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A History of Sex and Horror in Cinema

Horror films are almost always shrouded in murder, mystery and suspense, but did you know the genre is also cloaked in symbolism? Take “Halloween,” the 1978 classic starring Jamie Lee Curtis. John Carpenter and Debra Hill, the film’s director and producer, were heavy players in the women’s liberation and civil rights movement and wanted the film to reflect that in their signature killer.

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Michael Myers was the embodiment of the small town evil and meaningless hate crimes that Carpenter experienced growing up in the south. His infamous mask, both blank and expressionless, was a way to convey an evil that’s always present, but whose motives we don’t understand.

It’s thoughtful nuances like these that make the genre so fascinating. Horror films at this time were the filmmakers’ responses to Vietnam, civil rights, racial injustice and feminism. It’s all incredibly political, and why horror movies tend to speak to a generation’s political and personal plights.

And an omnipresent theme in most, if not all, horror movies is sex. Those who engage in sex often die, considered tainted and too horned up to make it to the ending credits. Those who remain abstinent, focused on bringing the killer to justice, usually live to see the next morning.

To better understand why sex and horror go hand-in-hand, we spoke to to Michael Varrati, filmmaker and host of queer horror podcast, Dead for Filth, and film critic and writer Abby Olcese who can help explain this co-dependent relationship.

Why Are Sex and Horror Often Synonymous?

“Horror, by its definition, is a genre of subversion,” says Varrati. “It often utilizes the lens of the fantastic to shine a light on things we don't feel comfortable tackling directly.”

These could be macro ideas, like political power structures or cultural biases, or something more personal with aspects of identity or things we keep locked within ourselves. In that sense, horror offers a keyhole glimpse into the forbidden, giving audiences a sense of witnessing something they shouldn’t.

“With that in mind, it makes sense that sex and horror find a common ground,” adds Varrati. “Both are something the world portrays as a bit naughty and both are primal.”

Olcese agrees that there is a psychological link between sex and horror, as both inspire strong emotional and physical reactions. “Because of western culture’s historically conservative relationship to sex, it’s become something kind of dark and forbidden,” she says.

This interrelatedness was present long before the horror genre, dating back to gothic literature and romantic art. Take Henry Fuseli’s 1781 painting “The Nightmare,” for example. Now that we live in a more sex-positive society, the trope has evolved, portraying sex and its fatal consequences in a different light. Perhaps a great example of this is “It Follows.” The 2014 film still adheres to the sex-equals-death trope, but looks at it from an entirely different thematic standpoint.

“[‘It Follows’] introduces a supernatural being that’s passed along by sexual contact, but director David Robert Mitchell isn’t using it as an excuse for gratuity,” notes Oclese. “Instead, he’s looking at sex as a passage from childhood into adulthood, and the loss of innocence and sudden sense of mortality that go along with that transition. It’s maybe the most philosophical exploration of sex and death that I’ve seen in the genre.”

“If You Have Sex, You Die,” Explained

Due to the aforementioned conservative relationship western culture has with sex, horror films have discouraged promiscuity by communicating, “you have sex, you die.” This phrase was quoted verbatim in the “Scream” franchise, which had a knack for poking fun at classic horror tropes.

However, the cliché didn’t rise to prominence until the ‘80s. “There was a period in the late ‘60s and ‘70s where a lot of horror was really exploring sexuality and eroticism,” says Varrati. “There was definitely a focus on seduction and the allure of darkness where sex was present, but not an assured death curse.”

With these examples, Varrati says it’s not necessarily virgins who are “compromising their virtue,” but rather taking away their agency. “It's a moment of liberation that's immediately taken away,” he notes. “I think that as the trope wore on, you can see it being boiled down to the essence of ‘you have sex, you die.’ By the mid-80s, it just became part of the formula.”

Interestingly enough, Varrati points out that the trope runs parallel with the rise of the conservative era of Ronald Reagan, as well as the dawn of the AIDS Crisis.

“You have a landscape where those in charge want to limit what teenagers know about sex and their own sexuality running alongside a terrible and deadly pandemic that the world at large equates with promiscuity,” he says. ‘You have sex, you die’ is most prevalent in the 80s because it was a manipulation of our fears, and that place where fear and sex intersect.”

The Treatment of Women in Horror Movies

Horror’s relationship with female movie characters is complicated. While the genre does feature women more prominently than any other, and is the only one where women boast more on-screen and speaking time than men, it also features blatant sexism and gratuitous female nudity.

“The Final Girl thing has become pretty damaging, and the fact that it weighs very heavily on one end of the gender spectrum is something that’s worth noting,” says Olcese. “There’s a lot of inequality when it comes to who dies (and how) in slasher horror. It’s nearly always women who get punished for sex. Men do die, but their deaths are rarely as prolonged or lingered on.”

Women have historically been portrayed as helpless, innocent creatures, and any violation of that innocence, whether sexual and/or through physical violence, triggers a strong emotional response. “That’s a patriarchal, reductive view, and ends up frequently treating women as weak or disposable,” adds Olcese.

For Varrati, it's about context. “If the trope is utilized to take away someone's agency or power with no clear-cut message other than to diminish them, then I absolutely think there's a problem with the narrative that's being sewed,” he says, adding that the same kind of discrimination is often applied to queer characters and people of color. “If they exist merely to brush them aside, or to diminish their humanity in some capacity, you've disenfranchised that person. If a character has sex and dies, it's one thing. If she dies because she has sex, that's entirely another.”

While earlier depictions of sex in scary movies were used as a device to project innocence and character, society has evolved, boasting more progressive and sex-positive attitudes. When you consider horror’s tendency to reflect the current cultural climate, we can only assume this dated trope will evolve with it.

However, we can all agree on one thing: Splitting up is still, and will forever be, the dumbest thing a character can do in a horror movie.

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