The 40 steamiest erotic thrillers ever made

Of all the Basic Instinct ripoffs to roll off the Hollywood assembly line in the ‘90s, none received a worse critical drubbing than Body of Evidence. A lot of the vitriol had to do with the stars involved - Willem Dafoe, cashing a check as the Michael Douglas stand-in, and Madonna, assuming the Sharon Stone role as a femme fatale who enjoys sexing men to death. Look, we’re not going to waste precious brain cells mounting some kind of retroactive contrarian defense of the film. But if you want to understand ‘90s erotic thrillers - and why boys of a certain generation feel slightly uncomfortable whenever mom lights a scented candle - it’s still a vital area of study.   

Every generation needs its own Fatal Attraction… well, maybe ‘needs’ is too strong a word. But they all get one regardless, and for the AOL Instant Messenger era, it was Swimfan. Its plot is basic stalker-flick stuff – a high school swim star (Jesse Bradford) is ‘lured’ into what he thinks is a one-night stand with the new girl in town (Erika Christensen), until she starts eliminating everyone standing in the way of them being together – but Bradford and Christensen are very believable in their roles, and director John Polson has a way of making the formula relevant for its intended young-adult audience. 

Remembered mostly (maybe entirely) for the scene involving Mark Wahlberg getting to third base with Reese Witherspoon on a rollercoaster, this young-adult thriller was envisioned as ‘Fatal Attraction for teens’, according to producer Brian Glazer, but overshoots its mark and ends up in campy ‘Lifetime stalker flick’ territory. Still, Wahlberg is believably menacing as the psychopathic delinquent romancing, manipulating and obsessing over Witherspoon’s sheltered rich girl, and the post-grunge soundtrack and distinctly MTV-inspired visual style make it a vivid late ’90s time capsule.     

Grim but intensely gripping, Sam H Freeman and Ng Choon Ping’s debut feature infiltrates the prison of toxic, heteronormative masculinity, and discovers conditions on the inside are even worse than imagined. Months after being assaulted in a brutal hate crime, a drag queen (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) spies their attacker (George MacKay) in a bathhouse and embarks down a path of psychosexual revenge, the ramifications of which neither is prepared for. Anchored by superb, complex performances from Stewart-Jarrett and MacKay, it’s a dark, dangerously horny noir, where sex is always violent and it’s never clear who, exactly, is dominating who. 

After the flop of Legend, Ridley Scott traded ogres and unicorns for cops and socialites in this romantic thriller, starring Tom Berenger as a blue-collar police detective who falls for the witness in a murder case he’s assigned to protect, a high-class woman-about-town played by Mimi Rogers. One problem: he’s married. Sounds standard-issue, but Scott’s visual flair takes it up several notches, while Lorraine Bracco turns heads as Berenger’s wife, showing the tough edge she’d later bring to bigger roles in Goodfellas and The Sopranos.

Roman Polanski directed this dark tragicomedy about a disabled man (Peter Coyote) regaling a buttoned-down Brit (pre-Four Weddings Hugh Grant) with tales of his and his wife’s sexual adventures while all of them are trapped on a cruise together. Sounds like a nightmare, and that’s exactly what it eventually turns into. It probably played a lot kinkier in the early ’90s – indeed, critics dismissed it as perverse – but engaging performances from Coyote, Grant and Kristin Scott Thomas as Grant’s wife make it worth a reappraisal.

If James Spader is the star of a movie, there’s a 97 percent chance his character is going to be both extremely horny and deeply insecure. And so it goes with Dream Lover, one of the better Basic Instinct cash-ins of the early ‘90s. Spader plays a horny and insecure architect who meets an alluring and mysterious woman (Twin Peaks’ Madchen Amick) at a party shortly after his divorce. The two begin a whirlwind affair that leads to marriage. Gradually, though, Spader begins to realise that her backstory doesn’t add up.

More seedy than steamy, this John Carpenter-penned murder mystery doesn’t fit the precise parameters of an erotic thriller, but it exudes a sleazy glamour specific to the 1970s New York art world that makes it feel of a piece with them regardless. A slasher flick dipped in supernatural horror, it stars Faye Dunaway as a fetishistic fashion photographer who begins having terrifying visions of violent killings that turn out to be real. Initially dismissed by critics, the film developed a cult following once it was framed as an American take on Italian giallo. Also starring a young Tommy Lee Jones – yes, he was young once.

