10 great erotic horror films

Desire and destruction have long shared a pulse. Drawing on the Greek concepts of Eros and Thanatos, Freud framed it as two intertwined drives: one towards life, the other towards death. French thinker Georges Bataille took it further, seeing their meeting as an ecstatic threshold where life burns brightest at the edge of its own annihilation.

It’s a paradox that has captivated artists for centuries. In Paris’s Grand Guignol theatre, gaudy spectacles of mutilation explored the erotically charged tension between sex and violence, foreshadowing cinema’s appetite for transgression. Decades later, filmmakers like David Cronenberg, Clive Barker, Claire Denis and Julia Ducournau would inherit that impulse, exploring what it means to inhabit (and occasionally ingest) flesh. 

Meanwhile, Japan’s ero-guro-nansensu movement shared the same fixation, blending eroticism with deformity. The 1936 case of Sada Abe – who killed and castrated her lover in an act of obsessive devotion – distilled the Eros-Thanatos paradox in its rawest form. The story inspired several of Japan’s New Wave filmmakers, notably Nagisa Oshima, whose controversial dramatisation, In the Realm of the Senses (1976), remains censored in its home country to this day. 

By the post-war decades, horror had absorbed the psychological anxieties of Freud’s century. Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942) linked repressed sexuality to monstrosity, while the Hammer films and the baroque excesses of Vampyros Lesbos (1971), Fascination (1979) and The Hunger (1983) gave the genre its decadent surface. The vampire’s bite – penetrating, fatal, rapturous – became a perfect emblem of the Eros-Thanatos dance. Unsurprisingly, this figure appears obsessively across the genre. 

For variety’s sake, this list includes only a handful of vampire films. It also omits those where sex merely decorates the horror (Cemetery Man, 1994; Thirst, 2009) and erotic thrillers, which flirt with Thanatos but ultimately recoil. True erotic horror crosses that threshold, collapsing the boundary between the will to live and the compulsion to be undone.

Director: Jacques Tourneur

Cat People was greenlit largely because RKO executives liked the schlocky title. Producer Val Lewton then built an elegant film around it, swapping monsters for melancholia and psychological unease. 

At its centre is Irena, a Serbian émigrée (Simone Simon, chosen for her “little kitten face”) who fears she’ll transform into a panther if she yields to desire. Here, sex is all subtext: desire diverted into the dread of literally tearing chunks off a lover. In this sense, Cat People is an early blueprint for the psychosexual horror that later films would confront more directly. For those who don’t have the stomach for gore, it’s an ideal entry point. 

With almost no on-screen violence, the film proved that suggestion could be more frightening – and in many ways, more erotic – than any special effect. Its expressionistic shadows and precise editing, notably the ‘Lewton Bus’ sequence (often cited as cinema’s first major jump scare), redefined how filmmakers evoke fear. It went on to influence dozens of directors, including Martin Scorsese, who showed it to his cast to prepare them for his 2010 thriller Shutter Island.

Director: Mario Bava

When The Whip and the Body premiered in Italy in 1963, it was seized for obscenity despite containing no sex or nudity – its sadomasochistic overtones were deemed “contrary to morality”. The story’s S&M edge is, in fact, used relatively sparingly, and the film’s brooding atmosphere of forbidden desire is all the better for it. It feels less exploitative today than slightly sad: a gothic tale of doomed love collapsing into compulsion.

The story follows sadistic nobleman Kurt Menliff (Christopher Lee), who rekindles his affair with his brother’s new wife, the masochistic Nevenka (Daliah Lavi). Lee was already a horror-film heartthrob thanks to his turn as the seductive Count Dracula in the Hammer series – dressed head-to-toe in black, he treads a similar path here. Shot in rich, bruised colours and heavy shadow, it’s a prime example of Mario Bava’s vivid visual style, and along with Blood and Black Lace (1964) would go on to inspire the kaleidoscopic calling card of later giallo auteurs, notably Dario Argento. 

