Erotic Thrillers: Unsung Heroes of Home Video

Welcome back to the Bulwark goes to Hollywood. My name is Sunny Bunch from editor at the Bulwark. And I’m very pleased to be joined today by Anthony Penta, who is the director of Wekill for Love. It’s a two and a half hour documentary slash video essay about the erotic thriller, the genre that was kind of birthed in the nineteen eighties and and hit its apogee in the nineteen nineties, I think, in the midst of the video store and cable TV boom, and has kind of faded in recent years, but it’s a it’s a really interesting documentary. Anthony, thank you for being on the show today.

I really appreciate it.

Thank you for having me, Sunny. It’s just great to be here.

So, let’s let’s start first things first. What made you want to, make a documentary about the erotic thriller. You know, it’s obviously a genre that is, you know, sometimes kind of treated as a joke, but is is really interesting both from a business and artistic perspective?

Well, I would say that there were two overlapping reasons why It dawned on me that I needed to make this movie to do this video essay, combine video essay documentary. The first was that I discovered, and here I was helped by the academic books I later found that the erotic thriller was roughly the same size and shape as film noir. Everybody knows what film noir is. It’s a publicly traded concept. If you go to any library, The film noir section is from head to toe, and as far as your hands can reach on either side.

There’s been a lot of discourse about film noir. It’s a household word. It’s a popular brand. When I discovered that the erotic thriller of the late eighties and the nineteen nineties was the same size and shape as film noir, but for some reason had been hidden away in our cultural attic. Like that madwoman from Jane Air, it puzzled me.

How had this happened? How could an entire American film genre come and go. That’s the same size and shape as a massively popular genre that is on everybody’s lips. But it no one knows about the films anymore, and it’s just gone. It’s just, you know, It’s just completely disappeared.

How could this have happened? So this was the first thing. As I began watching erotic thrillers, I discovered that like film noir had an equal number of films. I have Michael Akini’s film noir guide behind me on the shelf. And he lists seven hundred and fifty films in the roll call of film noir.

When I first started looking into these movies, Found a hundred, and then two hundred, and then three hundred, I maintained a personal spreadsheet of movies, I found the academic books and I added more. When my list got to over five and six hundred, I knew that I was on to something. That this was way more movies. And even the practitioners of these films didn’t realize how large the genre had become when I interviewed Fred Olin Ray, the director of, I think, twelve erotic thrillers throughout the eighties and nineties in his home when he lived here in studio city, I asked him how many erotic thrillers he thought had ever been made, and his response was maybe a hundred tops. When I told him I’d found at that point over five hundred, he just laughed out loud.

He didn’t understand how that it was possible that many could have been made. And I also discovered that there were other correspondences between the erotic thriller and film noir. Both of them are a specifically American film genre. Fil noir arose in America, in and around the area of Los Angeles and San Francisco, And film noir was a response to a lot of cultural upheaval at the time, and a lot of this cultural upheaval filtered its way into the films, and the films are oftentimes these little object lessons and morality plays. That are dramatizing these issues.

And the same was for the erotic thriller. It was also had its collection of themes and tropes that were dramatizing cultural shifts of the eighties and nineties. Phil noir has a shadow pantheon of actors that are specific to the genre. Alan Ladd, Elizabeth Scott, Marie Windsor. These people are, you know, people who are into film noir, They know.

They can re list off twelve or fifteen names off the top of their head. Likewise, the erotic thriller also has a shadow pantheon of actors. Specific to these films. Monique Parent, Kira Reed, Andrew Stevens, Doug Jeffrey, Kim Dawson, Nikki Fritz, the list goes on. As a matter of fact, the erotic thriller performers are a little bit more cohesive than the film noir actors.

Some of the film noir actors, of course, like Humphrey Bogart, he went on to act in much you know, broader films. He performed in films that were not legibly filmed noir at all. He was a major Hollywood actor. Right? But the erotic thriller of the nineties had this really boutique collection of performers who for the most part performed in only these films.

So it’s even more cohesive than noir. And there are other things that the other, you know, parallels between film noir and the erotic thriller. Yet, for some reason, the erotic thriller has, except for two books that have been written specifically about it. Balling by the Cultural Way Side has been hidden away in the Cultural Attic. And let’s never acknowledge it again.

So that was, I think, the first reason that made it interesting to me. And the second overlapping reason why I made we kill for love, was that because it had been locked away in our cultural attic, because it had been forgotten about, it was sort of like an abandoned house in the woods. You know, anyone who’s ever found an abandoned house in the woods knows the feeling. You know, a once beautiful house now has graffiti all over it. People just show up there at night to drink beer and do make a fire pit.