In the ’80s, Al Pacino’s career needed a jolt, and he found it in Ellen Barkin, his co-star in this moody procedural about a down-and-out police detective investigating a string of killings linked to personal ads. (Remember those?) A sting operation brings him into contact with Barkin’s suspicious divorcee, and sparks fly, not just in the script but onscreen. Pacino reconnects with his ’70s magnetism, while Barkin proves to be a bridge between the pulpy seductresses of the 1940s and the icy she-wolves of the incoming decade.    

Bob Rafelson’s second movie on this list, after The Postman Always Rings Twice, falls on the trashier end of the spectrum, but his rough-hewn approach keeps it from tripping into camp, making it the sort of worthwhile genre picture you’d stumble across on cable late at night and find yourself strangely drawn to. Debra Winger is a federal agent who begins to notice a pattern among a string of seemingly unconnected dead rich guys. All signs point to veteran ’80s femme fatale Theresa Russell – but the deeper she gets into the case, the further she’s drawn into her, uh, web, so to speak.

Hollywood spent a good chunk of the ’90s chasing the success of Basic Instinct – including some of the folks involved with making the actual Basic Instinct. A year after the Leg Uncrossing Seen ’Round the World, Sharon Stone once again appeared in a slinky, sleazy Joe Eszterhas-penned thriller, this time as a recently divorced book editor enticed into a life of voyeurism by the young stud in her new apartment building (Billy Baldwin). Lightning didn’t exactly strike twice – the most successful element of the film was the soundtrack’s chart-topping Elvis cover by UB40 – but the movie is a bit better than its reputation holds. Baldwin, in particular, is convincing as the slimy yet charming creepo antagonist, while Stone is still at the top of her game, even if the script isn’t totally worthy of her talents. 

Milk isn’t the only thing doing Nicole Kidman’s body good in director Halina Reijn’s exploration of female pleasure and sexual power dynamics. Kidman is the CEO of a robotics company whose repressed desires are brought to the surface by a twentysomething intern, played by Triangle of Sadness hunk Harris Dickinson. What it lacks in violence it makes up for in the suspense of watching a successful woman risk everything she has for carnal satisfaction. Plus, it contains some all-time memeable moments, including the ‘Father Figure’ needle drop and that scene in the bar, which did more for the dairy industry than a thousand milk-moustache ads.

On paper, Barry Levinson’s corporate drama reads like yet another entry in the endless line of ’90s movies where Michael Douglas’s raging libido threatens to upend his life. In this case, he plays an exec at a software company fighting a sexual harassment claim brought against him by his conniving boss, played by Demi Moore. But Disclosure is a hell of a lot weirder than its synopsis impies. The convoluted plot developments involving illegal dealings with the Malaysian government? The absolutely deranged virtual reality climax? A synth score from Ennio Morricone of all people? Sure, there’s only one real sex scene in the whole thing, but most erotic thrillers can only dream of being this bizarre.  

Given the limitations of his day, Alfred Hitchcock could only really explore erotic desire through subtext and innuendo – otherwise, he’d probably have quite a few films on this list. Instead, descendents such as Brian de Palma have taken it upon themselves to remake his films, adding in all the sex and depravity he couldn’t. In the case of A Perfect Murder, it’s ‘90s action mercenary Andrew Davis (The Fugitive) using the basic structure of Dial M for Murder to craft a slick-yet-lurid domestic thriller. Michael Douglas – who else? – plays a cuckolded commodities trader who hires the artist who’s been shagging his wife (Gwyneth Paltrow) to kill her. But the murder goes a bit less than perfect.     

Only the first part of this expertly crafted political potboiler qualifies as erotic, but as a driver of the plot twists to come, the sex is, well, quite driving indeed. On the heels of The Untouchables, Kevin Costner confirmed his leading-man status as a US Navy lieutenant who enters into an affair with a beguiling woman (Sean Young), unaware that she is also the mistress to his superior, played by Gene Hackman. Explaining more would spoil too much, but let’s just say that if you’re going to risk it all and possibly cause an international incident in the process, Young certainly makes it seem worth the trouble.

Made under the nose of Mussolini, and banned upon release, young Luchino Visconti’s take on The Postman Always Rings Twice is, if not the definitive adaptation of James M Cain’s scandalous 1934 novel, then certainly the grittiest. Serving as a precursor to neorealism, it transplants the location from rural California to Italy’s Po Valley, where a drifter (Massimo Girotti) and the wife of a local tavern owner (Clara Calamai) are swept up in a tawdry love affair that eventually leads to a murder plot. Given when and where it was made, it can’t match Bob Rafelson’s 1981 version for pure carnality, but that just makes the heat given off by Girotti and Calamai all the more impressive.  

