Body Horror

Revisiting the erotic thriller. 

By Neda Ravandi

Illustration by Justin Chen

In July I was obsessed with James Spader. Houston heat meant long, sun-soaked afternoons, which I’d spend on my bed, laptop open to a sketchy movie site when the humidity got too unbearable for tanning by the pool. So, my Halloween began in the summer, when I watched David Cronenberg’s Crash, a decision prompted not by an interest in cars or stomach-churning violence, but more so James Spader. After Crash came Dream Lover, then Sex, Lies, and Videotape, and slowly but surely I made my way through the bulk of his filmography—at least, the ones where his hair was still around. 

In an essay for Bright Wall/Dark Room, Veronica Fitzpatrick calls Spader the “Prince of Darkness.” He is the ultimate bad boy—“tortured, even, but decent,” though the traits that secured Spader’s role in Fitzpatrick’s “libidinal theater” manifest themselves more so in his films on a whole. These films came to represent the face of a genre in America’s "libidinal theater” that lived for a relatively brief, though intense, period of time: the erotic thriller. They rose to popularity with Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction in 1987: Starring Michael Douglas and Glenn Close, Lyne’s picture was the second-highest grossing American movie that year, and spurred a host of similarly popular films like Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct and Cronenberg’s Crash. 

The rise of home video and the internet after it—specifically, the continuous birth of innovations like cable TV, the mobile phone, and the inception of the World Wide Web—nurtured the burgeoning genre. A time of technological experimentation meant experimentation on film, with directors like Cronenberg examining the intersection of the body and technology. Ten minutes and several brief sex scenes into Crash, James Ballard (James Spader) crashes his Lincoln Continental at midnight, careening headfirst into another car on a rainy backroad and sending its driver straight through his windshield. Inside Ballard’s car, the man’s breath peters out as the woman in the other car stares at Ballard through spiderwebbed glass and opens her jacket to expose her chest. They watch each other. It is silent, save for the rain. The next scene is an up-close shot of Ballard’s hairy, battered leg, replete with steel pins and set with an archaic sort of metal brace. The camera creeps slowly up his body, forcing an audience upon its blue-green bruises and haphazard stitching. The sequence is hard to stomach, but it feels as if the point is to be a bit uncomfortable. Erotic thrillers as a genre impelled a reckoning with the body as something both grotesque and desirable. Look at what is human, they say. Look at it with pleasure and with horror, and do not look away. 

We plateaued at the burst of the dot-com bubble: Apple reigns supreme, selling us a reinvented version of the same six products every other year, creating new permutations of color, charger-plug-insert, and off-button location. The same procedural social media experience—post a clip, like a clip, share a clip—has materialized like rampant weeds across a multitude of apps. Today we consume, at a ferocious rate, what we take comfort in: rewatching minute clips of shows we’ve seen, wearing clothes inspired by online approximations of decades long-gone, turning experiences into aesthetics to be captured and stored away until we can pull them out of our saved videos when we grow nostalgic again. 

These bizarre, uncomfortable, and often grotesque erotic thrillers have largely died out, but this shift is intimately tied to our media habits at large. Flooding our lives with short-form, regurgitated content inhibits tendencies towards experimentation; it cauterizes creativity. That fascination with newness is what’s missing from the media of today, and my summer of James Spader was an overdue reminder. 

It’s October. Outside my dorm window the sky is pitch-black, wind beats itself against the pane, and everything tilts towards the ominous. Watch something long-lasting. Lean into your discomfort. Don’t be afraid to feel.