This week’s Horror Roundtable centers on a scintillating topic indeed: erotic horror-movie scenes. It takes no great scholar of the genre to point out the bond between eros and thanatos, but still, I was surprised to discover upon considering the topic just how many of the scenes I consider to be really hot stuff come from horror films.
Because it’s a virtual wall-to-wall smorgasbord of sensuality, I named “any Patricia Arquette scene from David Lynch’s Lost Highway” as my fave…
…which led me to think about Michele Soavi’s Cemetery Man (aka Della’morte Dell’amore), a sister film to Lost Highway in several respects, from horror to surrealism to fractured narrative to (in the persons of Rupert Everett and Anna Falchi) intense eroticism…
…but for me, all horror-eroticism roads lead back to the bathtub sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Lia Beldam’s matter-of-fact, unabashed nudity struck a chord with my young teenaged self that’s still resonating today, I think…
…and I think I’ll stop reproducing images from that scene right there, thank you very much, for all our sakes.