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Horror movies are designed to scare us and make our skin crawl so it’s not exactly a genre you’d think of as sexy. But horror has often mixed the erotic with the eerie. There are tons of sexy horror movies from the ‘80s that exemplify both sides of Freud’s death and sex drive such as the 1987 film Nekromantik, a movie about, well, necrophilia.
Even before Freud, the concepts of death and sex have been linked to each other in figurative language. Just think of French and its name for the first orgasm, “la petite mort”, which translates to “a little death”. In light of that, it’s no surprise that there are several sexy horror movies made to turn us on all while giving us the fright of our lives.
1. Dracula’s Daughter (1936)
The vampire is an inherently sexual and deceptively romantic creature that’s been used in film and literature as a way of alluding to homosexuality back when you couldn’t write explicitly queer characters. Dracula’s Daughter is a great example of this. The 1936 film stars Gloria Holden as Countess Marya Zaleska, the daughter of Dracula who is trying to escape her past. She tries to find a cure to her thirst for blood, but she can’t help luring beautiful young women to go home with her so she can sketch them near-naked.
If that’s not enough to sell you on Dracula’s Daughter, Interview with a Vampire author Anne Rice says she was heavily influenced by the film. In an interview with the Daily Beast, Rice said, “I never forgot that film…That was always my impression of what vampires were: earthlings with heightened sensibility and a doomed appreciation of life.”
2. The Neon Demon (2016)
Neon Demon mixes horror with sex by setting its events in the Los Angeles modeling scene. A young aspiring model, played by Elle Fanning, moves to Los Angeles to start her modeling career following the death of her parents. She quickly skyrockets into fame because of how beautiful she is. Intoxicated by the promise of wealth and admiration, the young model doesn’t realize that other people would literally kill to be in her position.
A tldr way to describe this movie, without spoilers, is that it’s Black Swan meets body horror with a dash of vampire themes.
3. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
There’s sexy and then there’s Winona Ryder as Mina Harker with Count Dracula holding her gently from behind sexy. This adaptation of Bram Stoker’s famous novel is a common fixture of aesthetic accounts and fan edits due to how unabashedly erotic it is in its depiction of vampirism. If you take certain scenes out of context, it definitely looks like it could be a different kind of movie.
4. Jennifer’s Body (2009)
Jennifer’s Body wasn’t a critic favorite when it first came out, but over the years, it’s become a cult classic that any self-respecting horror fan has at least heard of. Starring Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried, the film follows the two female characters as their unhealthy friendship falls apart because of Jennifer’s increased aggression and narcissism. Unbeknownst to her friend, Jennifer’s personality changes are because she died in a Satanistic sacrifice that gave her supernatural powers.
5. The Hunger (1983)
You need only know that David Bowie starred as a vampire in this movie to know that it’s a sexy horror film. The movie has been criticized for its thin plot, but then again, it’s not the kind of movie you watch for “plot”, not plot. In it, David Bowie is the dying vampire lover of an older female vampire who is desperate to help him survive his mysterious illness. His lover enlists the help of a human woman who researches aging in a bid to stop him from aging to death. However, things take a turn for the worst for Bowie’s character when his lover becomes enamored with the scientist.
6. Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)
Only Lovers Left Alive is a vampire love story starring Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston. The film tackles what love looks like when it grows centuries beyond what we typically see in on-screen happy endings. Hiddleston’s Adam is a depressed vampire trying to make himself interested in life again – a difficult task when you’ve led an exciting life of advising famous scientists and artists. Sensing that something is off with him, Eve returns to his side and the two live like an old couple at the end of their days…with a dash of vampirism, of course.
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7. Species (1995)
Species is a horror sci-fi that’s just a flick away from being an actual porn plot. It centers on a sexy human-alien hybrid who’s trying to, ahem, mate with a human male to produce enough offspring to overwhelm and destroy humanity. A group of three humans try to hunt her down before she can do so. The movie plays with the same themes of motherhood and alien invasions that Alien does – likely because Alien’s H.R. Giger was involved in its creation – that makes it a bit more contemplative than you’d expect.
8. Society (1989)
Is an alien invasion body-horror film that centers on Bill, a young man who suspects his family is part of a cult. He finds himself way in over his head when it’s revealed that his family isn’t really part of a cult, but are aliens who keep humans in undead states only to later consume them. Bill now has to figure out how he’s going to stop them and survive, all while grappling with the idea that his family, as he knows it, doesn’t really exist.
9. Carmilla (2019)
Not to be confused with Carmilla the Movie, the movie starring the same cast as the Carmilla web series, this adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla is a more faithful interpretation of the book. There are still some slight differences like how it’s set in England instead of Austria and the human female’s name is Lara instead of Laura. Other than that though, it’s still about a lonely girl whose solitude and longing is taken advantage of by the vampire Carmilla. Despite her monstrous nature, Carmilla seems to genuinely love Lara, something her other vampire counterparts don’t quite do with their female victims.
There’s a change in focus and antagonist in the film, a choice that may have been informed by the need to distinguish it a little more from other vampire stories that came after Carmilla such as Stoker’s Dracula. It’s sexy in a girlish way that brings to mind the allure of a first kiss instead of the more explicit sexuality of the other films on this list.
10. X (2022)
X is a pandemic-era slasher featuring Mia Goth and Jenna Ortega whose characters join a group of other young people on their mission to shoot a porno on a Texan farm. The group rents a guest house owned by an elderly couple who are unaware of what the group plans to do on their property. Envying their youth and beauty, the old couple begin to develop a desire for and a desire to be their guests.