The erotic thriller was born out of censorship. When the Hays Code prevented Hollywood from openly depicting sexuality, filmmakers learned to express desire through glances, gestures and shadows. This gave rise to film noir, with its femmes fatales and dangerous passions. In Gilda, Rita Hayworth removing a single glove conveyed more than any explicit scene could.

Hitchcock took this further. In Vertigo, love becomes obsession, and desire turns into an urge to control and reshape another person. Here, the defining themes of the future genre begin to emerge: voyeurism, control and the dangerous power of the gaze.

With the abolition of the Hays Code in 1968, cinema gained a new freedom. Dressed to Kill, Body Heat and Fatal Attraction transformed sexual desire into a source of suspense, crime and the destruction of ordinary life.

The genre reached its golden age in the 1990s. Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct overturned traditional power dynamics: the femme fatale was no longer merely the object of the male gaze — she now controlled it. In Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick shifted the danger from the external world to the inner world of fantasies, fears and hidden desires.

Why did the erotic thriller virtually disappear from mainstream cinema after the 1990s? And why do we recognise its familiar traits today in Gone Girl, Decision to Leave and Babygirl?

Perhaps the genre never truly disappeared, it simply evolved. Today, it increasingly explores not the danger of desire itself, but what desire can reveal about who we really are.