The windows get broken out. The house gets looted. It just gets treated terribly. And in the intervening years since the erotic riller stopped production in the late nineteen nineties early two thousands, the d discourse around it was just horrible. It the entire genre had been adopted by this diffuse tribe of softcore enthusiasts.

Who I can only presume were men. They traded the files online, and they only valued the films for how much female nudity they had in them. There was an entire popular online forum devoted exclusively to these kinds of films, and the films were evaluated only on the presence of female nudity And whether this or that woman from this or that film was in it or whether there was a girl girl scene between this or that woman or the other, and it was It was gross. And when I began fill you know, falling for the strange enchanting romantic mystery of these films, when I began reading the academic books that had written a been written about them, I thought that a huge injustice had been done to these films. And in some sense, I You know, in some sense, I respect the this diffuse tribe of collectors because I got a lot of movies from them.

Right? They inadvertently They collect the films. And so inadvertently, I I learned a lot about them and was able to find films that I could never find because they collect and compile them. There is there is a matter of fact, an entire reference book written about soft core films and the female actors called Doctor Skin’s skin cyclopedia, the a to z encyclopedia of finding your favorite actress’ naked. That’s the title.

And it just goes alphabetically through female actors only describing which movies those female actors have been in and what body parts they show. When I saw things like this, I just thought there somebody, this can’t be the last word on these movies. Right? I can’t allow that to happen. You know?

And Linda Ruth Williams who wrote the academic book, The erotic thriller in Contemporary Cinema sort of paved the way for a way of thinking about it for me as a documentary because given no one had previously written a book about these films, Linda Ruth Williams had to track down the practitioners, the writers directors, producers, and interview them. And so her book is prolonged passages of academic analysis, exploring the themes and tropes of the erotic thriller, and its interviews with the practitioners. And this patchwork of analysis and interviews I think for me wasn’t really prompt, and it made it seem made making a documentary about these films seem possible. Yeah. And so for those two reasons, I’m I decided to move forward with a documentary about them.

And this the your documentary very much follows that that format, interviews analysis, interviews analysis. And I I wanna I wanna talk more about the analysis in a minute because it reminds me a lot of I assume you, are familiar with, Los Angeles Place itself, which is, it like, there there are these interesting overlapping repeated places that that kind of come up again and again, which is which is very interesting and funny. But the, but before we get to that, I get to that, I wanna touch on something that you you had mentioned just the size of these, the the number of films that have been made, the number of erotic thrillers that are out there. And it is fascinating because there’s a case to be made that the early, business of home video v h s, video stores, etcetera, and the early business of cable TV, pay cable, HBO showtime, etcetera, Cinemax, these are things that would look entirely different without the entire world of the erotic thriller. I mean, the erotic thriller is you know, it it becomes kind of a staple, in, blockbuster and and others.

So what was it about? How how did these movies help define the business of Hollywood in the early nineteen eighties or help shape how the business of Hollywood, evolved in in the period of home movie watching.

Okay. I’m gonna answer your question. What I think you mean in this context by Hollywood was simply the filmmaking industry.

The film The erotic

thriller itself was became quickly a non Hollywood non theatrical industry. Hollywood actually took a long time to catch on to the direct to video or DTV format, making movies directly for VHS tape or cable television and bypassing theaters to Hollywood a long time. By a long time, I mean, five or eight years to even start to catch on. So I’ll answer your questions starting from the beginning. In the late nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties, two technological platforms arrived that were new, non theatrical platforms, for watching movies, There was home video rentals on VHS tape, and there was cable television.

And when these two things arrived, America found itself in a quandary pretty much right away. People wanted to see erotica. They knew that. Erotica could be popular, but they didn’t exactly know how to do it. And they didn’t know how to do it in a way that was complimentary to the audiences that they wanted to cultivate.

The nineteen eighties was a very aspirational time. It was a time of shopping malls, arcade games, personal computers, and those pastel portraits by Patrick Nagel of those incredibly determined looking women. Right? Those pastel portraits that that guy made of women with their jogging outfits on and a walkman on their arm, whatever. Those sort of that was like culture looking at itself in the mirror and that’s what they wanted to see.

They wanted to see success. They wanted to see something elevated. And so all of the homespun elements of the nineteen seventies, the porno chic It’s veneration of the authenticity of poverty. All of that stuff went out the door. Anyone who remembers the nineteen seventies and television shows like Archie bun bunker, Sanford Ron DeSantis Jefferson’s.

