Adam Page on the erotic horror renaissance of the 90s…
Look, sitting here in front of this keyboard, I can’t pretend it wasn’t a weird time. The decade of the 90s was a lot of things: flannel, teen angst, the inexplicable popularity of acid washed jeans. But somewhere between the Berlin Wall being torn down and the internet rising to its massive heights, American cinema found something that would make the late, great Roger Corman weep with unashamed pride. Softcore pornography could be sold to lonely insomniacs as long as you added a vampire. Or a succubus. Literally any creature that provided you a level of plausible deniability.
It wasn’t high art. There was nobody confusing these straight-to-video delights with the work of Bergman, for instance. But it was a uniquely American phenomenon that crawled out of the primordial goo of late-night cable. A magnificent and silicone-enhanced Creature from the Black Lagoon. It was all of our id, wrapped up in horrific special effects and brought to us at 2am, when the rest of respectable society was still asleep.
How this golden age of schlock came about reads like a recipe for cultural disaster. First came the home video revolution. With VHS, it had democratised movie distribution in a way that would have been unthinkable only a decade before. All of a sudden, it seemed as though every gas station and corner shop had a special “back room”, a beaded curtain hiding the entrance and every teenage boy knew what lay just beyond.
Then along came cable. Not HBO or Showtime, not what your parents had paid for. Cinemax had arrived. Dubbed “Skinemax” by a generation of pimply adolescents who found out that those scrambled images could be un-scrambled if you hit that cable box at just the right spot. Along with the Playboy Channel, which your friend’s older brothers’ friend had un-scrambled.
Added to this was the collapse of the B-Movie studio apparatus. The bigger studios had by this point pretty much abandoned the exploitation movies and a vacuum had been left. And we all know nature abhors a vacuum. So did the spiritual successors of Roger Corman, working at production companies with names like New Horizons, Trimark Pictures and Full Moon Entertainment.
And what was the result? A production feeding frenzy, one that treated movie making like sausage making, if that sausage factory had been filled with people brought up on too much Fangoria and Penthouse Forum.
The beauty of these movies lay in how brutally efficient they were. They understood the crucial thing about their audience: nobody was watching for the plot. But, and this is the crucial point, they needed some sort of plot. Just a little, enough to make it feel like you weren’t just watching softcore porn. The demon, the vampire, even the alien, these were the Trojan Horse of the narrative. A structural permission, if you will.
“This isn’t porn” you could tell yourself. “I’m watching a horror flick. That just coincidentally happens to have a lot of nudity. Artistic reasons. Crucial to the plot. The vampire has to seduce her victims.”
Sure. And I’m watching all these now for “research”.
The formula was pretty simple. You needed a supernatural being or a creature whose very nature needed a lot of graphic situations. Vampires were perfect because they needed to get intimate with their chosen victim. Succubae? Even better. The little green men who were conducting breeding experiments? Well, you get the idea.
There should be at least three of these encounter scenes, spaced carefully through the runtime, just long enough to justify the existence of a script. A detective investigating the mysterious deaths, or the poor artist who moves into the conveniently priced apartment with a dark history.
The monster absolutely always targets beautiful women in varying states of undress. Now and then a B-list actor would be added for credibility. Someone who once starred in a real movie and now whose agent took whatever call came. Andrew Stevens. Shannon Whirry. Julie Strain. Brando’s of late-night cable, who would deliver a performance that suggested they were having a great time or in desperate need of a paycheque. More than likely both.
Let’s discuss the directors, because buried to the neck in all this sexploitation were actual moviemakers. People who understood that even trash could be sculpted with a certain demented artistic touch.
The patron saint of this might just be Jim Wynorski. Here is a man who directed a movie called The Bare Wench Project (2000) for crying out loud. But he also knew pacing, and how to light a scene on a budget that wouldn’t cover craft services on most movies. He could coax out a performance from someone whose only talent was disrobing on camera. Fred Olen Ray was another of these men in the trenches. He could shoot a movie in 5 days and make it look like it took at least 6. He made Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers (1988), and it became a cult favourite because it knew precisely what it was and leaned into its absurdity with glee.
These people weren’t Stanley Kubrick or Martin Scorsese. They were working moviemakers, pumping out products in a business that wants results, and not excuses. They knew their audience more than a suit-wearing executive in a corner office did. They knew that at 2am on a Friday night, there was a core group who wanted what they were selling. And that was mayhem, monsters and mammaries.
But what’s easy to forget is that at the time, this stuff was everywhere. It wasn’t some weird fringe movement stuck in a grindhouse in Times Square. It was mainstream cable TV. It was in your video store, right there alongside the new releases, covers showing a woman in torn clothes running from some vague monster.
Back in the 90s, it was really the last gasp of the pre-online sexual furtiveness. Yes there was porn around, but you had to go to effort to get it. Make eye contact with the weirdo across the counter. There was a kind of shame involved along with the cost of the transaction. These hybrids of horror and eroticism offered a middle ground. Something you could, in theory anyway, watch with your girlfriend. If your girlfriend was very drunk or understanding. Or both.
