Do you remember the first time you were eroticial excited by an image on a screen? It might've been a music video to a teen-pop bop, or a particularly mushy episode of Buffy. Most likely, it was a movie of the PG-13 persuasion, which you snuck a viewing of far from the eyes of your parents when you were nowhere near the age of 13. Looking back, those scenes were cute. Harmless. Nowhere near the erotic scenes you've seen in movies since you branched out into the R-rated category and beyond.
Erotic scenes are nearly as old
as movies themselves. In fact, one of the first films to be screened
for the public debuted in 1896 and was called The Kiss. It was
quite steamy for its time, featuring a full-on brushing of the lips,
which, let us tell you, really riled up the modest-minded folks of the
late 19th century. But these days, a movie erotic scene has to accomplish a
lot more to be memorable—especially when we've been so impressed by the
earth-shattering erotic scenes appearing in television shows of late. It has to be downright crazy.
"Crazy" can be broadly interpreted in the realm of onscreen erotic. There's the hot stuff that begs for repeated rewatchings. There are downright hilarious eroticial interactions that involve comedic timing, musical numbers, awkward improv, and/or puppets. There are scenes from horror movies that make us recoil in disgust, and boundary-pushing scenes that inspire a trove of thought pieces. There's most of what Micky Rourke touched in the '80s. Here's a selection of 50 such movie erotic scenes, from the classics to recent releases, each one seemingly crazier than the next.
1.
Released: 2010
Directed by: Derek Cianfrance
Actors: Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling
Fun fact: This film was originally slapped with an NC-17 rating because of its realistic oral sex scene, giving some interesting insight into how female pleasure on screen is critiqued. Gosling's response: “You shouldn’t be penalized for doing a good job.”
2.
Released: 2016
Directed by: Park Chan-wook
Actors: Kim Tae-ri and Kim Min-hee
Fun fact: To shoot the lesbian sex scene in a way that made his leads feel comfortable, Park gave the male crew members the day off, hired a female boom operator, and filmed the encounter with a remote controlled camera.
3.
Released: 2017
Directed by: Luca Guadagnino
Actors: Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer
Fun fact: In the first and only rehearsal for this film, Guadagnino had his actors immediately act out the scene where they make out furiously. (This is also the film that launched a thousand peach memes.)
4.
Released: 2019
Directed by: Ari Aster
Actors: Jack Reynor, Isabelle Grill, and a lot of extras
Fun fact: It took two grueling weeks to film this nudity-filled, crazy-yet-terrifying ritualistic sex scene.
5.
Released: 2015-2018
Directed by: Sam Taylor-Johnson; James Foley
Actors: Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan
Fun fact: This soft-core take on BDSM pulled in over $1 billion at the box office across all three movies. The books they was based on were actually fan-fic for the Twilight tween series.