All of that stuff celebrated the authenticity of poverty and the authenticity of, those, you know, worlds, those homespun cultural worlds All of that was out in the nineteen eighties. The eighties trended up scale. And that’s exactly when these two home video techno technologies arrived. And they had to provide content for that group. And so the quandary that many people found themselves in is that they wanted erotic content, but they weren’t exactly sure where it would go or how it would what format it would take to be complimentary to those audiences.

Film genres like the thriller, Horrer, the Western. There were many successful movies backdated many years that screenwriters and directors could use as templates. You have a poster of one right now in your office behind you.

Mhmm.

These these movies, successful great movies served as like ready made templates that screen writers and directors could use to make new movies. But what templates were there for erotica? What what movies, what great movies of the past could people look at to say, wow, that’s a great work of erotica. Let’s do that again. And so they were desperate to do it.

We know that people wanted to see erotica because interviews with cable television programmers like Bridget Potter, the VP of programming for HBO acknowledge the fact that couples wanted to see erotica, but Bridget demanded that it be, quote unquote, spicy, but not vulgar. When playboy when when Christy Hefner, Hugh Hefner’s daughter took the reins of playboy and began quickly pour, you know, pouring money and resources into the playboy channel originally started out as Playboy TV. The mandates were on high that this was not that the TV channel had to have the same brand as the magazine. And that meant that The Grind House guy oriented Peep show trench coat Brigade movies in the nineteen sixties and seventies were not gonna work. They needed to develop a new kind of erotica that was complimentary to the couple’s audiences that they sought to cultivate.

It was a huge quandary for them. And so what happened to answer your question as all of this was happening is that genre films became places where filmmakers could experiment with loading in what we now call soft core content, that’s nudity and simulated sexual activity, non pornographic sexual activity, They could load this into traditional genres, and they could just see what happens. So you started seeing these genres emerging On the home video landscape that started packing in software content. You had the sword and sandal movies like Barbarian Queen, the Amazons, and many others that had nudity and simulated sex in them. You had the whole glut of beach movies.

Malibu beach girls, summer job, many movies like that, where These light comedies set in beaches over the summer, and they would load software content into them. And you had the Madcap comedy. You know, like meatballs and porkies and that sort of stuff. And this enters sort of, a bit of congeck sure for me in terms of me interpreting what happened, but my feeling is is that of all of these different film genres that were loading software content in them and sort of quietly but methodically eroding the Publix. Fear of taking soft core content home and, you know, on in the form of a VHS tape or playing it in terms of a late night.

Film of all the genres that began experimenting with doing this, the thriller was the one that really took off. And my feeling is that that’s probably because, it it just happens to be the case when Softcore is loaded into a lot of these comedy movies, like the remote boarding school movies, or the Summer Beach movies that when it’s in the form of a light comedy, The nudity and simulated sex feels a little bit exploitive. For some reason, it just it just feels d class a and exploitive, But the thriller was took itself seriously. I think most thrillers have to take themselves seriously. Right?

It’s part of the job. And so when they began loading software content into thrillers, they found It was serious. It was interesting. Erotica erotica merged very well with danger, it complimented danger, and that the female protagonists of these films, they could make female protagonists. And they could and they could, develop stories in which women took center stage that female sexuality took center stage.

That women were put in the same kind of danger that men had been traditionally put in. Women were complicit and compromised in a the same way that men had been complicit and compromised in men for in in movies for a long time. And that it just worked. And I think it was like the match that no one knew was gonna just let ignite all at once. It was just waiting to happen.

And when in the late eighties, certain films started coming out that’s lit this match, That merge danger and desire. Fatal attraction. When that match lit, they couldn’t stop it from burning. And if you trace the development of the erotic thriller, If you look at the number of films produced by year, it kind of percolates in the nineteen eighties as cable television and home video rentals are getting off the ground and booming. But then after fatal attraction, it starts jumping up.

A couple years later, after basic instincts, it just gets sent into overdrive. And by nineteen ninety four and nineteen ninety five, the banner years for the erotic thriller, about seventy movies were being produced per year. Seventy erotic thrillers. And so I think that all of this The the boom of the erotic thriller was fundamentally because of, all of the gasoline that had been laid by the the eighties. Right?

The the, you know, the cultural shifts that were waiting for erotica. The technological landscape for home video rentals It provided even more gasoline. And once the fire lit, it just burned, you know, like a bonfire.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in the in the documentary, you really, hit on the, the confluence of, you know, sex and danger and how they are complimentary to each other and how they, they work better on screen as storytelling devices because —

Mhmm.

— as you say, is sex is dangerous. It can be. And dangerous sometimes sexy. And I they kind of, work together like that. Let’s, just drilling down on the video store aspect of it.

