I was recently watching a video by Reads with Rachel – she has a very fun channel, and if you like taking the piss out of books, she’s a great follow – where she went over Ali Hazelwood’s werewolf-vampire romantasy book Bride. Thrilling title, I know. One of the scenes that made Rachel uncomfortable is pretty par for the course for spicy vampire romance: bloodsucking turned naughty. Naughtier than the knotting that happens in the book. YouTube recommended Rachel’s video to me on a day I was mulling over the eroticism of Saltburn, so it felt sort of cosmic.
In my favorite show of all time, The Good Place, Eleanor plants a big ol smooch on the surprisingly ripped Chidi. Oh no! This could literally end all of humanity if certain people see it! Chidi’s scared but also… into it? To which Eleanor iconically replies, “Scared is the best way to be horny.” (use actual clip)
What’s that about? Why is it that fantasies about monsters, murder, fear, dominance, loss of self, danger, the taboo, and issues around consent are all… sort of sexy?
Before we dive into it, I want to suggest some videos. They’re not required watching. I’ll go over relevant things here. ContraPoints has a video over Twilight that delves into vampirism, eroticism, consent, and what fantasy both is and isn’t. I have an equally long video discussing censorship aimed at self-published erotic art. Reads with Rachel has another video called “Orc romance, Monsters, and Booktok” that delves into how some erotic horror and romantasy and the like can accidentally or purposefully perpetuate harmful ideas, in this case, specifically, racism. Rachel Oates and Alizee Eezy both have videos diving into Colleen Hoover and dark romance which is sort of aligned with erotic horror. They both take a stance against the genre and what it does, so their videos might provide a nice counterpoint. Dan Olson of Folding Ideas has his videos over 50 Shades of Grey where he posits that the series could have potentially made compelling erotic thrillers which I think might be interesting to think about in regards to what we’ll be going over in this video.
With that out of the way…
One - Sublimation
Is it easier to be scared or turned on? You probably have an instinctual answer to that, but I think it’s a fair question to ask that might help us get to the bottom of this. If you had to admit to being either excited or terrified to a group of people, which would it be?
I think most of us might assume the responses to that would be skewed by gender. Broadly speaking, mean are taught to be sexual creatures growing up. Bro culture is filled with exaggeration about sexual conquests. Religious figures speak as if men are made of lust. “Manly” pieces of media are filled with sexualized women. People insist that porn exists primarily for men, even lesbian porn. President Donald Trump bragged about sexually assaulting a woman on the Access Hollywood bus tape, and a decent amount of people at the time called it “locker room talk.” Men are expected to not only be sexual but to be sexually dominant. This is part of what Natalie Wynn calls default heterosexual sadomasochism. Of course, to be the height of dominant masculinity, one is not allowed to be weak. Performative emotional repression could be seen as a sort of mating ritual. Because at some point we socially constructed masculinity to coincide with either stoicism or anger, other expressions are often seen as un-masculine and therefore unsexy. If the most important part of being male is sexual expression and conquest, emotional needs, expressions, and performances outside of those stereotypes are “shameful.” If you are “scared,” without a stiff upper lip, you’re going to die a lonely incel. It’s better to have a stiff lower…
Female sexuality, in contrast, is seen as deviant. Femininity has often been bundled up with the performance of innocence. To go back to Natlie’s DHSM, this can be in part because “innocence” is submissive, corruptible, prey. In stereotypical heterosexual gender roles, all of those things are part of “what it means” to be a woman. Yes, these are repressive categorizations. Congratulations. You’re so smart for noticing. One way you can tell that female sexuality is highly repressed and condemned is that we do something weird with words here. Normally, the weird English default is that you have whatever the original noun is and then women’s blank or female blank, et cetera, et cetera. For sexuality, it’s the opposite. We have “slut” and “man-slut.” We have “whore” and “man-whore.” Our sexual pejoratives are female-centric. A woman’s sexuality is meant to be a locked up secret because what are women if not submissive good boys wearing chastity cages? Does that count as a joke? It vaguely amused me to write it. Meanwhile terror, broadly speaking, is almost expected of a woman. In part, this is to contrast with the assumed stoicism of a lot of masculinity. If you can only imagine gendered binaries and you believe in bioessentialism, then for men to be stoic, women must be emotional. In a way, teaching girls that their emotions are over the top kind of allows them to “fill” the emotional “hole” of the stoic men. Desire is always lack. If you feel deeply, or perform feeling deeply, you might attract a “masculine” - meaning stoic - man who “lacks” that specific performance in his own life. It works the other way around, too. Terror, specifically, plays a part in mating. If femininity is innocence, then performing fear sends out the signal that you are more innocent than others.