With a plot revolving around an affair between a high school teacher and his student and a possibly fabricated sexual assault allegation, this unabashedly trashy neo-noir is high on the list of movies that probably wouldn’t get greenlit today. But compared to many post-Basic Instinct erotic thrillers, which aimed for icy stylishness, Wild Things felt refreshingly skeevy, nowhere more than the motel-pool threesome between Matt Dillon, Denise Richards and Neve Campbell which every teenage boy who came of age in the ’90s probably has committed to memory.

There isn’t a ton of ‘sex’ per se in this most curious of Pedro Almodóvar curios, but it is undoubtedly a movie about kink, sexual identity and consent. Identifying the themes is much easier than describing what actually happens, though. The most basic synopsis is that Antonio Banderas plays a plastic surgeon who claims to have invented a synthetic skin more durable than the real deal. Even if we were in a spoiling mood, attempting to explain the bizarre twists contained within this sci-fi mindbender would probably just make us ache in several different places.

The most blasphemous entry on the list goes to Paul Verhoeven, who pricked the Catholic Church something fierce with this fiery piece of nunsploitation. Supposedly based on a historical account of a lesbian love affair in a 17th century Italian convent, Benedetta contains a lot more bonkers stuff going on than the existence of sapphic nuns, but it’s that particular plot point that pissed off religious folks the most and led to protests outside theatres. To be fair, Verhoeven is a bit extra with it – at one point, the title character carves a wooden dildo using a figurine of the Virgin Mary. Who’d expect anything less from the devilish Dutchman?

In the strictest genre terms, Angel Heart isn’t precisely an ‘erotic thriller’ – it’s more a hallucinogenic triangulation of pulpy murder mystery, psychological thriller and occult horror. But it belongs on this list for one reason: the wild, blood-stained sex scene between Mickey Rourke and Lisa Bonet that nearly got the movie slapped with an X rating. It’s the only explicit sexual content in the movie, but its heat radiates outward, rendering the rest of an already fairly depraved exploration of sin, guilt and the literal Christian devil almost pornographic by mere assocation.  

Wondering what happened to sex and violence in movies? Apparently, director Rose Glass was hoarding it all for her sophomore feature. An antidote to the prudishness of 2020s cinema, this ’80s-set noir, about a dangerous dalliance between a bodybuilding drifter and a bored gym manager in small-town New Mexico, is unabashedly lurid. It’s also deeply weird, from the close-ups of audibly bulging muscles to bad-guy Ed Harris’ bug fixation to the utter mindfuck of an ending. At heart, though, it’s still a love story, and an oddly moving one at that: Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian are absolutely mesmerising as mutual bad influences who are nevertheless better for each other than everyone else around them.

Few modern filmmakers are as adroit at (or, frankly, even interested in) capturing the intoxicating promise of sex as François Ozon. And none of his films are as sexy as this one, a movie so erotically charged, you’ll want to throw a bucket of cold water in its face (it had to be recut to avoid being the dreaded NC-17 rating in the US). It follows an English crime writer (Charlotte Rampling) to a villa in the south of France, where she holidays alongside her publisher’s sexpot daughter (Ludivine Sagnier). If you’ve seen La Piscine, you’ll recognise loose parallels in the seductive tale of sex, murder and fantasy that unfolds. The ambiguous ending won’t be for everyone, but it works just fine for us.

In the ’90s, if Michael Douglas didn’t have time for your project, you cast the next best horndog: Tom Berenger. In this wildly ridiculous but still pretty fun psychological thriller, he’s a car-crash survivor with a fully reconstructed face suffering from amnesia, leaving him rife for manipulation from various sexy women and the plot open to a number of implausible twists. Added points for Bob Hoskins as a private detective helping him piece the puzzle of his life back together.

A decade removed from E.T., Drew Barrymore went the pop-star route in declaring herself no longer a little girl – by flaunting her adult sexuality in the most outrageous context possible. In her case, that meant playing a pouty 17-year-old with a troubled past attempting to seduce her new best friend’s dad. Obviously, it’s not exactly the mature coming-out role she may have imagined it being, and it’d be another few years before she’d start being taken seriously as an actor. But she’s certainly convincing in the role, and the film on the whole is self-aware enough to qualify as entertaining trash. 

