JeffTheAlpaca

Do you miss the erotic thriller?

The 50 Shades trilogy might be the only big one I can think in the last couple of years.

It seems you could not escape from them in the 80's and 90's with movies like Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, Wild Things, SIngle White Female, and The Last Seduction to name a few.

Maybe the consensus to have all movies slapped with a PG-13 rating to get the most viewers could be a factor or people are going online to get their kicks.

dex14

Bluelitespecial

Studios caring more about getting a PG-13 rating happened. I wish these movies were still around but modern day feminism is another big reason these movies don't exist today.

GoldenJCJ

majorjoe23

dex14

Mondo Kane

There was one that I ran into in the mid-90s called Play Nice

^Seeing that guy naked had to have been the death blow for the genre.

Mike86

RichC2

I don't get the feminism comment at all.

It mostly came down to numerous flops in the early 2000s and changing theatrical appetites. 2016s The Handmaiden was hot as hell though.

dex14

OldBoy

Gasper Noe, while wildly pornographic still makes em. More overseas now. Even Paul Verhooven does them overseas as his US production is more Hollywood...

DJariya

I rented a lot of erotic thrillers back in the 1990s.

I think the fad just died out along with the actresses who became known in the genres getting older & retiring.

Just guessing here, but also many of these movies were super cheap to make and shot in 4:3 on video tape. Once VHS started dying out in the late 1990s and everyone was getting 16:9 TVs and DVD players, that also killed the genre.

dex14

RichC2

Yeah, it isnt film nudity being discussed, that's still alive and well. Noe flicks make me feel dirty for other reasons.

windom

I blame Mr. Skin. People could just see all the nudity in these movies online in one place instead of paying to see it in a theater or even at home.

Mondo Kane

I remember the video stores (At least the mom/pop ones) used to only carry the Unrated versions of the films while Premium cable played the R-cuts. Didn't ever suspect that there would be much difference between the versions, but a Playboy-Channel showing (Yeah, I was a brief subscriber) of *Husbands and Lovers offered the comparison and the trimming of one scene in particular was brutal.

On the flipside of that, I've now noticed that cable ONLY plays the Unrated versions of both Basic Instinct and Body of Evidence. Odd.

*Joanna Pacula

JeffTheAlpaca

I think women were portrayed as the aggressors and villainous in these movies and not in a positive light so maybe in the metoo era that stuff does not fly anymore.

brayzie

This.
And probably this too.

They did seem either cheesy or all style and no substance.
When Basic Instinct came out it was considered so edgy because of some hot-lesbianism going on in a mainstream film, and Sharon Stone's crotch shot. When I finally saw the movie I didn't think it was that good. Fatal Attraction is the much better film, but I would classify that one as a drama/suspense-thriller.

Color of Night with Bruce Willis and Jane March was another one of those erotic-thrillers. The story was interesting but also odd, and almost campy.

It was like porn-lite, which was shown in regular theaters and later able to rent in chain video rental stores like Blockbuster and Hollywood video which were known for not having an adult section.

OldBoy

Unfaithful is a good one.

brayzie

Which one's do you recommend? Because most of the well-known ones from the 90s don't look very good.

It's weird because I've only come across women who gush over the book and the movie. No guys I know have talked about it.
Yet, I remember a lot of guys seeing and talking about movies like Basic Instinct and Wild Things.

rbrown498

The Handmaiden is probably my favorite film of the past ten years. It would have been great even without the sex scenes (but I'm glad that they're in there).

Nick Danger

I'm going to go with internet porn, too. The erotic thriller was an effect of censorship. Movies pushed the envelope to see how much they could get away with in a sex scene. Now we've got PornHub on Roku.

I recently watched the YouTube video Koreans Watch American Porn. They were pretty much appalled by what they saw. ("Americans watch this?") I think The Handmaiden is good because it came from a culture that has censorship laws and that still values subtlety.

majorjoe23

JeffTheAlpaca

Maybe nobody in Hollywood will fund these type of movies anymore and like some people said most of them were cheesy and audiences today are more sophisticated.

RichC2

There just doesn't seem to be much of an appetite for them anymore.