I mean, and this is this is, I find really interesting because I feel like you know, we have forgotten the the early boom times of the video store. And this this movie, I you guys, had your premiere at Vidiots out in, Los Angeles. Yes.

That was Yeah. Tomorrow.

Yeah. So that’s, that’s, exciting. That’s exciting. But the, but the the the rise of the video store and the the kind of business of making videos. Again, outside of the kind of standard Hollywood apparatus, You know, you had you had not just, the erotic throwers, but also, you know, a lot of the Canon movies.

Right? A lot of the, you know, big cheap action movies. From this era, like, the stores needed content. They for for for, to use a terrible modern word they needed content. And and and these VHS tapes were that content.

I, like, I I’m just, in your in your research, did you, did you to any of the early video store owners about what they were looking for and, and and hoping for from these films, or or not. Would that be on the screen?

I tracked down I tracked down, something even better. I tracked down a man named Thomas k Arnold Thomas k Arnold was a former editor of video store magazine. He’s the current he’s a current publisher of media play news. Thomas Kate Arnold has had his finger on the pulse of home video since its inception. And Thomas k Arnold is in the documentary and we talked at length about just these sea changes within the home video industry, why it was popular, and how these genres thrived.

Thomas Kay Arnold introduced me to a very interesting concept that he called deliberate consumer dissatisfaction. And he said that the video industry thrived by producing dissatisfied customers. That seems counterintuitive to us. How is it possible for a business to thrive by making its customers unhappy? Well, In the early days, if you look back the early days of video stores, they were all independent.

Right? And there wasn’t a lot of videos. Video store started, they weren’t even released stores. It would be like a corner of the supermarket. If anybody remembers those early days, and they would have about twenty or thirty movies.

And then when there were more videos available on video tape, actual independent video stores began sprouting up. And those stores didn’t have many video tapes. Right? They needed content. And it’s just difficult for us nowadays to think about a world in which the bringing home a movie, and the ability to stop and start it and watch it over and over was just massively popular.

It was big. You know? And so because these video stores didn’t have a lot of content and that the consumers were going to the store, What the consumers knew, and this has never changed. It was the Hollywood movies. Right?

Consumers when they walked into a store, They were looking for, can I get what h what movies do I recognize? Can I get on video? Since Hollywood was not producing enough movies and not licensing enough movies to video tape to fill video stores. Video stores found themselves having to rely on the video distributors like prism home entertainment to supply them with videos, and they read magazines like video store magazine, and they looked for new videos. And so what they the distributors found they could do is they could purchase, develop, self produce, or advertise independently produced movies that ape the advertising, the advertising strategies of Hollywood movies and could sit on the shelf alongside Hollywood movies and be something that the consumer could get when the Hollywood movie wasn’t there.

So the in a nutshell, what I’m saying is The consumer went into the video store looking for basic instinct. And there was a movie next to it called animal instincts. An animal instincts on its v h s tape compared itself to basic instinct, or they were looking for fatal attraction, And they found a movie called illicit attraction or dangerous attraction, and it compared itself to fatal attraction. And so the consumer went into the store looking for movie a. But then browsing the store came out with movies b c and d.

And everybody was happy. This this huge boom, as, Blaine Brown, the cinematographer writer director told me, He said, back then, you could make anything and it would sell to video stores. Peep the I really wish this world would just come back. Unfortunately, it’s never coming back. But this world was a world that motivated, it animated the independent film industry in America because as Hollywood, was trickling out films to video.

Independent filmmakers were out there. Pounding out movies. And these movies flooded the shelves of home video stores and the programming slots of cable television. It was a huge boom for independent cinema in America. A lot of people got wealthy.

A lot of people had jobs for a decade. And it’s just too bad that world disappeared because this, the idea of deliberately dissatisfying the consumer when they went into a video store produced tons of art.

It’s it that’s an interesting idea, the deliberate consumer, just dissatisfaction idea because it really does feel like that is also essentially Netflix’s model to a certain extent. You throw on Netflix. You watch twenty minutes of something. You’re like, oh, this sucks. What’s the next thing?

You would, you know, what and that and that is the the the difference, of course, is that, you know, Netflix is just getting your twenty dollars and they pay the, you know, twenty dollars a month, they pay their production costs, whatever. You know, once upon a time, we’re talking about, an era in which, you know, a movie costs a hundred dollars or eighty dollars or dollars to buy on VHS. You know, you rent it for two or three bucks, but you do that enough times you make your money back. And, of course, if you’re selling I don’t know, twenty thousand copies at a hundred bucks a throw, you know, that that ends up being real money.