Paul Schrader’s very loose remake of the 1942 Val Lewton classic is something like a sexy American Werewolf in London, in which two siblings (Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell) share a curse that transforms them into literal bloodthirsty felines when their sexual desires become too enflamed. It sounds silly, but it’s also seriously sensual, owing to Kinski’s smouldering presence, the throbbing Giorgio Moroder score and David Bowie’s great theme song. 

Dennis Quaid is a corrupt but charming New Orleans cop whose colourful nature reflects his hometown. Ellen Barkin is the city’s hot but rigid District Attorney. Opposites attract and all that, and sparks are soon flying. But their blossoming romance is swiftly derailed when they both fall into the crosshairs of a dangerous crime boss. With a script from Beverly Hills Cop writer Daniel Petrie Jr, The Big Easy is a breezy delight, but Quaid and Barkin have a chemistry that makes their love affair genuinely steamy.   

After almost 20 years as the unquestioned king of the erotic thriller, Adrian Lyne went out on top, so to speak, producing one of the genre’s last high-quality major studio entries – at least until he decided to come out of retirement in 2021 with the confoundingly weaksauce Deep Water. A rarely better Diane Lane seems to be slowly dissolving from the inside from the combined effects of both lust and guilt as an upstate New York housewife traveling into the big city to cuckold her boring husband, played by Richard Gere. There are plenty of genuinely steamy sex scenes between Lane and her hunky French artist beau (Olivier Martinez), but the hottest moment is simply the image of Lane, riding the train back home after a tryst, looking flushed with sinful desire.

‘Hitchcock but make it sleazy’ was Brian De Palma’s modus operandi in the 1980s, and nothing he made was more lascivious than this psychosexual mash-up of Rear Window and Vertigo. A voyeuristic actor (Craig Wasson) grows obsessed with the erotic dancer he watches from his window every night – and when she turns up dead, it leads him down the darkest corridors of the LA adult film industry. As he’s known to do, De Palma elevates the scuzz with high style, exemplified by the ‘porn movie within the movie within a music video’ sequence, soundtracked by Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

An update of Dangerous Liaisons for teenage millennials, Cruel Intentions plays like a precursor to those YA-oriented TV dramas that take themselves so seriously they end up unintentionally hilarious. Only here, the humour is a bit more knowing. Transposing Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ novel to a New York prep school, everyone is young, rich, beautiful, ridiculously named and a total asshole, with step-siblings Kathryn Merteuil (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Sebastian Valmont (Ryan Phillippe) being the most superlative in each category. Sebastian wants to bang Kathryn, and to do so, he must first deflower angelic virgin Reese Witherspoon. Hijinks ensue… dangerous hijinks.

The most sexually explicit film on this list, Alain Guiraudie’s much-praised queer thriller truly puts the ‘cock’ into ‘Hitchcockian’. The setting – a nudist lake in Provence shaded by pine trees – is a playground for relaxation, cruising and murder, as the buff Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) falls under the spell of killer Michel (Christophe Paou). It’s that same combustible crossover of sex and death that powers all the best films in this genre. Still, surely only a French film would be unafraid to suggest that sex might just be worth getting killed for. 

Before being cuckolded by Diane Lane in Unfaithful, Richard Gere’s breakout role had him doing the cuckolding as a high-end escort who gets involved with a politician’s wife and then mixed up in a murder plot. Hollywood had dealt with movies about male sex workers before, of course – namely Midnight Cowboy – but director Paul Schrader brings a lavish sheen to the proceedings that manages to capture the vibe of the ’80s when the decade had barely started. Gere also famously goes full-frontal, in one of the first instances of male nudity in a major studio film.

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 novel about the sexual gamesmanship of the rich and amoral received its best cinematic adaptation from Stephen Frears, the famously talky English director who truly seemed to understand the book’s biting wit better than any of the other previous attempts. Glenn Close and John Malkovich, as the borderline sociopathic aristocrats Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont, volley screenwriter Christopher Hampton’s stinging dialogue around like a shuttlecock, as the former lovers enter into a wager with some truly, ahem, cruel intentions.

