Line up: Basic Instinct | Body Heat | In The Cut | Body Double “Does this sex scene advance the plot?” Do you have a train to catch? As it is for sex, so it is for cinema: it’s about the journey, not the destination. Animus Magazine and host Elena Lazic are proud to present four films guaranteed to keep you up all night, in which the sex is almost entirely the point—four erotic thrillers where the quest for a dangerous killer is intimately intertwined with the pursuit of pleasure. Arguably the subgenre’s peak, Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992) will get us off to a deliriously entertaining start. As an elegant yet disarmingly blunt crime novelist, Sharon Stone is the ultimate femme fatale, while Michael Douglas shows us why he is the king of the erotic thriller in his electric interpretation of a detective almost too horny to live. Edging closer to film noir—the erotic thriller’s more respectable ancestor—Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981) is packed so full with double entendres that they are almost single. William Hurt’s aimless lawyer and Kathleen Turner’s irresistible screen siren fog up the screen in their every sweat-drenched scene. Refusing to deny women the thrills found where lust meets peril, Jane Campion brings together rom-com star Meg Ryan and an alarmingly moustachioed Mark Ruffalo for In The Cut (2003). This stylish serial killer story is the rare erotic thriller to have its lustful protagonist keep (some of) her wits about her: before laying with a potential killer, she handcuffs him to the radiator. Our nocturne escapade will fittingly conclude with Brian De Palma’s orgiastic Body Double (1984). Centred on a hapless actor who, after witnessing a gruesome murder, embarks on a strange sexual odyssey, this hysterical cult classic exposes cinema’s basis in voyeurism butt naked.