And,

after after not to too long. And the we it seemed it feels like we have devalued things in a in a in a real way. I mean, you know, that’s progress, I guess. But

Yeah. It’s true. I mean, people have looked at modern streaming services and compared them to the home video Of the nineties. And it’s true that they’re very similar. The home video of the nineteen nineties was an exploding video market for consumers.

Both VHS tape rentals and cable television, and it was resistant to pornography. The the marching orders for from on high was that no porn. The same thing goes with streaming services. Now you have streaming services pouring money into independently produced content, And they will not program pornography in the same way that blockbuster video wouldn’t put it on the shelf in showtime, wouldn’t put it on late night cable. So where are all the erotic thrillers?

You know, I this is a bit of a mystery now that there the two phases of home video now can be looked at as being so comparable, yet they’re so different in many ways.

Yeah. Well, I I wanna I wanna talk about where the erotic thriller went because it’s one of it’s a thing I think a lot about, probably more than I should just in terms of, you know, what happened to nudity in film and on TV and why, particularly some of the younger generation gen z are very hesitant and and, dismissive of nudity in films. It’s a thing you. I think Abby Bender mentions it on, toward the end of your documentary, but it’s it’s it’s a it’s a topic I think about, a lot is is Before we get there, let’s look at how Hollywood did for a while adopt the erotic thriller with fatal attraction you know, basic instincts, nine and a half weeks. You know, you’re kind of verhoeven, Adrian line.

Sure. Period. You know, that that was that felt like the real golden age boom time, though that did kind of precede the real boom time in the in the late nineties.

Yeah. The the the relationship between Hollywood and its response to the erotic thriller and the direct to video erotic thriller is an interesting one, and it’s something that Linda Ruth Williams covers in her book on the erotic thriller. It’s oftentimes erroneously stated that The direct video erotic thrillers were just cheap knockoffs of the Hollywood films. Right? Someone also once sent said that history is written by the Victor.

And that’s certainly the case. The constantly traded piece of misinformation, and of which there are many about the erotic thriller, that the direct to video films are cheap knockoffs of the Hollywood films, is something that circulates on social media, in armchair film reviews, in articles for vox and Jezebel, etcetera, but it’s just simply not true. It’s not completely true. It is absolutely true that the direct video erotic thrillers imitated compared themselves to Hollywood films as a way to sell tapes. They there are films that you can go get video store magazine.

If you can find it and look at the ads for erotic thrillers, and it’ll say this year’s basic instinct. Body heat for the next generation. They would say things like this even if the movie had no legible relationship to the story of body heat or basic instincts. They would just say it. In order to get people to rent the tape, they figured out when you watch the movie.

Right? Once you paid your five dollars, we’ve got you. So the relationship between Hollywood and the Directive Videoorotic thriller, though, as story forms is an interesting one. Often, the direct to video erotic thrillers served as a sort of laboratory for the development of themes, tropes, and character types, that would become essential to the erotic thriller as a story form. And Hollywood would see this, and they would pick and choose which story elements that they wanted, and they would make blockbuster successes out of them as Linda Ruth Williams says the Hollywood movies would present exalted forms of these tropes.

A good example is basic instincts. Basic instinct doesn’t it was a massively successful movie. Right? Basic instinct advances a trope. That’s oftentimes looked at as basic instincts look looked at as being the origin of this trope.

It’s something I call the suspect lover. And that is that a murder suspect is the love interest for the investigating detective. And in basic instinct, The love interest is Sharon Stone. The investigating detective is Michael Douglas. She’s a she’s a suspect lover.

Her motives are suspect, she is a suspect. Right? This was all presented years before in a movie starring Harry Hamlin and Nicole at Sheridan called Desceptions. Deceptions was recently scanned in HD, and it’s available right now. On a streaming service called archive dot tv, I I suggest anyone listening to this podcast, go watch it.

The central trope of the suspect lover, the Maverick detective who’s investigating a blonde murder suspect, who lives in an aspirational mansion, His standing outside her bedroom window and looking up at her. From afar, his eccentric partner who killed alone late into the movie while investigating the crime. All of this is in deceptions. Suddenly, basic instinct doesn’t look. As original as we all thought it was when movies like Deceptions exist.

And this is across the board for the direct to video erotic thriller. There’s so many forgotten direct to video erotic thrillers, which have the essential building blocks of the Hollywood movies, which would later, you know, present those building blocks in an exalted form, rake in tons of money, And now people history is written by the Victor. People think that the Hollywood movies invented at all, which is just simply not true. All of this is not to say that there weren’t a lot of cheap knockoffs of Hollywood movies. Linda Ruth Williams has a great way of describing this in her book.