So theoretically, it might make sense if we polled this question and found the answers correlate with gender. Where do trans people fit in? Well, obviously, trans and nonbinary people aren’t allowed to be horny or scared. Duh.
What do you do then when one is more appropriate than the other? Or, rather, when one feels more comfortable or acceptable to feel than the other?
You sublimate the feeling.
Sublimation is a sort of repressive, transformative defense mechanism. You recognize some feeling or instinct within you to be harmful, shameful, or socially disliked and you work, consciously or not, to turn it into something else. For instance, an extreme version here, someone experiencing suicidal ideation may sublimate the desire to harm themselves into a sexual fantasy. In this case, let’s say fatal vore wherein you are swallowed whole and digested. It’s a fantasy that is by definition fantastical. It is impossible to fulfill. Now you can indulge in your ideation but there’s no actual danger to yourself. This is self-preserving sublimation. Now then, vore is made fun of and it’s a bit weird and fatal vore is definitely frowned upon as a fetish. It’s not mainstream, right? So you might sublimate it again. This time you go from sexuality to some other expression. This is how you end up with Cell eating the androids with his not-so-subtlely designed tail. Importantly, the sublimation out of sexuality does not make the creative expressions of it necessarily sexual. The TV Tropes CinemaSins “uh-oh, it’s the writer’s barely disguised fetish” is correct in a way but it connotatively gives off the idea that this is purposefully perverted. That’s not true. Most of the time, yes, it is an expression of that fetish. That does not make the expression sexual.
So that’s sublimation. To give another famous hypothetical example, if you were to eroticize holiness and martyrdom alongside a repressed homosexuality, you might get Guidi Reni’s Saint Sebastian.
What does this have to do with erotic horror?
Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu led to some online debate as art often does these days. What so very often happens is people assume their take is the only correct take. To be fair, that does drive clicks. When I went over The Menu I acted as if it can only really be interpreted as a “the violence of the cosplay revolution is bad,” but it’s most easily a metaphor for artistic creation. I read I’m Thinking of Ending Things as an I Saw the TV Glow type trans allegory. The point of this slight tangent is that art is not objective, and people need to maybe calm down a bit.
One twitter user said it’s concerning that people read the movie as Ellen loving Count Orlock, and another said, “Count Orlock represents Ellen’s shame and inner darkness. Her desire for him is real.” Though that second tweet doesn’t necessarily conflict with the first. I found this same debate in two articles for The Mary Sue. One paints the film as a disturbing failure to celebrate or comment on female sexuality, instead punishing it and retraumatizing an assault survivor. The other says, “ Orlok points a sharp and inviting finger to an exit from the shame Ellen feels. He and the plague that follows personify the enormity of Ellen’s desire, as shameful as you may believe it to be, and that’s the horror of it all.” Dread Central takes an interesting middle ground by saying it’s a non-erotic look at assault and stalking. Abusive men will try to ruin you until they’re dead, the article says, with perhaps an implication that the movie is suggesting: so kill them while you can.
Forbes paints Ellen’s connection to the vampire to the experience of sexual fantasy. It says, “Ellen is then plagued by disturbingly erotic nightmares of Count Orlok… Ellen hates and enjoys these dreams, and thus, is riddled with guilt and self-hatred.” What is this if not fantasy followed by post-nut clarity? Is this not the experience of watching weird porn or reading messed-up smut? Is this not, oddly enough, one of the necessary steps for sexual sublimation?
Sublimation is sort of the whole film. You could maybe make the case for the non-sexual version presented in Dread Central being the end point of sublimation. The film itself is the artwork created by the transformation of unacceptable desire. I don’t really know if that fits. What does fit is the metaphorical interpretation of the film where Orlock is Ellen’s desire. Desire has been transformed into fear because terror, in the time and world of the film, is more acceptable for a woman than desire. If Ellen was allowed to be a sexual being, Orlock would never have come for her. Desire becomes fear becomes a horror film. This is erotic horror.
