But the erotic thriller is truly defined by the second half of its sobriquet. Such stories typically revolve around a femme fatale—sometimes calculating, sometimes unhinged, always dangerous—and the poor sap who’s both lucky and unlucky enough to be fucking her. Sometimes, as in The Last Seduction (1994), the dangerous woman gets away with it and the patsy is left wishing he’d never met her. Other times, as in the original Fatal Attraction, the monster gets what’s coming to her and the status quo of the family man she led down the path of sin is restored. (In rarer cases, the villain is an outside force not represented by the female half of the sexual dyad—Body Double, say.) In all cases, erotic thrillers use tension and suspense to build to a good-versus-evil resolution, and no matter which side comes out on top, sexuality is on the side of sin.

Yet there’s an adjacent genre that does away with those conventions, as easily as Catherine Tramell bumps off her lovers: a genre of tragedy. In these films, sexuality pervades, not as a troublesome interloper, but as an all-consuming directive; like hunger, it is dangerous only when thwarted. It refuses to be relegated to the shadows. Like buried trauma, sex demands an audience. The perennial discourse of the plot-relevant sex scene—does it or does it not exist, and should it?—can find no footing here: sex is the plot, and it does so much more than titillate. It communicates. There is not just the soft-focus romantic lovemaking we’ve come to expect on-screen; there is also fucking for anger, shame, sorrow, and all the ugliness of which we fear to speak in the light of day. There is transgression and discomfort. There are real taboos hard at work between the sheets.

What there aren’t, though, are thrills. These sex tragedies are downbeat, enervating to the last frame. Call this genre the “erotic bummer.”

Like their erotic thriller cousins, these films combine sex and death too, but the balance is shifted. Sex is prioritized in the plot, drives the plot, often becomes the plot, so the erotic component is stronger than ever. But the violence inherent in erotic thrillers is transmuted into something morbid rather than thrilling. It’s as if the characters’ growing appetite for ever-intensifying sexual intimacy devours them until there’s nothing left. No mind games, no cat-and-mouse chases through expensive apartments, no fundamental battle of good versus evil; the erotic connection between the characters is beyond good and evil, and is itself their undoing, leading inevitably to tragedy, isolation, and death.

Unlike the erotic thriller, which, until its recent revival, was essentially a discreet Hollywood phenomenon that existed from Reagan through Clinton, the erotic bummer manifests itself in a much wider range of modes, styles, countries, and time periods. This ad hoc genre spans from European art films of the 1970s (The Night Porter in 1974, Last Tango in Paris in 1972, the French-Japanese co-production In the Realm of the Senses in 1976) to erotic-thriller-adjacent Jeremy Irons vehicles in the ’80s (Dead Ringers, Damage) to turn-of-the-millennium period-piece Oscar bait (Atonement in 2007, The End of the Affair in 1999, The English Patient in 1996) to stylish psychological horror (Possession in 1981, Mulholland Drive in 2001) to divisive 21st-century art-house fare (The Brown Bunny in 2003, The Piano Teacher in 2001, Antichrist in 2009). In addition to jettisoning the erotic thriller’s default neo-noir template of murder plots and their resolution, the erotic bummer is less dependent on violating the specific sexual mores of “Morning in America” and its aftermath. Forget AIDS, NC-17, the Parents Music Resource Center: the erotic bummer posits that anyone, at any time, can fuck themselves to death.

My wife Julia Gfrörer and I wrote about a genre of horny, depressing movies we call “the erotic bummer” for our debut at the Los Angeles Review of Books.