She said that hot she says that Hollywood and its fringes exist like a sea of sharks. Everything is food. And there are Hollywood movies influenced by the direct to video films, direct to video films influenced by the Hollywood films, It’s just a huge self feeding network. You can see this comically demonstrated in, a scene from Jag Mundra’s Direct to video erotic thriller nighteyes where Tanya Roberts takes a candle and drips candle wax on top of Andrew Stephen’s bare chest. You know, in this moment of heightened erotic sexuality.

Right? That got picked up right away and used in body of evidence, and it became Madonna and Will Saletan Foe. But then it got used again in I like to play games, the direct to video film, and it got used again in a Hollywood film, and then it got used again in mirror images too. So this one scene, as it bounces back and forth like a tennis ball from the to video films to the Hollywood films to the direct to video films to the Hollywood films. That one scene demonstrates and underscores the self feeding Bulwark.

The self feeding story network of the erotic thriller and the relationship between the direct to video films and the Hollywood films.

As we as we mentioned, a minute or two ago, you know, the the erotic thriller has kind of gone away. And I’m curious to get your take on to why that is. I mean, there’s all sorts of theories, the prevalence of porno the actual pornography, you know, the ease of access there. Changing norms and mores. I what is your what is your take on, I mean, I can literally only think of one off the top of my head from the last couple years, and that’s, Adrian Line’s deep water.

And that barely got released. I mean, that that that, you know, that winds up getting dumped to Hulu. You know, it it it it barely gets out there despite having, you know, real stars and Right. A decent decent budget. What what happened to the erotic thriller?

Why is it why have we turned away from that mixture of sexuality and danger.

Okay. I don’t think we ever did. I think as a named genre, the erotic thriller did slope off in production. And if you happen to be a person who collects erotic thrillers like me, corrupt collects named erotic thrillers. The films began sloping off starting in nineteen ninety five and by nineteen ninety nine two thousand.

There was only a couple being produced every year, and it seems as though, The erotic thriller is a name genre disappeared. You stop seeing erotic thriller on VHS tape covers or DVD covers? People stopped saying they were making erotic thrillers. But by that, you might think that the central concerns plot tropes character types, etcetera, of the erotic thriller, dangerous desire, erotic fantasy leading to danger, women on excursions to the dark side of desire. Men lured into danger by attractive femme fatals.

You might be tempted to think that these things disappeared with the erotic thriller, but they didn’t. The erotic thriller did its job. Like a laboratory, it created all of these these new story. Elements, these building blocks for stories. And into the two thousands, they dispersed.

And Though they weren’t often not all collected together into individual film types, which use them all. Right? Like an eight cylinder engine, it put them all together and fire net. It was like, wow. In erotic thriller, the individual elements of the erotic thriller engine, the technology developed was used in other films.

And I can think offhand of three completely separate film movements. That picked up on the erotic thriller of the nineties, thrived, and nobody will acknowledge them. The first is women’s television. Women’s television emerged first with, lifetime television, later Hallmark movies and mysteries, and today, passion flicks, The brainchild of Tosca Musk, who’s the sister of the space explorer and electric car magnet, Elon Musk. Tosca Musk’s passion flicks, lifetime, and to some degree Hallmark movies and mysteries, are still making erotic thrillers.

And those erotic thrillers that they’re making have become increasingly lurid, the titles of the films, like pool boy nightmare, Psycho yoga instructor, I loved psycho yoga instructor. I thought, like, I thought I was floating on air when I watched that movie. It was made a couple years ago, these move these movies are erotic through they’re they’re one oftentimes one softcore seen away. From being a real deal erotic thriller. And some of them now because of the permissiveness of streaming services, lifetime, and passion flicks, Some of them crossover and they are legibly real erotic thrillers.

Women’s television Never gave up on the erotic thriller. As a matter of fact, women’s television preceded the erotic thriller. In the nineteen seventies and eighties, women’s television lurid tales of women drawn into dangerous desire. Like through naked eyes, a television movie, from the early eighties starring the Pam Dauber from she was Mindy and Morgan Mindy. You know, The movies like that always existed.

During the erotic thriller era, they got sort of pulled up into the current of the erotic thriller, And after the erotic thriller subsided, they just kept going. So I could go on about women’s television, but I think that the central themes and tropes of the erotic thriller live on, never disappeared, and are always there. And if you really like direct to video erotic thrillers, odds are you’re probably gonna like a lot of women’s television. You’re probably gonna like psych yoga instructor. You’re you’re probably gonna like pool boy nightmare or stock by my doctor or stock by my lawyer or any number of other stock buy movies.

