gaze, with all its blindspots. 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 theater seat at fag jokes and Queer villains.

Before we had free porn 24/7, Erotic Thrillers were a “respectable,” tepid replacement. The genre had been around for decades. Explicit movies were available as soon as the Production Code was dismantled at the end of the 60s and replaced with the MPAA ratings system, with X-rated and NC-17 films like Midnight Cowboy, Last Tango in Paris, American Gigolo, Body Heat, Body Double. But it’s the time span between 1985-1995 that these films felt the most necessary for the average American viewer. This is, of course, the peak of the AIDS crisis, when the “free love” and “porn chic” of the 60s and 70s crashed, when premarital sex and infidelity not only felt morally wrong but lethal. 

From the safety of their theater seat and living room, Erotic Thrillers exposed America to sadomasochism and softcore. Like the noirs of the 40s and 50s pushed the boundaries of the Production Code, these neo-noirs pushed the ratings system. The MPAA counted the seconds in which breasts were exposed or how many thrusts were shown on screen (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, 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 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? All 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. 

Just how these provided straight Americans with glimpses of sex, they gave Queer folks crumbs of ourselves. At least Queerness was there, even if it was mostly used as villainous plot points or as a garnish of cosmopolitan danger. Erotic Thrillers were 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 with a man and cracks the case in Body of Evidence. Not even our greatest ally escapes the homophobic trappings of her film. Observe how Julia Roberts disguises herself as a man in Sleeping with the Enemy, the way it’s played to show how desperate she is. The femme fatale in Color of Night, who pretends to be both 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 Sarah Gilbert, pretending to be her mom in Poison Ivy. In Basic Instinct, the three murderers are bisexual women, which led Gay groups to disrupt the filming in San Francisco. During outdoor scenes, protesters held signs that said “Honk if you Love the 49ers.” 

Film purists bristled at my inclusion of The Pelican Brief and The Net as Erotic Thrillers as there is little or no sex. It’s their subtle homophobia which links them to the genre, occupying the same dimension. In Pelican, Stanley Tucci (everyone’s favorite straight Gay guy) plays a Queer-coded villain who enters a Gay porn theater and murders a closeted Supreme Court justice with a rope he wears as a belt. As he strangles the man, he glances at the porn playing. 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. As far as I’m concerned, they’re floating in the same hot dog water as Basic Instinct. Queerness as the worst case scenario for the very desperate.

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. 

These films had a fanatical obsession with monogamy, concealing a deep misogyny. They’re a tapestry of Rape Culture, desire of 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 followed 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 is it 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. 

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 the way female sexuality was depicted in media. By the mid 90s 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 that his wife had a fantasy of 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. It’s not that audiences got 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. 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 but we should revisit to see how it molded us. I still remember the protests over Basic Instinct, 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, paused in wobbly TV scanlines. 

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Sex Freeze Frames: The best paused moments from these films

Bruce Willis pink mushroom & butt in Color of Night, Madonna & Julianne Moore in Body of Evidence, Michael Douglas & Demi Moore’s blowjob in Disclosure, Bridget Fonda & Jennifer Jason Leigh’s creepy masturbation scene in Single White Female: