Speaking of Soft Core

When researching The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema,¹ I found myself in a peculiar scholarly position. There was both too much material and not enough—a plenitude of movies and an absence of information. The book looked comparatively at two parallel and interpenetrating industries producing similarly genred product for distinct markets: I discussed mainstream, A-list titles such as Crimes of Passion (Ken Russell, 1984), Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987), and In the Cut (Jane Campion, 2003) alongside cheaper, straight-to-video or cable titles such as Night Rhythms (Gregory Dark, 1992), Die Watching (Charles Davis, 1993), or Sins of Desire (Jim Wynorski, 1993). The book took issue with the fact that much academic scholarship in contemporary cinema looks primarily at theatrically released movies—the Basic Instincts rather than the Basic Deceptions—and I felt strongly that, as I put it,

In a proliferating market which includes straight-to-cable/made-for-tv and direct-to-video or -dvd films, any study which confines itself to movies which are defined by the mode of their opening release is allowing distributors to do its decision-making for it.²

Nevertheless these are the titles with most available research resources. Cuttings libraries, popular print materials, and academic papers were brimful of an embarrassment of riches: Adrian Lyne and Michael Douglas, Jane Campion and Meg Ryan, Kathleen Turner and Ken Russell all waxed lyrical in promotional press about the cultural significance of their movies, which were then reviewed in journalistic outlets. Later, feminists, queer theorists, and genre theorists took their turn in scholarly journals. But of the cheaper titles, there were slim research pickings: perhaps a short review or two on a dedicated B-movie Web site. No one was systematically archiving the paper chase of material that bottom-of-the-barrel productions generated, because everyone, including those with an investment in selling them, doubted their place in film history. Some enthusiastic academics and journalists were beginning to produce interview collections with exploitation filmmakers, but rarely did they discuss "my" genre.³

Beyond that, there was just the text—often released in various formats under a range of different titles (Animal Instincts [Dark as A. Gregory Hippolyte, 1992], Animal Instincts II [Dark as Gregory Hippolyte, 1994], Animal Instincts 3 aka Animal Instincts: The Seductress [Dark as Gregory Hippolyte, 1996])—and what the text seemed to be telling me about its audience aspirations and market expectations; how expensive or cheap it was; and the regularity with which genre and video stars came and went. Carol J. Clover's 1992 study of a similar high/low stratification in horror cinema might have offered me a precedent, but her focus was textual and theoretical; mine was also industrial and generic.⁴ Since I was mapping out the ebbs and flows of a new subgenre from the mid-1980s onwards, I needed more information—trade publications and Web reviews will take you only so far. The majority of the more than 250 erotic thrillers I looked at in my book have garnered scant attention at best on ephemeral Web sites. David Andrews starts his exemplary study of the history of soft core with the sentence, "My most formidable challenge in writing Soft in the Middle was the paucity of prior theorization on contemporary softcore itself."⁵ Perhaps, as the writer of the first book on the erotic thriller, my most formidable challenge was the limited, or entirely absent, information about many of my texts, apart from the texts themselves. I needed the horse's mouth.

Apart from my fervent interest in my subject, one of the driving forces that kept me going across this long research project was a panicky sense that film history was being lost almost as soon as it came into being. Point of Seduction: Body Chemistry III came—and went—in 1994, as did Dangerous Indiscretion, Flinch, Improper Conduct, Indecent Behaviour II, Lipstick Camera, Midnight Tease, Mind Twister, Sexual Intent, and Sexual Malice. Archives hold hardly a trace of their brief passing; the only evidence that any of these made an impression on the marketplace lies in Web sites...