They were also of the era’s sexual politics, in ways which are now fascinating and uncomfortable to examine too deeply. The women in these movies were objects of either terror or desire. And usually both. The whole “pleasure and pain” aspect in horror has always had those psychosexual undertones, but these films brought that subtext up into regular text, then took a highlighter to it.
The vampires were almost always female, feeding on men with the mixture of beauty and violence like some weird adolescent fever dream. The monsters were usually defeated, but not until they had their way with half the cast. It was our id made solid, our teenage sexual fears and fantasies all up there on screen in their grainy and over-saturated colour.
However, some of these movies rose above their grimy origins and became real cultural artifacts. Roger Donaldson’s 1995 Species, with a Giger designed alien and pretty well-respected A-list cast brought erotic horror to regular cinemas. Natasha Henstridge slithered out of her cocoon and made her way across L.A, seducing and killing with equal joy. It made $113 million worldwide, and someone at MGM got a nice bonus.
Gilbert Adler’s Bordello of Blood in 1996 tried its best to bring back the Tales From the Crypt franchise with a story about vampire prostitutes. It starred Corey Feldman and Angie Everhart’s delightful red hair. It was terrible. But it definitely had a certain something.
Straight-to-video movies like 1995’s Embrace of the Vampire starred Alyssa Milano in a role clearly designed for her to shed her sweet image from “Who’s the Boss?” by shedding literally everything else. It went on to become one of the biggest-selling straight-to-video movies of that year. For whatever reason.
There was a multitude of others, a veritable tsunami that all blur together in memories of that time: The Vampires of Sorority Row (1999), Bikini Drive-In (1995), Sorceress (1995) and the brilliantly titled Body Chemistry 4: Full Exposure (1995). Yes, there were indeed 4 Body Chemistry movies. Truly a different time.
What’s really hard to explain to people who didn’t live through this? The movies looked like shit. Even by the lower standards of the time, the production values were often terrible. Special effects that wouldn’t have been used on Xena: Warrior Princess. Lighting that made us think the cinematographer learned their trade from a manual written in Esperanto. Acting that made actual porn performers look like graduates from RADA. But that was all a part of what made it so appealing. Its cheapness, the obvious trickery created a winking conspiracy between the moviemakers and the audience. Nobody was fooled. It was exploitation and we all knew it. It was honest about its dishonesty.
Even the monsters themselves were brilliantly unconvincing. There were rubber suits and inexpensive prosthetics. CGI was in the infancy back then, and nobody wanted to use it as it was so expensive and usually looked worse than the practical effects. But then again, nobody was watching for the monster. The monster was an excuse, a permission slip.
The internet killed this industry model faster than any Van Helsing ever could. Why would you ever wait up until 2am hoping to catch a glimpse of scrambled Cinemax sex when you could download as much porn as your hard drive could cope with? The crucial plausible deniability aspect had become totally unnecessary. Blockbuster and Hollywood Video disappeared, and the beaded curtains at the back of those stores came down. Any barriers to accessing explicit content disappeared and the horror/erotic hybrid no longer had a reason to exist. The audience had hooked into more efficient delivery systems.
The straight-to-video market didn’t vanish entirely, it moved into the straight-to-streaming arena. But something is lost in the translation. The newer stuff is slick and self-aware. Also less interesting. It knows it’s a joke and that knowledge is toxic to the form. In the 90s, those versions were earnest in their sleaze. They actually were trying to tell a story, even if that story was just an excuse to get to the next softcore scene.
And so what do we make of all this today? These movies are just cultural detritus, forgotten step kids of cinematic history. They won’t be taught in film school or released on the Criterion Collection. But they represent something very American: packaging violence and sex onto a product, stick a monster in it and sell it by the millions. It’s capitalism and carnality, gratification and guilt all wrapped up in 90 minutes of awful moviemaking.
But also, they show us a moment in time that can’t be replicated. The cultural context, and technological limitations. The exact configuration of desire and shame that made these movies possible is all gone. You can’t go to the video store at midnight because its not there anymore. Or stay up late hoping for Skinemax to deliver because who watches cable anymore?
In their trashy and exploitative way, these movies were the last hurrah of a particular kind of American sexual repression. Puritanism and desire had found a compromise. “It’s horror, not porn.” You watched them when you wanted something, but couldn’t quite admit what it was… And despite everything, they were occasionally sort of fun.
I’m sure not saying these movies were good. You’ll get no argument for their inclusion in the pantheon of American cinema from me. But they were there, they had an audience, and they can tell us something about who we were in that weird time between the Cold War and 9/11. In between analogue and digital, video stores and digital media.
They were trash, but dammit they were our trash. 2am on a Friday night, sneaking some beer, they were exactly what a huge portion of the population wanted to watch.
The renaissance of the erotic horror of the 90s is dead. Long live the renaissance of the erotic horror of the 90s.
Now do excuse me. I need to take a shower. A long, cold one.
What are your memories of 90s erotic horror? Let us know on our social channels @FlickeringMyth…
Adam Page
