Erotic thriller documentary We Kill For Love recently had its world premiere at the Overlook Film Festival. Written, produced, and directed by Anthony Penta, the documentary dives into lost and misunderstood world of the direct-to-video erotic thriller, and Penta talks about the research, interview subjects, and surprises of making We Kill For Love in our latest Q&A:
DTV erotic thrillers were a huge part of 80s / 90s late night TV programming and video store offerings. Why was this an area of genre filmmaking you wanted to shine a light on in your new documentary?
During my search for the erotic thriller, I discovered it is miraculously the same size and shape as another much more reputable American film movement – film noir. Unlike film noir, however, the depth and breadth of the erotic thriller as a film subgenre is largely unknown and therefore unacknowledged. Film noir is celebrated for its stylistic eccentricities, its exploration of themes relevant to American culture of the 1940s and 50s, its stock characters and recurring plot devices, and its unique shadow-pantheon of actors. All of this is bound by a 15-year “classic period” stretching from roughly 1940-1955. As I discovered, the erotic thriller is nearly identical to film noir in these ways. There are over 700 films. Its classic period was about 15 years, from roughly 1985-2000. There are stylistic eccentricities specific to the genre, explorations of specific themes relevant to American culture of the era, stock characters and plot devices, and finally, a shadow-pantheon of actors specific to the films. Yet for some reason when the erotic thriller disappeared in the early 2000s, all that remained in popular discourse was a dozen studio films. So my first instinct was to find out why an entire American film movement comparable to film noir had been hidden away in our cultural attic.
This led to a related and more important reason for We Kill for Love. As anyone who has seen an abandoned house in the woods knows, eventually people find it. The wrong people. It gets looted, the windows get smashed in, and it gets covered with graffiti. This is unfortunately what has happened to the erotic thriller. Without anyone to maintain the edifice, as is done with film noir by a legion of fans and conservators, it has been terribly mistreated. DTV erotic thrillers are traded on the internet by a diffuse tribe of softcore fetishists who value the films only for scenes of female nudity and sexual spectacle. The icons of the genre are repeatedly dragged through the mud and their names invoked only to reference where and in what movies they took off their clothes. Obviously non-pornographic films are branded with a scarlet letter by online databases maintained by people who have never seen the films. The actors are labeled “porn stars” by journalists who should know better. It seemed to me a huge injustice had been done. I realized I had a special feeling for the films and what they were trying to say. I had the capability to tell the story as it should be told. We Kill for Love is my attempt to clear away the underbrush, paint over the graffiti and return a forgotten house, for all its flaws, to something that resembled a place people once cared to live in.
What kind of research went into making the documentary? I imagine that some of these films have become hard to track down.
I did too much research. I didn't just track down erotic thrillers on VHS, laserdisc, and DVD. I bought High School yearbooks, magazines, trade ads, and all sorts of ephemera. I amassed books in film noir and genre cinema. I adopted a dozen email pseudonyms so that I could sign up for accounts on clandestine file trading sites. I spoke on the phone with many people I never interviewed on camera. I have a bulging folder full of hastily written notes from those conversations. I made outlines, mental maps, and graphs. I bought and experimented with a never-ending collection of hardware devices to digitize my growing collection. During the pandemic I wrote a long, messy book on the erotic thriller because I couldn't do much else. Years went by. I still don't consider myself an expert. I'm more like a DTV detective. I pounded the pavement with my notebook. I interviewed suspects. I wrote down what I knew. We Kill for Love is my investigation.
Who are some of the stars and filmmakers that took part in the documentary? Did you have a favorite interview or bucket list guest that you were happy to speak with?
Andrew Stevens was a big win. He was one of the first interviews. Even Linda Ruth Williams failed to get Stevens when she was interviewing practitioners for her book The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema. Pulling up to Stevens' enormous home in Dallas and seeing Will Griffith from Night Eyes standing on the lawn was pretty surreal! When, after the interview, I stood on that lawn and waved goodbye, Stevens walked over to me, shook my hand with a tight grip, and with a gleam in his eye said: “The erotic thriller!”. That was when I knew the movie was going to get made, somehow. Lawrence Lanoff, the director of Temptress, was an amazing person. He's a kind of spiritual guru of sorts. He wrote a book called A Course in Freedom and it changed my life a little bit. Kira Reed Lorsch was just amazing. So smart! And such a seductive person. Her eyes, the way she talks, her figure. James Dearden, the writer of Fatal Attraction, was another big win. After I interviewed Chloe King, Zalman King's daughter, she said "Who do you need?". She sat down at her computer and waited for my response. Fumbling for names, I said "James Dearden". She wrote him an email on the spot and that night he emailed me! Many others were just lovely people. Nancy O'Brien was a doll. Doug Jeffery was just as dashing as he is in his movies. Jody Fisher was like a real-life Walt Disney Princess. Blonde, cute, commanding. Her home was a micro-castle filled with furs, mirrors, and candelabras. Athena Massey was so cool! So talkative and friendly and positive. Finally, Duke Haney was fascinating. Our first telephone conversation was five hours long. His on-camera interview was the same length. He can ruminate endlessly. Unfortunately, he has only two sentences in the movie because he's just too introspective and thoughtful. His book Death Valley Superstars is a collection of quiet epiphanies. I still have plans to get coffee with him.
During the process of making this documentary, was there anything in particular you uncovered that you found surprising or that impacted the course of the documentary?
Women were the biggest surprise. The history and trajectory of women's stories -- in Gothic romance, in melodrama, in fiction -- was a hugely unexpected discovery. Most film writers leave out the female Gothic when they look backward at the origins the erotic thriller, but the influence is pronounced. Early on and informed by the academic writing, I began to see the erotic thriller as a kind of arena in which men (and their traditional story forms) and women (and their traditional story forms) clash by night in a rarified atmosphere of adult fantasy. This is why We Kill for Love is structured into three acts -- DANGER, ROMANCE, SEDUCTION. These are the man-in-crisis thriller, the woman-in-crisis romance, and the cauldron of sexual conflict into which both are merged. This takes overt form in many of the DTV erotic thrillers, especially those with both a male and female protagonist -- sterling examples being Thief of Hearts (1984), The Finishing Touch (1992), and Animal Instincts 2 (1994).
You recently premiered the documentary at the Overlook Film Festival. After all the hard work putting this together, how did it feel to have a theatrical audience see this for the first time?
It was a relief. The movie took a long time -- just over six years -- and like the Count of Monte Cristo I labored quietly for years in a sort of dungeon. It was actually a lovely place to be but I'm happy to finally shave off the long white beard, buy some new clothes, and rejoin polite society.
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"Written, produced, and directed by Anthony Penta, the doc goes in search of the lost and misunderstood world of the direct-to-video erotic thriller, an American film genre that once dominated late night cable television and the shelves of neighborhood video stores.
We Kill for Love stars filmmakers Andrew Stevens, Jim Wynorski, Fred Olen Ray; film stars Monique Parent, Amy Lindsay, Kira Reed Lorsch; film scholars Linda Ruth Williams, Abbey Bender and more.
Balancing film art with scholarship, We Kill For Love pulls back the curtain to reveal the heart and soul of a forgotten and often maligned film movement."
Director Anthony Penta shared, “We Kill for Love is part film essay, part documentary, and part casefile. It's a record of my prolonged investigation into a forgotten but once lucrative film movement -- the direct-to-video erotic thriller -- as well as a fantasia on its themes. For six years I tracked down the prime suspects of these films and I recorded their stories. I travelled the country to interview the academics and film writers whose books and articles explored its mysteries. I'm very happy to be partnering with Yellow Veil Pictures on the release of this film, and I'm sure it will serve as a permanent monument to not only a lost film subgenre, but a bygone era of American cinema.”
Photo Credit: Michael Reed in We Kill For Love Courtesy of Yellow Veil Pictures
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