Another group that picked up on the erotic thriller was Southeast Asia, Bollywood. In the early two thousands, Bollywood began picking up on the erotic thriller, the classic direct to video erotic thriller, and they began making all these movies like hate story, murder, Awas, Raja Tomho, there’s a whole bunch of them. And they’re legibly erotic thrillers. They’re the same stories revolted. And I think that one of the reasons that that this happened is that In order for the erotic thriller to keep thriving, people have to take the central abstractions of the genre seriously.

They have to take its central abstraction that desire is dangerous. Seriously. And Southeast Asian culture, Hollywood, the Indian audiences for whom these movies were made. I think they took the the theme seriously. I mean, one producer in the Hindu times was quoted as, you know, saying that since these movies oftentimes foreground female protagonists, who seek out sexual desire outside of marriage.

This was very controversial for Indian audiences. Subsequently, the movies were very Popular. The the erotic thriller has to be a little bit scandalizing. It has to feel a little bit like a taboo is being broken. When you watch an erotic thriller, you have to get the sense that you’re kind of being allowed to peek behind that bedroom door and see what people are really up to.

It has to feel a little bit illicit for the audience. And this essential part of the erotic thriller may be one of the things that’s kind of lost. And then finally, I’ll just say that the third group that has picked up on the erotic thriller is, Bulwark audiences. In the early two thousands, Bulwark audiences began picking up on the themes and tropes of the erotic thriller, and movies like the perfect guy, obsessed, etcetera. Twa, twa two, twa three, asunder.

These movies began revolting the themes and tropes of the erotic thriller, but for specifically black audiences, and they never went away. And streaming services like to be now. If you look, you will see that there’s a lot of these new Bulwark erotic thrillers on to be which are it’s as if they exist in a world where the direct to video erotic thriller is still the biggest thing ever. There’s they’re just general they’re just doing the whole thing all over again. But what you will not find is you will not find cultural commentators who are writing for internet publications like Vox or collider.

You will not find any of these writers who are lamenting the death of the erotic thriller You will not find any of them mentioning any of these three modalities, contemporary women’s fiction, Bollywood, or the new Bulwark erotic thrillers. In the same way that the direct to video erotic thriller of the nineties flew under the radar, no one talked about it, and then it disappeared. These three types, same thing is happening. No one’s talking about them. Everyone is saying the erotic thriller died, but there it is right there, lift a rock in the garden, and they’re all there.

So

Is let me ask, is this just a function of critics, commentators, etcetera, really being only focused on what they see, ads for what we get trailers for, you know, what is in theaters? I mean, is it is it just a a function of the hegemony of Hollywood as an idea? Yes. Is is that the problem?

Yes. The problem is is that, unfortunately, this is not the case with most sound really old saying this. This is not the case with most young people these days. But unfortunately because of the dominance of streaming services and the eclipsing of physical media, people of today have allowed the corporations to create reality for them. Just as Neo in the matrix is fed a virtual reality, which he thinks is the real reality by his artificially intelligent robot overlords.

Young film goers of today Maybe even not so young film goers of today, their their cinematic reality has unfortunately being shaped. By conglomerates, and they think that the only things that exist are what those conglomerates put in front of them. Some of this is breaking down with streaming services like to be and archive TV that are that are putting a lot of independent cinema. Online. Some of it’s breaking down, and there are many, many young film enthusiasts today and not so young enthusiasts who really spend the time tracking down movies on a broad spectrum and find that the story is more nuanced and complex than the streaming service is what have us believe.

And so I worry. You know, the the the erotic thriller is a victim of this whole process, unfortunately, that Again, history is written by the Victor, and, it’s sad to see happen when it comes to film genres because film genres can be a very nuanced broad spectrum phenomena. And, you know, like in iceberg, it’s it’s really unfortunate to see an iceberg get defined by the very tip that’s above the waves because if you’ve ever seen, you know, like, a cutaway illustration of an iceberg, the bulk of the iceberg is below the water, the massive bulk of it. And, to just consider the tips of the iceberg burgs all that exist of history is unfortunate. And and this is happening today, and it’s demonstrated by the supposed death of the erotic thriller, which Never happened.

I I’ll just say from my perspective, you see a lot of this particularly in the world of action movies where a lot of DTV action stuff just nobody nobody ever talks about it except for the subcultures that enjoy talking about we’re we’re we’re running long here. I I I wanna I just I know. I I this is great. This is per I

have no one to talk to about this except you.

Well, I I I I don’t want and I know you’ve got more interviews to do today. So I don’t wanna I don’t wanna take up too much more time I Will Saletan I just wanna ask one question, stylistic question. When you were when you were putting together the the montages and the, narration, there there are these really, kind of I I’ll just say they’re fun. They’re fun moments where we see the same house used over and over again, you know. The same location used over and over again.