In the other interpretation, the unfortunately sexualized assault one, horror is turned erotic. Isn’t this just a thing that happens? Plenty of people who have been assaulted in one way or another go on to deal with the intense emotions through sexualization. Sometimes you get hypersexualized people. Sometimes you get people who indulge in non-con, dub-con, and CNC almost as a way to confront their trauma. Sexuality is easier to deal with than trauma.
Here’s maybe an easier version of that to grasp: gay guys who like being called the f-slur in bed. This can be one of two things: the sexual sublimation of homophobic trauma or the sublimation of internalized bigotry. Isn’t it more acceptable to be a submissive degradee than to thoroughly hate yourself?
So, one of the keys to understanding erotic horror is understanding sublimation and fantasy. Nosferatu is more of an example of sexuality into fear, but what about the other way around? If it’s more acceptable for men to be horny than scared, why aren’t there more female horror villains and monsters? Why do we have final girls and not many final boys? Why is male-oriented porn so predominantly violent against women instead of fearfully submissive? The answer might lie in Natlie’s theory of default heterosexual sadomasochism. Horror mostly works through the removal of control. Except in horror comedies, the victim is not really the “dominant,” at least not at the start of the story. Final girls are pure. Long-lasting victims are submissive and innocent. These are not the categories “allowed” of masculinity. Male submission is therefore a subversion of this stereotypical sexual dance, a taboo, a deviancy. What you’ll often find then is that to indulge in erotic horror, men imagine themselves as the perpetrator. They sexualize the monster they are taught lives within them by repressive systems. “Men are barely controlled demons of lust” in Sunday school becomes “men are monsters of uncontrolled lust” in erotic horror.
In adult film, men are the home invaders. They’re the ones with guns and knives and drugs. They’re the ones who dress up as serial killers. They’re the one who say cruel and abusive things. Men are typically the abusers in both male and female fantasy. But the majority of these men have no interest in actually harming a woman. They do not have a real desire to assault anyone. This is not a sublimation of the longing to harm. This is fear turned into sexuality. These men are afraid that they are evil. They’re afraid of dying alone because they are capable of great harm. You put on the Scream mask when taking artful nudes because you’re afraid of being the Scream Knifey Stabby Boy.
Obviously, there is a growing market of male submission and male victims in erotic horror and erotica in general. I do have to make clear that I am a gay man who mostly consumes gay male erotica. If there is submission or victimization, it’s always going to involve a man on both sides of the coin. But this is my understanding the weird and wild world of the straighties is slowly changing and growing.
But men have to be scared of the same things women are. Death, violence, lack of control. How are those things sublimated? Well, I’m going to be real, I think it’s through gay erotica. But nevertheless, horror movies are part of the mating dance, aren’t they? Boy meets girl, boy takes girl to scary movie, scary part happens, boy cuddles girl. Fear becomes sexuality. To know when to hold her tight, he has to know what is scary. And he has to let that fear turn into dominance and protection. DHSM. Sublimation. Erotic horror.
We could go on and on about sublimation. I talk about it a lot in my video over censorship in adult art. Erotica is filled with things on the edge of horror, and that’s primarily a genre made by and for women. So is that sublimating desire into fear? That doesn’t quite make sense, does it? Because erotica is designed, in part, to titilate. There has to be desire leftover for the genre to truly function. It can’t all be pure sublimation. Why is being scared so… sexy?
Two - Science
I hated science courses when I was in school. I’ve never been much of a handson learner. I despised labwork, and I find scientific academic writing to be suffocating tedium. I much preferred to be nose in a book. It didn’t help that I wasn’t really curious about the why of things. When I was taking calculus and we were learning anti-derivatives, some of my classmates got incredibly stressed out about the why of certain steps. That confused me. We were just solving puzzles. The why didn’t really matter to me.
What does matter to me? It exerts a gravitational pull, of course. And that’s what we call a heckin’ good science joke. I’m practically the next Bill Nye. ~Jarred Corona has a boring persona~
Psychology is a science, I guess, so I got to thinking: maybe there’s more science to erotic horror. Ew, I know: science.
An article for Huffington Post – UK, so get ready for my horrible British accent – puts it like this, “when we get scared our bodies produce a cocktail of hormones and up our heart rate to get our blood pumping so we’re that ready to run – and when we’re turned on, our bodies kick out a very similar blend of hormones... for a very different type of exercise.”
Matthew Lachman is a sex therapist who reiterates the hormone thing while adding that there was “an interesting experiment back in 1974, where a group of men found a beautiful woman more attractive after crossing a shaky suspension bridge than a control group did.” The shaky bridge experiment demonstrated something called the missattribution of arousal. Misattribution is probably really complicated to study and truly understand, but the name makes the concept easy to grasp broadly speaking. It’s when you misattribute a response to an unrelated emotion. With the bridge, the increased anxiety and adrenaline, causing fast heartbeats, warmer flesh, buzzing nerves, was misattributed to be sexual attraction.
If you’re aroused at a horror movie and find that horrifying, you might not actually be aroused. You could be misttributing the physical responses to the emotion. Bodies have a habit of this sort of thing. When you drink too much coffee, the influx of energy might make you feel anxious. My body does this. It’s because the physical sensations of energy overflow and anxiety are very similar. My body and brain are more used to anxiousness than they are abundant energy. Knowing this doesn’t necessarily make any of it easier because brains are assholes.
But this obviously flows the other way. Arousal and sex are scary to some people not because the find intimacy itself frightening. But the physiological response, the hormones produced, cause their brain to misattribute arousal as fear.
What happens when you combine this misattribution theory with sublimation theory? I think it’s pretty easy to see how they combine together pretty easily. If you’ve been socially conditioned to preference either fear or arousal over the other, misattribution becomes easier in part because your subconscious is looking to make that switch in the first place.
This makes sense if you’ve trained as an actor. You’re taught not to play an emotion. You are doing something under given circumstances. You have verbs. Those actions, how they move in your body, will often result in emotions. You feel through doing.
But that’s not all. Or, rather, that might not be it at all. Sociologist Margie Kerr claims that you aren’t confusing fear for arousal or arousal for fear. She says, “It's not misattribution of arousal, or misunderstanding ourselves — it's just that, in that moment, we're feeling what I would call sexy scared.” In otherwords, it’s both. You’re aroused in more ways than one.
She also says that fear and sex work on the same level. When fight or flight kicks in, you’re not stressed out about how many subscribers you’ve got on YouTube or whether or not you’re worth anything as an artist or if everyone secretly hates you. You’re locked in on surviving. You can only be in the now here this. Isn’t that also what good sex is like? The worst hookups of my life have been the ones where my mind can wander. There’s a reason people play music and movies, why they might over-vocalize. It’s all set-dressing and performance to drown out the brain. It’s to get you in the here and now.
Well that explains why we might find arousal at horror media or horror at sexuality. Sublimation explains a bit of how we get erotic horror or scary kinks. But what even is erotic horror?
Three - WTF is Erotic Horror?
I have a tendency to get bogged down into small word based elements that don’t really matter. For instance, I’m drawn to a discussion about erotic horror vs horror erotica. Typically in genre naming, the first word is a modifier of the second. For instance, a romantic fantasy is a fantasy story with a romantic subplot. This is most of what romantasy is. Fantasy romance on the other hand is a romance with fantasy elements. Do these distinctions really matter? I don’t particularly think so, but they’re interesting nonsense to me. So technically erotic horror would be a horror piece that is at times erotic… Right? Well, no. Erotica does not mean “fiction that is sexual.” Erotica is fiction where sex and sexual discovery are the drivers of plot and character. So an erotic horror is horror wherein sex, sexual discovery, and arousal are not incidental but rather integral to the story, to the fear, and to the catharsis. Horror erotica, on the other hand, is erotica that’s a bit scary or borrows elements from horror.
But for our purposes, imagine I’m talking about both when I say erotic horror.
Except… Can you have erotica without horror? And… can you even have horror without erotica?
I mean, obviously, yes. Right? I mean, Skinamarink is so devoid of anything approaching any type of arousal, horror or otherwise, I don’t think you could call that erotic horror… Right?
