Anthony Penta, ‘We Kill for Love’

0:13Hello and welcome to the special episode of the Monaco Weekly. I'm Fernando Guto Pacheco, and for today's show I speak with Anthony Penta, director of the documentary We Kill for Love, on the lost world of the erotic thriller. The film explores the genre's heyday in the 80s and 90s, the home video explosion, and the future of the erotic thriller. Here is Anthony with more.

0:43I think the first time I heard the term erotic thriller was probably when I auditioned for undercover when my agent said erotic thriller and I said well what is that well you know like nine and a half weeks not a fan of the phrase erotic thriller it just sounds a little naughty. A little naughtier maybe than I want to be. There was always that element of danger in an erotic thriller and it was usually the woman who was dangerous. In these erotic thrillers these women were beautiful and sexy but often deadly. Anthony Penta, welcome to Monaco Radio. A pleasure talking to you. I was very excited to do this interview.

1:25You just finished a documentary We Kill for Love, which is all about erotic thrillers. And I discovered so much, and I love the genre. My first question to you, Anthony, of course, you've been working with cinema for a while now, but what's your relationship with erotic thrillers? Is this something that you followed for decades? Well, I went from age 20 to 30 in the 1990s, and that was more or less the erotic thriller's golden era on late night cable television and on home video. So certainly I remember seeing these films, these hazy, soft focus, mysterious, romantic movies on late night cable television.

2:08And I remember walking the long carpeted aisles of Blockbuster Video and finding them there. But when I started making this documentary in roughly 2015, I really didn't remember the titles, the actor names. I couldn't remember any of the films. I just had these wispy memories of it. Like most people, I came to the erotic thriller through the front door. Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, Jade. I was driven initially by the feeling that there were more movies like Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct. I remember seeing these movies, and I had images in my head from them. from watching Late Night Cable in the 90s.

2:52But I just didn't know where they were. And wanting to find more of them caused me to sort of stumble headfirst into this lost world of beautiful, enchanting, strange movies. I mean, and it's fantastic the footage you have in the film. I mean, I have to say, it's incredible. There must be quite a lot of editing. You had to watch quite a lot of films as well. There's so much footage and the soundtrack is great as well. Thank you very much. The soundtrack was a real miracle. Herman Beeftink, a composer of the soundtrack, he was a real deal composer for many of these films and television shows in the 1990s.

3:31Herman Beeftink's name is synonymous with the sound of sex. He created that sound, that synth-driven, pulsating, aspirational sound of the 1990s. He was one of the architects of it, and I would just hugely fortunate that Herman Beeftink allowed me to use his music in the movie. Anthony, give us a sense of time. When was kind of peak erotic thriller time? Because of course, in the film, it shows the inspiration from some of erotic thrillers, some Hitchcock films, or even perhaps some early 80s films, like, you know, you have Buddy Dubbo there. But when is the period that you can say that was peak erotic thriller season?

4:10The peak of the erotic thriller was 1994, in which 75 erotic thrillers were released. 1995, you had a similar number. So 94, 95 was the peak. The erotic thriller percolated in the 1980s after films like Dressed to Kill, Body Heat, Body Double, Thief of Hearts. But it never really congealed into a publicly traded concept until the late 1980s, and that was after Fatal Attraction. Fatal Attraction itself was just yet another obsession thriller in a lineage of obsession thrillers that included Play Misty for Me, Obsessive Love. But there was something about Fatal Attraction that kind of ignited the erotic thriller at the end of the 1980s and caused the designation erotic thriller to begin circulating.

5:06And I think there was something about the title, as Linda Ruth Williams indicates in my documentary, fatal attraction, sex, death, dangerous desire. Suddenly, this concept seems to have congealed in the late 1980s, and you began seeing at that very moment the designation appearing on the cover of video boxes, like Slamdance used the phrase an erotic thriller right up front on its video box when it was released. so that you saw the genre begin to ramp up after Fatal Attraction. Suddenly people started generating them more. And there was a lot that were already going into production at that time that hadn't seen Fatal Attraction.

5:50But the concept of the erotic thriller began ramping up pretty quickly. You play fair with me? Do you have an affair with her? I'll play fair with you. I don't want to lose my family. How could you do that? You're scared of me, aren't you? You're afraid. gutless heartless spineless if you ever come near my family again i'll kill you you understand i'm not gonna be ignored alicia where's ellen she's gone call the police whatever resentment she's feeling she's probably got it out of her system what if she didn't get it out of her system what then Fatal Attraction. And then in 1992, by 92, as erotic thrillers began getting produced for the home video market, Hollywood caught on and started responding with its own erotic thrillers.

6:43And of course, Basic Instinct, released in 1992, was a huge motivator. It's almost like a one-two punch. You had Fatal Attraction in 1987 and then Basic Instinct in 1992, driving it. When Basic Instinct was released in 1992, 40 erotic thrillers were released that year for the home video market. That's a lot of movies that were released that hadn't seen Basic Instinct. So the erotic thriller was already powering forward as a dominant home video genre before and without reference to Basic Instinct. You see in 1994, two years after Basic Instinct, this huge jump in the production of erotic thrillers.

7:27And of course, a lot of them use the same trope, something I call the suspect lover, where there's a murder suspect who winds up being the romantic interest for the investigating detective. You see this repeated over and over in erotic thrillers. Fatal Attraction certainly caused a ramp up in the obsession thrillers. You know, one protagonist is sort of psychosexually obsessed with another one. This trope was picked up and used in many erotic thrillers throughout the 90s. But Basic Instinct drove forward the sort of police procedural kind of variant of the erotic thriller also. They all mashed together.

8:05You didn't feel anything for him. You just had sex with him for your book. In the beginning, he gave me a lot of pleasure. You like playing games. Games are fun. What's your new book about? A detective. He falls for the wrong woman. What happens? She kills it. After Fatal Attraction, after Basic Instinct, you saw a massive ramp up in 1994, 1995 was the peak of the erotic thriller in which you had 75. That's more than one erotic thriller per week. And then after 1995, you saw a really rapid decline in the production of erotic thrillers until you get to roughly 1999-2000, in which they're only producing about one a month.

8:47There was a brief surge of erotic thrillers for the pay-per-view cable television market in the early 2000s, and most of these were produced by a single company, Mainline Releasing Group, but after that it really peters out. And it goes back, we've gone back to the 80s era of just, it's percolating. It's such a shame because, I mean, it's interesting. One of my favorite parts of the film is I think one of the guests mentioned that they are a portrait of society. So even in the 80s, in the Reagan era, I mean, there's the sense of sexual freedom, but also the guilt that sex brings. So it's not, you can't define an erotic thriller as liberal or conservative.

9:26It's almost like a mix of both, right? I think that's an excellent way of viewing it. And there's no need to politicize the erotic thriller. The erotic thriller is a cultural phenomenon. We're all part of that. And so everyone responds in their own ways to what the erotic thriller was there to provide. And I think the erotic thriller, like all film genres, exists because it revolves around certain abstractions, right? Horror is fear of the unknown. The Western revolves around the abstraction Life on the Frontier. And I think the erotic thriller arrived because the abstraction that desire is dangerous was something that was in the air.

10:12And as a culture, there was a lot of gunpowder in American society and really around the world to make a big bang with that abstraction. People were ready for it at any level. and as had happened in the 1940s with a massive surge of women into the workplace in the 1980s you saw women entering the workforce in greater numbers than ever before and so a film genre which pitted men and women against each other it seemed like people were really primed for that and the erotic thriller is and has proven to be one of the most efficient film genres for pitting men and women against each other. That's very true.

10:56I mean, even in the posters, right, there's always the man and the woman. And sometimes, let's say Basic Instinct, which is perhaps one of the most famous of the now. I mean, clearly, I feel that Sharon Stone has a bigger role than Michael Douglas in some ways, in many ways. Yeah, for sure. The fascination that screenwriters had with women emerges in movies like Basic Instinct. And I think as, you know, Frank Crutnick wrote this book called In a Lonely Street, Film Noir Genre and Masculinity, in which he said that the patriarchy maintains itself by reinforcing and maintaining an asymmetrical power imbalance between men and women, that the patriarchy thrives by maintaining this asymmetrical power balance.

11:42Men have more access to resources, are typically physically stronger than women, typically more murderous statistically. And I think you can see this extending into the erotic thriller in that the erotic thriller itself mirrors this, but also maintains a sort of polarized, very feminine woman and very masculine man. And the sort of innate cultural power imbalance between men and women proved to be a pretty fruitful idea and challenge for screenwriters. and screenwriters tasked with writing erotic thrillers had to figure out ways. How can women get one up on men in a world where there's all these power imbalances across the board?

12:33And I think that there was this special problem of trying to figure out how women could get the upper hand in this world that helped conjure the erotic thriller to the forefront. And a woman could be a dangerous obsessive, a psychotic like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. She could be a murderous and acquisitive seductress like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. She could be someone like Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. She just wants what other men want. She wants wealth. She wants financial security. And she wants a hottie sitting next to her on the beach in some remote place. You know, that's what she wants.

13:14And she wants the same thing that men wants, and she's going to figure out how to get it in a man's world. And that special kind of woman, the femme fatale, who challenged this patriarchal imbalance, became a special character that screenwriters were fascinated by. And she appears in so many different disguises, in so many different movies. And she was an ongoing and fruitful character for screenwriters. And from what you show in the film as well, and I was surprised, I mean, the amount of female directors and producers behind many of those films as well, which is quite interesting to see. There were a lot of women behind the camera.

13:53Certainly at that time across the board, men made more movies than women. Men wrote and directed more films than women in the 1990s. But there were many female writers and directors of these films. And of course, I interviewed Chloe King, who wrote episodes of The Red Shoe Diaries. I interviewed Anne Gourso, who's a writer and director and editor, who wrote. Kat Shea was someone who wrote and directed some very powerful erotic thrillers. And of course, most people don't know this and can't know this. Unfortunately, I'm in possession of the knowledge that a woman wrote and directed more erotic thrillers in the 1990s than any other man.

14:32There are certain men like Jim Wynorski and Fred Olin Ray who directed as many as 12 erotic thrillers each. But they didn't write them all. They only wrote and directed four or five. But a woman wrote and directed more erotic thrillers in the 1990s than any other person. But she did so under assumed male names. And I'm not allowed to say who it is. She swore me into silence. I'm sorry. I'm curious, Anthony, but no worries. But I understand. They're direct-to-video erotic thrillers. And I only found out about this through happenstance and just a massive amount of research. And I finally contacted her and I basically said, you're busted.

15:15I found out who you are. I know what movies you made. And you did so under all these assumed names. but she today she's pursuing another career and she doesn't want to be associated with these particular films and i understand that so i say this only to say that the erotic thriller was an attractive medium and genre for women as much as it was for men and interesting as i said so much footage in the film and it reminded me some film i know perhaps i shouldn't be watching this when i was a kid but in brazil for some reason wild orchid was a massive hit and then And I just realized because it was set in Rio.

15:53From the creators of nine and a half weeks comes the most eagerly awaited film of the year. Enter a world of desperate love and stunning sensuality. Enter the world of Wild Orchid. Miss Reed, if you were chosen for this position, what would you say if I told you you'd be expected to leave for Rio de Janeiro in the morning? You're going to make a lot of money, honey. You might as well learn how to enjoy it. It's all play money anyway. Do you have a favorite, actually? Or perhaps some favorites? Because Wild Orchid is so interesting. It was repeated on TV almost every week in Brazil. And I think they had Wild Orchid 2, 3, and 4, perhaps, as well.

16:32That's right. That's right. Yeah, I love the movie. And Zalman King loves to put in these sort of carnival-esque scenes in his movies where people put on masks. And there's this sort of like release of energy in his films, this beautiful release of energy and a beautiful combination of both masculine and feminine energy also. So I can see why his film was very popular. I don't have favorite erotic thrillers. I return to certain erotic thrillers that they're like listening to a song again. If you want to be in that mood, you'll listen to that song again that puts you in that mood. So when I'm in the mood to watch really dark psychological erotic thrillers about urban alienation, I put on a Gregory Dark erotic thriller.

17:20Secret Games 3, Animal Instincts two, object of obsession, mirror images. Most people that get into the erotic thriller, the direct-to-video erotic thriller, find the Gregory Dark movies pretty much right away, and they're enchanted by them. Julianne is rich and lonely. She is an object of desire, beautiful and afraid, with passions that are only dreams and silent desires to play secret games. But secret games have no rules. No complications. No emotional ties. There are no obligations here. When I'm in the mood to watch a really fun erotic thriller, Girls with Guns, a sort of campy comedic atmosphere, I put on one of the Jim Winorski or Fred Olin Ray erotic thrillers.

18:17Victim of Desire, Sorceress. Body Chemistry 3 is just dynamite. It is just a dynamite movie. Jim Winorski launched Andrew Stevens and Sherry Shattuck into stratospheric levels of campy excess in that movie. It's just a really fun erotic thriller to watch. I need to watch Body Chemistry 3. It is just fantastic. Dynamite movie. If I'm in the mood to watch just a really lovely movie, the movies I really like to watch, erotic thrillers I go back to again and again, are the erotic thrillers that were produced by Playboy for Playboy TV throughout the 1990s under various clandestine film imprints. They made movies as cameo pictures.

19:04They made movies as mystique films, and they made movies as Indigo. This cluster of movies, which amounts to about 70, are all really terrific. They're really just terrific movies. You know, they got SAG actors for all the mystique films. They were beautifully photographed. They're set in really aspirational Los Angeles locations. it's almost sort of like the mystique films for me are sort of like it's this sort of enchanted sort of fairy kingdom it's a parallel universe version of los angeles that i get to visit because that's one of the good things about the film is the property porn you know this kind of look at the life of i mean it's incredible i think that's why people also enjoy those films they're a bit kind of escapism but they look at the life of the rich with all their scandals as well.

19:52I think so too. I think so too. I think, you know, Fred Olin Ray comments in the documentary that he said part of the reason that people want to see these movies is that they want to see rich people suffer. I think he's correct, but I also think that there's more to it than that. There's more than just the sadistic pleasure of seeing rich people suffer. I think it's a voyeuristic feeling of going and seeing how the other half live in these really rarefied environments that very few of us get to see. So you're seeing these games of dangerous desire played out in Los Angeles mansions, Malibu beach houses, poolside resorts.

20:30And part of that started with double indemnity. When Fred McMurray pulls up to that Spanish Revival mansion in double indemnity, and there's that wide shot of this huge mansion, he mentions the mansion. He talks about being one know, those houses that people were just buying up many years ago. And the feeling and double indemnity you get, which must have been very powerful in the 1940s when there were a lot fewer of these mansions, is that behind that facade was all these seething sexual tensions. You know, behind that placid, beautiful facade were all these things happening, and all they had to do was go inside.

21:10One question for you, Anthony. Do you think there is space for the erotic thriller to come back? Because I mean, films like yours, which is fantastic, but I see a little bit of people revisiting the genre, perhaps with kinder eyes. You know, I know there was kind of a backlash, a conservative and liberal backlash against those type of films. But what do you think? What's the state of the erotic thriller today? I think the erotic thriller will come back when people respond to its abstraction, that desire is dangerous. I think that people will accept it again if they can respond to that abstraction.

21:47I think that the erotic thriller will come back if it can deliver that abstraction in an atmosphere that's resistant to pornography. The widespread free availability of pornography seems to have had a muting effect on the production of inexplicit sexual content and erotica in America. It seems to have had a muting attempt, though I don't think it had an effect on the sloping off in production of the films in the 90s. I think it has had a muting effect on the films. So I think the erotic thriller will come back if people are ready to hear its abstraction. I don't think that it's going to come back if people are just nostalgic for it, if they just want the movies again nostalgically.

22:32I think it'll come back when people really need this abstraction, when they really want to see what the erotic thriller is here to deliver. And in some senses, the erotic thriller never did leave. If you look at things like women's television, premium cable television channels like Lifetime, Hallmark Movies and Mysteries, and now Passionflix, the brainchild of Tosca Musk. These channels are creating fiction that we presume is for women, dangerous stories of women journeying to the dark side of desire and meeting a handsome stranger. There's so many Lifetime movies where a woman, a middle-aged woman, meets a guy and he turns out to be not what she thought.

23:18He's trying to embezzle money from her. He's a serial killer, whatever. You know, stalked by my doctor, stalked by my lawyer, psycho yoga instructor. Pool Boy Nightmare. The titles of movies made for women have become increasingly lurid, and the films themselves have become increasingly lurid. And as the restrictions on what they can show have loosened, the films are starting to read more and more like erotic thrillers, but they're also becoming more self-consciously campy, like the Stalked by My Doctor films. so I think you know in some sense I know that there's a public percolating on social media and whatnot there's this ongoing feeling that the erotic thriller like we're right on the verge of the erotic thriller coming back but it keeps knocking on the door but for some reason it's not getting let into the modern world even though many people want to see it get let in but in another sense the erotic thriller has always been here with us it's just the energy of it has dispersed into these other forms that people don't pay much attention to, one of which is women's film and television on channels like Lifetime.

25:16We'll see you next time.

25:20NIM, Fernando Augusto Pacheco.