Erotic Thrillers are based on (often male) anxieties about sex, power and the intersection of the two. The subgenre evolved from the sexual politics of 1940s and 50s film noir as the Hays Code dissolved and the censorship of morals and ethics loosened. At its core, Erotic Thrillers are obsessed with the power dynamics between traditional (ie: white, middle to upper class, cis heterosexual) couples.
And yet there is an undercurrent of queerness lurking beneath the surface, and often within the reveal of the killer/villain. Starting with Noirs and moving through Psycho to films of the 70s, 80s and 90s, including Basic Instinct, Dressed To Kill, Stripped to Kill, 10 to Midnight, and The Color of Night, Erotic Thrillers have a tendency to traffic in the (presumed male) audience’s sexual fears of queerness, particularly bisexual and trans women.
This talk will explore the ways that sexual norms did – and didn’t – evolve throughout the Erotic Thriller heyday of the 80s to mid-90s. After exploring the social and political factors contributing to a fear of queer in this time period, we’ll conclude with a discussion of two recent contemporary examples (Yann Gonzalez’s Knife + Heart and Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake) that suggest a new direction for queer representation in the subgenre.
References:
Karagiannidou, Aneta. Getting Away with it: The Erotic Thriller and Its Fantasies. Thesis.
Keesey, Douglas. “They kill for Love: Defining the Erotic Thriller as a Film Genre.” Cineaction
Williams, Linds Ruth. The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema. Indian University Press
Film Clips:
Psycho (1960, Hitchcock)
Dressed to Kill (1980, De Palma)
Basic Instinct (1992, Verhoeven)
Stranger by the Lake (2013, Guiraudie)
Joe Lipsett is a Toronto-based film critic and podcaster. He has written for Bloody Disgusting, Pajiba, Consequence, The Spool, That Shelf, Anatomy of a Scream, as well as his own site QueerHorrorMovies. Once upon a time he was a sessional film instructor at Carleton University where he taught courses on Dystopias, Cyberpunk, Animation, Superheroes and Slashers. Nowadays Joe is the co-host of several podcasts, including YA adaptation podcast Hazel & Katniss & Harry & Starr, Erotic Thriller podcast White Ladies in Crisis (on the Anatomy of a Scream Pod Squad Network) and Bloody FM’s Horror Queers, which has been profiled in The AV Club, Variety, The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly.