Tonight, when you’re off to bed, turn out all the lights. Stand there, look into the dark, and listen. What’s that noise? Who’s there? Who’s coming for you? Can you hear the whispers? Can you feel the darkness lap at your skin? It’s coming for you. There’s nothing you can do to stop it. The darkness will have you. Forever.
Isn’t that hot? I mean, a little, right? It’s a little hot.
An article in Decider ends with the following:
The genre has certainly come a long way since implying that all women who have sex are doomed to die, but it’s quite likely that the relationship between sex, violence, and horror will never wither – they’re just too interlocked to ever stand on their own.
When I read that I was originally a little apprehensive, mostly because I can think of non-violent horror and non-sexual horror. But the more I sat with it, the truer it became.
Horror as a genre, broadly speaking, is about the loss of control. Erotica, as a genre, broadly speaking, is about the struggle for control. Someone will lose it or surrender it. Human sexual intercourse is incapable of existing without surrender. It requires vulnerability, whether physical or emotional. To be vulnerable is to be frightened. Margie Kerr called is sexy scared instead of scared sexy because… there’s no other form of sexy.
Have you ever had the intrusive thought that you could just chomp down and literally swallow the sausage? I have. Sex is extreme vulnerability. To be vulnerable is to be easy to hurt. It is to make yourself prey. Sex is predation. It is violence. Things are impaling and slapping and burrowing and thrusting. These are words of violence.
Violence, sex, and horror are all about the body. They are inherently tied together.
So what’s with all the censorship?
If you recall back to the werewolf vampire knotty-naughty book from the start of the video, some of the scenes that made Rachel uncomfortable were the erotic blood-sucking scenes. This is a pretty common trope in vampire media, isn’t it? In the House of Night, both vampyres and their sentient blood bags feel pleasure during feeding. It’s akin to intimacy. This is furthered by the stereotypical spot to bite: the neck. Vampire slurps are, really, a more intense form of a common place sexual act: the hickey. Where are most hickeys left? On the neck. This is for several reasons. It’s the first spot you get to after a make-out. The neck is an erogenous zone on many people. It’s one of the more visible parts of flesh in human fashion, so there’s a higher chance of your claiming marks being seen by others. You get to cosplay being a vampire, and that’s sexy. What came first, the vampire or the hickey? Are we emulating horror monsters or did we create a monster for the purpose of furthering and extremifying already extant sexual behavior?
Regardless, you see this all the time in traditionally published art. You know where you won’t see it? In self-published work. Vampires are closely related to blood, but you’re not allowed to use fake blood on OnlyFans. Bloodplay is a no-go on Amazon and Smashwords, too. So unlike in the Ali Hazelwood book, indie authors aren’t allowed a scene where a vampire starts sucking and either of the characters get turned on by this, even if it’s fully consensual.
Does this make any sense? No, it does not. Does it understand what art is? No, it does not. Is it pointless censorship that these companies get away with because they have too much power and everyone is too afraid to get on their bad sides? Yes. I go into the whole credit card issue in my video on erotic censorship. I’m not going to go on a very long tangent about it here. But erotic horror is one of the most common forms of erotica and of horror and has been since the genres were invented, but moralizing, anti-art, idiotic companies have taken it upon themselves to ban art that makes them uncomfortable because they are incapable of understanding what art is.
If someone reads about a vampire draining someone while they have intercourse, is that person going to go out and do the same? No, that’s a stupid argument that can only be made if you assume the presence of sex suddenly changes what fiction is and how it functions. It does not. Erotica is not documentary. Porn is not documentary. These things are works of fiction.
OnlyFans and other sites don’t really allow “public play.” Assumedly this is based on concern about people appearing in the background of shots, which, yes, you do need the consent of anyone who appears in your films, that is part of being a filmmaker. It’s also likely out of partial concern that their models would then go out and break public decency laws, get caught, and they’d get some bad press. But here’s the thing: film is artifice. You can make it look like you’re doing something without actually doing it. If you film from specific angles in your car, you can make it look like you’re cruising in public… when really you’re parked in your own secluded yard.
What does that have to do with erotic horror? Well, half the appeal of public play is… the horror of it. It’s the thrill of the potential of getting caught. Getting down and dirty in a car risks ruining your life. That’s kinda hot. It’s a sexy scared.
