Erotic thrillers survived instead as at-home pleasures via premium cable (the middlebrow soft-core of Showtime’s Red Shoe Diaries and Cinemax’s Max After Dark) and quietly lucrative straight-to-VHS (and, later, to-DVD) releases like Sins of Desire and Poison Ivy II: Lily. Aside from a scattering of erotic thrillers in the late 2000s centered around Black stars like Beyoncé and Idris Elba ( Obsessed), or Morris Chestnut and Regina Hall ( When the Bow Breaks), the mid-budget, adult-skewing genre largely receded from multiplexes over the past two decades just as superhero fare and internet porn were rising in prominence.
Never mind that Unfaithful hauled in a robust $119.1 million in worldwide ticket sales and netted Diane Lane a Best Actress Academy Award nod. Erotic thrillers had lost the ability to court controversy with sexually illicit material, while also creating four-quadrant cultural sensations à la Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct, both multiple Oscar-nominated classics of the category that were the highest-grossing titles in the respective years of their release. By then, films of its ilk had been limping along for years - see: the twin debacles of Showgirls and Jade, critically lambasted potboilers that bombed at the box office in 1995.
When did the erotic thriller disappear from Hollywood? Ask anyone in the industry and they’ll tell you that sex-pulsed neo-noir ceased as a dependable popcorn genre back in 2002, not long after the theatrical release of Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful.
Photo-Illustration: Vulture Photo Courtesy of 20th Century Studios The industry is still nervous about sex on big screens, leaving streamers to struggle to reboot a genre that died too young.
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