If Valentine’s day is all about red roses and romantic comedies, we’re not about to yuck your yum. But sometimes you need to put down the copy of Notting Hill and seek out something that will get your pulses racing in a different way.
These horror flics and erotic thrillers make ideal alternative viewing on Valentine’s Day, or any date night (as long as your boo can stomach something unsettling).
Here are 10 of the best sexy horror films and horrid sex films:
Shivers (1975)
Director David Cronenberg’s back catalogue is an orgy of body horror, so you can’t really go wrong. But Shivers is the perfect mix of sex and supernatural violence. Residents of Starliner Towers in Montreal have a bad/good time when a rogue doctor’s horrible experiment gets loose. These rather phallic parasites ooze their way into people’s orifices and cause them to become raging nymphomaniac sex zombies. Soon the apartment complex descends into an orgy of rape and murder. As the director himself said in Cronenburg on Cronenburg: “With Shivers I’m a venereal disease having the greatest time of my life and encouraging everybody to get into it.”
Wild at Heart (1986)
RIP David Lynch, no one did surreal erotic thrillers like you. Again, you can’t really go wrong with anything Lynchian, but Wild at Heart truly, well, f***s. Nicholas Cage and Launa Dern play hot criminals on the run in a caper that’s full of sex, speed metal, and shotguns. One of the torture scenes was originally so graphic that hundreds of people walked out during test screenings. Lynch cut it down, and Wild at Heart went on to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Fun fact: Cage’s iconic snakeskin jacket in the film was handpicked by the actor himself.
The Love Witch (2016)
What’s a love addicted modern witch to do? Samantha Robinson stars as Elaine Parks, the titular love witch whose potions might be a little too potent. It’s a slyly feminist take on gender roles in romance and horror, with a high body count (both sexual and the other way; it doesn’t end well for the witch’s conquests). It’s a riot of technicolour that brings Sixties aesthetics into the present day, all shot on 35mm film by director/producer/editor Anna Biller. Expect lashings of blood, spells and tarot.
Betty Blue (1986)
“We screwed every night. The forecast was for storms.” No one does erotic thrillers like the French. Directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix, Betty Blue follows the passionate affair between wannabe thirty-something writer Zorg and Betty, a 19-year-old young woman whose tendency to get a bit stabby with a fork belies a serious mental instability. The sex may be steamy, but she will also set your beach shack on fire. One to watch with your most frustrating situationship.
Secretary (2002)
If someone tries to get you to watch Fifty Shades of anything you should probably dump them, but if you’re truly down bad for your BDSM-curious bae then try converting them with Secretary from director Steven Shainberg. Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Lee, fresh out of the mental hospital for her self-harming tendencies. She finds a strange kind of soothing by accidentally entering into a dominant/submissive relationship as the secretary to stern lawyer James Spader, and the two of them run the kinky gamut from petplay to piss. Bonus points if you deliver your V-day card by mouth while crawling on your knees.
Nosferatu (2024)
Director Robert Eggers probably didn’t expect his audience to get so hot and bothered for Count Orlok, the “scary, smell corpse” of an evil ancient vampire with a penchant for hair-sniffing and plague-bringing. But that’s what happens when you cast Bill Skarsgård under all those prosthetics. Lily Rose-Depp and Nicholas Holt also deliver a delicious freak-for-freak romance in this pretty terrifying take on the Dracula canon. Featuring rats, horny night terrors, and things that go bump in the night.
The Witches of Eastwick (1987)
Sometimes all the men in your area are so boring you unwittingly summon the devil himself. Or at least, that’s the premise of The Witches of Eastwick, George Miller’s high camp adaptation of John Updike’s novel. Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Susan Sarandon play the three titular witches who take turns to be seduced by horny handsome stranger Daryl Van Horne, played (of course) by Jack Nicholson. What stats as hot sex and levitation quickly escalates to the entire town descending into chaos. But getting rid of the devil you know carnally is harder than you might think.
Bones and All (2022)
Cannibalism, hot or not? Your mileage may vary, but Bones and All is a gore-fest take on the lovers-on-the-run genre from Luca Guadagnino (the mind behind the infamous peach scene in his film Call Me By Your Name). Young cannibal Maren (Taylor Russell) is left to fend for herself after snacking on a girl’s finger at a sleepover gone wrong. After a brush with an unsettling encounter with a fellow “eater” named Sully (Mark Rylance) she strikes up a relationship with Lee (Timothée Chalamet), another cannibal. Can they find normal lives together, or will a bone-crunching hunger catch up with them? One to watch after you’ve tucked into a romantic dinner.
Nine 1/2 Weeks
In Adrian Lyne’s deeply messed up X-rated romantic drama, Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke play a pair of New Yorkers whose sadomasochistic sex games escalate into petty crime. Based on a scandalous memoir by Ingeborg Day, it follows a violent short-lived affair between an art gallery owner and a Wall Street broker. By all accounts it was not a happy set, with Lyne terrorising Basinger on set to produce real fear in some of the ickier scenes. Still, it’s a cult classic for a reason.
Color of Night (1994)
If you won’t consider dating someone until they’ve gone to therapy, Color of Night may make you reconsider your red flags. Bruce Willis plays Dr. Bill Capa, a psychologist who can’t escape people around him dying (or see the colour red, thanks to some handy plot-induced psychosomatic colour blindness). He takes over his murdered friend’s group therapy session to try and hunt down the killer, while engaging in a steamy affair with Rose (Jane March). It’s a completely bonkers box office bomb, but it did win the award for Best Sex Scene in cinematic history from Maxim magazine – something director Richard Rush was so tickled by he kept the trophy in his bathroom.
