Around the start of the 1980s, a group of directors who’d grown up on classic Hollywood movies and neo-noir began making a new kind of cinema where the only thing more costly than the suits were the characters’ romantic affairs. By the end of the decade, these stylish, provocative, and erotic thrillers were among the most profitable films in Hollywood, but they soon went out of fashion with the rise of the Internet and all the things that people were suddenly able to watch in the privacy of their own homes. With recent movies like Deep Water and Babygirl suggesting another revival, we’ve rounded up the 10 best erotic thrillers of all time.
In the interest of variety—and with respect to Adrian Lyne, Paul Schrader, Paul Verhoeven, Brian De Palma, and the rest—we decided to limit our selection to one film per director. They are listed in chronological order, based on release date.
American Gigolo (1980)
Arriving on screens at the start of the decade, American Gigolo introduced Richard Gere and kick-started Paul Schrader’s career as a director, but the movie’s style (all those synths and Armani suits) might have left the biggest mark on the cultural zeitgeist. The plot already contains many of the genre’s most well-worn tropes, with Gere playing a sex worker who becomes wrongfully accused of murder after one of his clients is found dead.
Body Heat (1981)
After making his name as a screenwriter on Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Empire Strikes Back, Lawrence Kasdan moved to directing with Body Heat, a dangerously humid twist on the neo noir. Set in Miami, the story follows a dubious lawyer (William Hurt), who begins an affair with a married woman (Kathleen Turner) and eventually hatches a plan to kill her wealthy husband. A Hollywood classicist, Kasdan had set out to remake Double Indemnity but instead delivered a blueprint and high watermark for a budding new genre.
Body Double (1984)
Director Brian De Palma helped to invent the erotic thriller in 1980 with Dressed to Kill, but Body Double (the Rear Window to that earlier movie’s Vertigo) feels like the fuller expression of his signature, leering tendencies. The plot follows an actor who agrees to housesit an insanely modernist home in the Hollywood Hills only to discover a beautiful woman in danger through a conspicuously placed telescope. Of course, he becomes obsessed, and of course—for not entirely selfless reasons—he decides to intervene.
Fatal Attraction (1987)
No other actor is more central to the history of the erotic thriller than Michael Douglas, and his first foray into the genre, even if it hasn’t aged the best, remains one of the most infamous. Douglas plays a lawyer who has an affair with an editor while his family is out of town, only for the other woman (a brilliant Glenn Close) to become dangerously obsessed. Earning $320M on a $14M budget, Fatal Attraction confirmed the genre's remarkable profitability while scooping six nominations at the Academy Awards. If you’ve ever enjoyed a rabbit stew, you probably won’t enjoy one again.
Dead Ringers (1988)
Is every David Cronenberg movie an erotic thriller? You could make the case, yet few fit the bill as seductively as this eerily sterile riff on the tale of the doppelgänger. Dead Ringers stars Jeremy Irons in a duel role as twin gynaecologists Elliot and Beverly Mantle. One is a cynical womanizer who seduces their patients, the other is a mild-mannered man who occasionally falls in love. What could possibly go wrong?
Bitter Moon (1992)
By 1992, some filmmakers had already started to satirize the genre, none better than Roman Polanski’s still shocking Bitter Moon. The movie stars Hugh Grant as an upper-middle-class Englishman on a honeymoon cruise who becomes obsessed (that word again) with another woman on board. This affliction only grows more problematic as her husband (Peter Coyote) begins to regale him with the lurid story of their marriage. Grant’s famously flustered mannerisms, a kind of stand-in for the audience’s own performative outrage, have rarely been so caustically funny.
Basic Instinct (1992)
It was very tempting to go for Elle in this slot, director Paul Verhoeven’s more recent masterwork, but no list of erotic thrillers would complete without this iconic piece of ‘90s provocation. It says much about how our viewing habits have changed that Basic Instinct was, at that time, the fourth highest-grossing film of 1992—bettered at the box office only by Aladdin, Home Alone 2, and The Bodyguard. Michael Douglas stars again, this time as a detective who is seduced by the primary suspect in a murder case, a novelist famously played by Sharon Stone.
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Kubrick dying four months before the premier, a record 400 days of shooting, 95 takes of Tom Cruise walking through a door, Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s disintegrating marriage... There was so much going on around the time of Eyes Wide Shut‘s release that it’s no surprise it took so long to be considered not only one of Kubrick’s best but a classic of the erotic thriller genre. The director’s dreamlike swansong, which follows a New York doctor (Cruise) down a late night rabbit hole of unfulfilled sexual desires, has never been more influential.
Stranger by The Lake (2013)
This modern classic of queer cinema picked up the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013—an early sign that the genre had the potential to make a comeback. Stranger by the Lake takes place around a picturesque cruising spot in the French countryside, where a young man witnesses a murder but is already too consumed by the killer to stay away. A daring film about the limits of desire.
The Handmaiden (2016)
The most recent entry on our list comes from the South Korean master director Park Chan-wook. Brilliantly adapting Fingertips, Sarah Water’s Victorian era-set novel, to Japanese occupied Korea, The Handmaiden follows a pair of Korean con artists posing as a handmaiden and a count who plan to seduce a Japanese woman out of her substantial inheritance. Naturally, things don’t go exactly to plan.
Where To Watch The Best Erotic Thrillers Online
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