And, I I was wondering, you know, aside from just watching so many of these things that they were you you noticed the how the repetitive nature of some of them, how how did you, w did you have your eyes, were you looking for specific places? I guess is my did you know that there were some like landmark homes that were constantly used in erotic thrillers or or what? What was — Oh, yeah. —

what was

your process then?

I mean, if you can go to you can go to we kill for love dot com, the film’s website, and there’s a map section which I don’t promote or advertise, which during the watching of these films, one of the things I did to entertain myself among many other things was freeze frame things and try to find these locations. And at one time, I entertained the idea of having a sequence of the film in which you saw the location in an erotic thriller, and then it would dissolve to the actual location today. And the plan was to show how the past is present. These places are still with us. That didn’t wind up in the movie, and so I just created this Google map where I show you all the locations that I’ve been able to dig up and it’s entertaining.

But, yes, I mean, when I began when I began watching the erotic thrillers, I realized right away that I had to do so in my editing software. And so when I watched erotic thrillers, I watched them in the editor, And when I saw repetition, when I saw things repeating, certain homes, certain locations, or certain tropes, the overhead fan, strippers in jeopardy, red cars, people getting killed in hot tubs or pools, I began saving these moments, and I have many timelines that never made it into the movie. The original movie was five hours long. I have many timelines I never made it into the movie that that cluster together these repetitions of things. Whether their ideas or locations or people or tropes or character types.

And I I saw in those things that They underscored some of the things that the erotic erotic thriller was trying to say in really unique interesting and amusing ways. I know that the overhead fan is kind of goofy. I know that. In the movie, I make a big to do about the overhead fan. Being this really important thing, the slowly revolving overhead fan.

But these things, which seem funny and goofy actually express what the academics call the dichotomous structure of the erotic thriller, danger desire, fatal attraction. The overhead fan often looks down on the bedroom and the bed, which is a scene of sexual pleasure, but it just as often looks down on people who are killed in erotic thrillers. You see dead bodies in the slowly revolving fan. The same thing goes with hot tubs and erotic thrillers. Hot tubs are the locusts and in many erotic thrillers of actual activity, but there are just as many scenes of people getting killed and floating face down in hot tubs or pools.

The locusts of sexual pleasure is also a locust of death. And these locations in the erotic thriller, these things reflect the dichotomous theme of the erotic thriller. It’s central abstraction that desire is dangerous. Right? And so these things for me became very important to the film, and that’s why the film is so loaded with them.

It’s loaded with these things. That over and over and over again underscore the central abstraction of the erotic thriller, and they became very important to me when editing the film.

I, I always like to close these interviews by asking if there’s anything I should have asked. If you think there’s, anything people should know about the erotic filler or the state of Hollywood or filmmaking in general, business of Hollywood, business film? Whatever. What do you think people should know?

I, you know, I I put it I put my all into that documentary in film essay, and I made it for three audiences. I understand that it’s a long movie, but I’m I made it for people to watch people today, and hopefully those people who wanna learn more about erotic thrillers and wanna see how far the rabbit hole goes, the movie is for you. The other audience I made it for was for myself. It had to be satisfying to me. And in many ways, it’s a document of my prolonged madness of trying to make sense of this genre.

So the movie is also for me. I made it for myself, but there’s a third more important audience I made this film for and that was for the people of the future. I felt like people a hundred years from now, four hundred years from now, have to be able to see this movie and it has to have everything. I felt very strongly as I was making we kill for love that no one was ever gonna do this again. And so like making an Egyptian tomb, I had to put everything in that tomb.

I had to put everything in that room that the erotic thriller was gonna need for its journey into the afterlife. And so we kill for love is that tomb. It’s loaded with that stuff. And so I my suggestion to people is now it’s gonna be on All the digital platforms this week. Take your time.

Watch the movie in pieces. Understand what it has to say. You know, if you don’t like one part, don’t worry. Another good parts go down the pike. It’s a dense long loaded movie that took many years to make.

And, I just hope that people enjoy it.

Anthony Penteth. Thank you very much for being on the show. Again, the name of the movie as we kill for love. It is on VOD now. I, again, I I I did not know that I needed a two and a half hour, documentary slash film essay about the erotic thriller in my life, but I’m glad I have it.

I’m bad. I have it now.

Right on.

So this is, this was great. My name is Sunny Bunch. I’m the culture editor at the Bulwark, and I will be back next week with another episode of the Bulwark goes to Hollywood. See you guys in.