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Abstract:
Besides its high-budget theatrical sector, the erotic thriller includes lowerprofile, lower-budget, nontheatrical subgenres like the softcore thriller. This article proposes that as the softcore thriller has grown more feminized, pornographic, and consumerist over the past fifteen years, it has also become less like 1940s film noir and much less expensive.
When discussing the erotic thriller, critics persistently allude to expensive Hollywood films like Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987) or Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992), as if to imply that such films represent the "essence" of this contemporary genre. This reduction has its rationale. Theatrical erotic thrillers have exerted an undeniable cultural sway, and their economic significance is not to be discounted. Unfortunately, the effect of this limited focus has been to make the genre's lowerbudget, nontheatrical forms that much more "invisible." Any honest appraisal of the genre s multiform reality must pay heed to these superabundant thrillers, which have for decades proliferated on the edges of the mainstream marketplace.1
The difficulty is that these low-cost vehicles are so manifold in type that no single article can theorize them in detail, much less situate them in their contexts. Thus the following article centers on one subgenre, the softcore erotic thriller (or "softcore thriller"), and refers to cognate forms mainly to clarify this generic strand. My assumption is that by examining one of the erotic thriller's least understood segments we may reorient our understanding of the broader category.
Two other premises are central here. First, this heterogeneous field is organized by a uniquely profitable abstraction: sex is dangerous. The anxiety of the erotic thriller is a relentless repackaging of this simplification, whose economic potential lies in its combination of sexual mystification and consemitism. As the components of "erotic thriller" indicate, the genre promises a dual spectacle: sexual action and violent suspense. The erotic thriller often integrates these forms of spectacle, as in the rough-sex idiom popularized by Michael Douglas in Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, and Disclosure (Barry Levinson, 1994). Accordingly, this suibgenre tends toward violence throughout its spectacle, precipitating the common view that the "erotic thriller means two minutes of nudity and 60 minutes of violence."2 But this perception is myopic. Softcore thrillers, for example, mostly detach their sex from their violence. Today, the lowest-budget...