[REVIEW] Overlook Film Festival: We Kill For Love— The Lost World of the Erotic Thriller
If you’re a 30-something person, you might remember being young and curious, parents having gone off to bed, and you are just lucky enough to have a television set in your room (or they’ve allowed you to stay up just a tad bit longer in the living room by yourself). You wait. And wait. And wait, making sure that all is quiet before you turn to that infamous channel and dare to peek at the films that you know you’re not supposed to watch after a specific time. But you just can’t seem to help yourself. You watch in amazement, with some semblance of admiration of what will later be described as desire and slight horror due to the nature of the plot: a woman has been murdered, and a detective has been hired to investigate but as soon as the private investigator gets too close to the answer, a dangerous woman gets involved. She seduces the investigator, and all the answers seem to no longer matter, but in a twist, the investigator finally plays their last hand and the dangerous woman is caught and put away. In between the bloody murderous story, there are some incredibly steamy and passionate scenes that seem to confuse but fascinate you. Danger intermingled with the sexy.
You’ve just fallen into the world of erotic thrillers, unbeknownst to your young and burgeoning mind. Hooked, you take in as many films as you can before you’re caught, and the channel barred from your eyes.
Written, produced, and directed by Anthony Penta with Michael Reed playing the enthralled Archivist taking in the many films of the genre, We Kill For Love is an expertly explorative look into the world of the subgenre that ruled the 80s into the 90s until meeting its end in the mid-2000s. They were heavily influenced by film noir and gothic romance. Then an addition of terror was added to the mix, thrilling audiences. Erotic thrillers also helped the direct-to-video market that had built-in audiences already due to studios creating content strictly for video starting in the 1970s thanks in large part to horror films being in demand (here’s looking at you John Carpenter’s Halloween for helping with this). With its ability to both intrigue and titillate its audience, erotic thrillers were churned out en masse with budgets that weren’t quite as large as the bigger studios were able to secure, but they created stories with gorgeous characters living lives of excess–including, but not limited to scandals and murders.
They made stars out of women such as Shannon Tweed and Julie Strain, to name a few from the obscure side of the genre, to Sharon Stone and Glenn Close from the bigger studio films. Michael Douglas and Mickey Rourke were the leading men in the most prominent erotic thrillers on the big screen while you had Andrew Stevens in the smaller, direct-to-video films. However, if they were not on the big screen, they were considered just erotica, and not treated the same or considered art.
Through the years that erotic thrillers held their sway, they steamed up mom-and-pop video stores and then made their way onto cable networks on television, only coming on late in the evening for adult enjoyment. If they were not Basic Instinct or Fatal Attraction, they were not seen as mainstream. They were considered more “smut” than cinema, but were wildly successful all the same and held their audience captive until the market for erotic thrillers became too saturated. The downfall of erotic thrillers came soon after the quality of the storylines declined, leaving only room for getting right to the simulated intercourse and cheapened overacted murders. Plots were thrown out in favor of skin being exposed almost right away. Then came the closure of those mom-and-pop video stores that gave audiences a plethora of erotic thrillers to rent, DVDs coming into play where you can buy a few to own instead of renting plenty of tapes that you’d have to return.
It was the end of an era.
The world of erotic thrillers seemed both dangerous and exciting, sexy and thrilling. With the collection of contributors to the genre such as Jim Wynorski and Fred Olen Ray, and film stars Monique Parent, Amy Lindsay, and Kira Reed Lorsch with film scholars Linda Ruth Williams and Abbey Bender to examine the subgenre at length, this documentary was insightful and honest. It gave erotic thrillers their proper acknowledgment and left an impression of admiration for a genre that captivated an audience for many years. Although they have waned, they have left their mark on the world of cinema.
We Kill For Love premiered at the 2023 Overlook Film Festival on April 1st.