Director: Harry Kümel

Many lesbian vampire films of the 1970s found their erotic appeal in nudity. Alongside it, there was often a hypocritical moralism that ultimately destroyed the corrupting vampire – after flaunting her nakedness, of course. Harry Kümel’s take on the Countess Báthory legend replaces fleshly excess with fetishistic allure, abstracting eroticism to ravishing accoutrement: PVC boots, glistening red nails and painted lips are alluring, but ultimately deflective and impenetrable as armour.

It’s set in a near-empty Belgian hotel in winter, all twilight evenings and faded grandeur. A brittle young couple arrive, followed by the mysterious Elizabeth Báthory (Delphine Seyrig) and her companion (Andrea Rau). The countess’s poise is so chilly it’s impossible to imagine a beating heart beneath those fabulous gowns. As innocuous as quicksand, she exerts her pull: the more her victims struggle, the more she draws them into her silken oblivion. The result is erotically charged but detached – desire stripped of warmth; familiar, yet eerily anachronistic and deeply lonely. 

Director: Walerian Borowczyk

In a decaying French estate, a marriage of convenience gives way to dreams of feral desire, as the bride-to-be imagines herself pursued – and possessed – by a monstrous creature lurking in the woods. The film shifts between bourgeois farce and primal hallucination, dissolving the thin border between civility and instinct until only carnality remains. 

On-screen erections were banned in most of Europe until the mid-1970s, so having a mythical beast with a large, fully functional prosthesis was essentially Walerian Borowczyk’s horny workaround. The infamous ‘dream’ sequence (no peeking before you watch the film) is equal parts sexy and hilarious – and what a refreshing change from so much po-faced erotica (and porn, for that matter). Once reviled for its explicitness, it is now hailed as Borowczyk’s masterpiece, a film that paved the way for other teratophilic fantasies, including Possession (1981) and The Untamed (2016).

Director: Nagisa Oshima

In May 1936, Sada Abe, a geisha and prostitute, strangled her lover, then cut off his penis and carried it around Tokyo tucked into her kimono. The sex scandal caused a national sensation, fascinating a public exhausted by depressing political and military reportage. It also inspired countless artists, especially those who were part of Japan’s then-popular ero-guro movement, which turned Abe into something of a muse and poster girl for political resistance.

Provocateur Nagisa Oshima doesn’t shy away from the realities of this story, offering a faithful depiction of events. As the lovers (Eiko Matsuda and Tatsuya Fuji) retreat from the outside world into an ever-tightening circle of pleasure, their quest for complete sexual unity becomes a kind of resistance against society, imperialist Japan, and the limitations of flesh itself. As with real life events, their desire proves incompatible with the conditions under which it exists, and ecstasy inevitably slips into annihilation. 

Director: Jean Rollin

Choosing just one erotic horror from Jean Rollin’s extensive back catalogue is no easy task. The man loves vampires, lesbians and lesbian vampires – and why shouldn’t he? His passions have proved an effective vehicle for his unique brand of art-erotica, which is filled with gorgeous women, lavish costumes and sometimes gory violence. 

Fascination is the most well-known of his sapphic vampire tales. It follows a cocky thief who hides out in a crumbling chateau, only to have his gun-wielding advantage reversed by two maids who belong to a bloodsucking coven. While its most enduring image is a scythe-wielding Brigitte Lahaie as a beautiful angel of death, it’s also notable for Rollin’s other sometimes overlooked hallmark: a pervasive mood of dreamy melancholia. His static camera dedicates as much attention to the wind howling through crumbling parapets and barren, autumnal fields as it does its bodacious stars. At times, his elliptical storytelling and vast, empty landscapes have more in common with Michelangelo Antonioni than any skin-flick provocateur.