Sex, violence, and horror are wrapped together. But self-publishing sites want them to be separated. They do not want violence in your erotica. They definitely don’t want it in the sex scenes, but there’s a chance you’ll get banned for having it in non-erotic scenes if the work, overall, is still erotica.
What is erotic horror? Arguably, everything.
Four - Vampires
But vampires. Vampires are inherently sexy, even when they’re gross and disturbing. They’re problematic in almost every single way, and that’s part of why they’re attractive. They’re attractive because they’re a horrifying fantasy.
But there’s something more to it.
A vampire is always a metaphor. Just like the killer in a slasher, chasing you down relentlessly to bury his knife inside you, is always an erotic metaphor.
In most versions of the vampire myth, they require human blood to live. They must feed. And you? Well… They have to have you specifically. You are what they need to live. It’s through your blood that they can continue. You are the object of desire. No, not desire. Necessity. When a vampire drinks your blood, you are giving them life. It is childbirth. It’s merging. The two become the one. You are so desirable and good that they will go to insane lengths to have the pleasure of being with you, of taking you, sometimes of making it so no one else can ever touch you again. To be made into a vampire is to get the ultimate marriage proposal: eternal life.
Isn’t it nice to know your life has meaning? To know that your very blood is capable of saving someone? Of living on in them. That isn’t just hot. That’s fulfilling. That’s divine. A vampire is a god who has singled you out as the blessed lamb.
To dream about being with a vampire is to dream about…
In Bob’s Burgers, Tina has her “erotic friend fiction” that sometimes includes zombies. The zombies aren’t threatening her most of the time. Why zombies, though? The show uses it for a joke, but erotic zombies are nearly the same metaphor as erotic vampires. You, your body, your brain, are so desirable that they will chase you to the ends of the earth. You are needed. They cannot live without you. You will be… consumed.
DHSM - default heterosexual sadomasochism. The receptive, submissive partner is the metaphorical “prey.”
I guess what I’m saying is… Erotic horror is the most common genre. It’s the genre that is constantly fearmongered about and censored. It is under attack from anti-sex, anti-art, anti-human weirdos, including those who run sex and art companies. It is all of sex. When you get down to it… It’s all a vore kink.
Sources
“I read Ali Hazelwood’s new SPICY WEREWOLF book” - Reads with Rachel | YouTube
The Good Place - Michael Schur
“Twilight” - ContraPoints | YouTube
“The anti-art, anti-sex movement destroying the internet” - Jarred Corona | YouTube
“ORC ROMANCE, MONSTERS, and BOOKTOK” - Reads with Rachel | YouTube
“Colleen Hoover BROKE ME” - Rachel Oates | YouTube
“Colleen Hoover is OVERRATED.” - Alizee | YouTube
“A Lukewarm Defense of Fifty Shades of Grey” - Folding Ideas | YouTube
“‘Nosferatu’s outdated take on female sexuality is frustrating” - Kirsten Carey | The Mary Sue
“‘Nosferatu’ is so much more than horny: A short history of vampire media and what it REALLY represents” - Olivia Rolls | The Mary Sue
“Robert Eggers’ ‘Nosferatu’ Rejects Eroticism To Portray A Harrowing Reality” - Mary Beth McAndrews | Dread Central
“The Sensual Horror Of ‘Nosferatu,’ Explained” - Dani Di Placido | Forbes
“The Surprising Reason Why You Find Horror Films... A Little Bit Sexy” - Dayna McAlpine | Huffington Post
“Horror and Sex: Why You Should Incorporate Scary Movies into Your Sex Life” - Matthew Lachman | Cleveland Sex Therapy
“Misattribution: How We Mistake Fear for Love” - SciShow Psych | YouTube
“Why Do Horror Movies Make You Horny? You May Be ‘Sexy Scared’” - Molly Longman | Refinery 29
“Sex & Horror: How Sexuality Shapes The Genre” - Jade Budowski | Deadline
Links
https://www.themarysue.com/nosferatus-outdated-take-on-female-sexuality-is-frustrating/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2024/12/29/the-sensual-horror-of-nosferatu-explained/
https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/why-do-horror-movies-turn-you-on
https://decider.com/2017/10/26/sex-horror-how-sexuality-shapes-the-genre/
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