Park Chan-wook’s best film to date is an ornate puzzle box of a thriller that’s unafraid to end on a gratuitously erotic note, presumably to reward the guy with sweaty hands at the back of the cinema for working his way through all the twists and turns. The gossamer touch with which Park and co-writer Jeong Seo-kyeong transplant Sarah Waters’s novel, ‘Fingersmith’, from Victorian England to Japanese-ruled Korea is matched only by its endlessly gripping, wildly stylish long-con storyline. Even the production design is ridiculously sexy. 

In a mirror-universe version of the ‘90s, Linda Fiorentino is the decade’s defining femme fatale – a Sharon Stone for gentlemen who prefer brunettes. Heck, it probably would have happened in this universe, if cable television had the prestige back then that it does today. Initially debuting on HBO, critics expected cheap softcore trash and instead got a smart, sexy neo-noir, led by a beguiling and darkly funny performance from Fiorentino as a telemarketer-turned-criminal-sexpot. Critics pushed for her to receive an Oscar nomination, but the movie was deemed ineligible due to having premiered on TV. It’ll still surprise anyone who seeks it out as one of the erotic thriller genre’s true standouts.

A cold shower is almost essential after watching Jacques Deray’s Gallic thirst trap, loosely remade as A Bigger Splash with less sexy results.It’s warmed by the Sirocco and the megawatt sex appeal of its ludricously good-looking cast, as Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, Maurice Ronet and Jane Birkin exchange sultry vibes by the pool of a Riviera villa. It’s all fun and games until someone gets horribly drowned in the pool. There’s no mystery over the murderer here – La Piscine is altogether too hot to bother keeping you guessing – but it’s all about the undercurrents: the way libidos and egos clash and catch fire under the Mediterranean sun.

Never leave your bored wife at home with Jack Nicholson. Just one of the takeaways from a sexed-up redo of James M Cain’s ’30s potboiler that leans right into the tawdry mood of its source material (once the subject of an obscenity trial). It unites Nicholson with Jessica Lange as a Depression-era drifter and the discontented wife of a Greek roadside diner owner, in a tryst that’s first adulterous, then murderous. It’s a thriller in which consent isn’t always obvious – the affair is consummated in a kitchen table in something that initially plays perilously close to rape – and moral bankruptcy seeps from its every pore. An early erotic thriller, it’s the bad dad of the genre: even the same year’s Body Heat, another riff on the Cain novel, can’t match it for its sheer, libidinous badness.

More of a sexually-charged noir than an ‘erotic thriller’ per se, the Wachowskis’ pre-Matrix debut is nonetheless more erotic and thrilling than many of them. Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly nearly melt the screen as lesbian lovers looking to defraud the latter’s gangster boyfriend, played by Joe Pantoliano. The sex scenes deftly thread the needle between titillation and realism – the directors even hired a sex educator to choreograph them, and the end result is not exploitative yet still molten hot.

It’s the erotic thriller that didn’t precisely start it all but did manage to codify many of its tropes. Michael Douglas is a lawyer with a seemingly happy home life that just can’t help but have a tryst with Glenn Close’s wild-haired book editor, who turns out to be, let’s say, a bit clingy. Debates persist over whether the film (and indeed director Adrian Lyne’s entire milieu) is misogynist or if there’s a feminist message buried within the histrionic screenplay. In any case, few of the movies that arrived in its wake can claim to provoke such a visceral reaction – and that’s even beyond the whole bunny-boiling bit. 

Paul Verhoeven’s sleazebag classic doesn’t get enough credit as one of the more influential films of all-time, probably because the world would be better off without many of the movies it inspired. But that just tells you how good Basic Instinct really is – lurid and stylish in equal balance, shockingly violent while also being genuinely hot, it hits an equilibrium few in the genre ever attain. Of course, not every erotic thriller has prime Sharon Stone, whose casting as novelist-slash-suspected icepick murderer Catherine Trammel is as close to perfect as the movies ever get.

William Hurt’s sleazebag Florida lawyer, Ned Racine, is the hapless dupe to Kathleen Turner’s rich, unhappily married beauty in this sweaty genre high-water mark. Turner’s manipulative bombshell, Matty Walker, is so many steps ahead of her outmatched lover – and just about everyone else in Florida – that there’s moments when you practically feel her pausing to let them all catch up a bit. The sex, of which there’s a lot, is relentless in a way that even has poor Racine complaining about the state of his neds at one point (get some more ice on there, mate). But it’s always in service to a noirish plot that director Lawrence Kasdan marshals with supreme discipline as he charts two genuinely terrible people jettisoning their morals, professionalism, pants… the lot.