Director: Jörg Buttgereit

Hailed by John Waters as “the first ever erotic film for necrophiliacs”, this was the debut feature of Jörg Buttgereit – a film so transgressive it remains banned in several countries due to “revolting, objectionable content”. It’s a fair cop. The film is essentially a chamber piece that follows Robert (Bernd Daktari Lorenz), a Berlin cleaner of accident scenes, who secretly takes home a corpse for him and his girlfriend Betty (Beatrice Manowski) to enjoy. Cue scenes that will have even the most hardened horror fans squirming, complemented by a jarringly schmaltzy soundtrack that takes the queasiness up a notch. 

Shot on Super 8 and looking like it’s decomposing as it plays, Nekromantik fuses splatter, pornography and dark humour into a kind of punk allegory about love and death. Its homemade energy only adds to its grubbiness. Shots of an innocuous apartment exterior contrast with the lovers’ dank apartment, which is part shrine, part laboratory, filled with jars of viscera and a corpse pegged to the wall – later replaced by a greasy stain after Betty makes off with the stiff (no pun intended). You’ll want a hot shower after this – and hopefully not have cause for a cold one. 

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola’s grand guignol romp is over the top in the best possible way. Made with old-school, in-camera tricks and crowned by Eiko Ishioka’s Oscar-winning costumes, the story of Dracula is transformed into a full-throttle erotic love story. Expect billowing veils, sculpted hair, writhing bodies and overdelivered lines; funeral whites bleeding into giallo reds. Keanu Reeves’ dodgy British accent drew mockery at the time (God knows how Winona Ryder escaped largely unscathed), but somehow it all just works in the broader tableau of consciously synthetic excess. 

It’s mostly true to Stoker’s book, but with one major change: instead of the count being a parasitic womaniser, he’s a tragic antihero who yearns for Mina, who he believes is the reincarnation of his beloved dead wife. This makes him a far more sympathetic character, which only adds to his bad-boy sex appeal. He even tries to warn her off eternal life right in the middle of their scene d’amour. What a gentleman. 

Director: Claire Denis

Adult sexual relationships are a strange, hostile thing in Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day. Conceived a decade before its release, it grew from the director’s desire to create a “horror film set at night” with Vincent Gallo. Nothing came of it, but it sparked the idea of a gore film about forbidden, nocturnal desires. After making Beau Travail (1999), she teamed up with regular screenwriter Jean-Pol Fargeau and shaped a strange, unsettling creation that’s cold as a scalpel and as intimate as hot blood. 

Scientist Shane (Gallo) brings his wife June (Tricia Vessey) to Paris for their honeymoon. While there, he hunts down Coré (Béatrice Dalle), the wife of a former colleague who he’s obsessed with, and who also happens to be a cannibal – cravings he recognises in himself. Cat People, In the Realm of the Senses and Trouble Every Day all explore the knife edge between desire and destruction, albeit in wildly different ways. In the first, love tempers all-consuming hunger; in the second, it fuels it. Denis sits between those poles. Love neither saves nor wholly damns, so much as dissolves into carnal violence. 

Director: Jonathan Glazer

This is Scarlett Johansson as you’ve never seen her before, or so the advertising campaign slyly cooed. Yet for those hoping for the sunny girl-next-door version (minus her clothes), bitter disappointment was to follow. In an interview with The New York Times, Johansson recalled its screening at the Venice Film Festival, saying: “I remember looking over at Jonathan [Glazer] at the end of that screening, and people were simultaneously standing and applauding and booing, and Jonathan looked like a kid in a candy store.”

She plays an alien disguised as a woman. Dressed up in a wig, fur coat and red lipstick, she drives through the Glasgow suburbs under granite-grey skies. Occasionally, she picks up lone men, takes them back to an abandoned house, strips off and entices them into a pool of black goop, where they are suspended, then vapourised. 

The deep silences, icy landscapes and Mica Levi’s score of sawing violins and cymbal shimmers feel sensual, uncanny and alluringly dangerous. This is sex reduced to abstraction until all that remains is the void Bataille once described: the brief opening between beings, charged with the promise of communion and the certainty of oblivion.