There are probably more interpretations of his surreal images than frames of film that comprise them, but I think I’ve mapped at least one tiny fragment of the man’s worldview: he seems simultaneously terrified and attracted to sex. If a director could be singled out for dissecting more of his own mental hangups on film than any other artist, David Lynch would get my vote. It comes out of left field and completely flips the story in the most sudden and nightmarish way possible… and then we fade to black. Stephen King listed the film’s last scene in his horror thesis Danse Macabre as one of the scariest ever committed to film, and I can see why. Diane Keaton’s deeply troubled schoolteacher tries to chase away her personal demons through drugs and a series of rough one-night stands, but when she picks up a disturbed man (Tom Berenger) on New Year’s Eve, she gets far more than she bargained for. ![]() This 1977 drama, based on a novel (and a true story), is the least horror-themed film on this list, but the final minutes are among the scariest I’ve ever witnessed. It probably goes without saying, but I should point out that there’s a few naughty bits on display here, so this post is not entirely work-safe. In horror, it’s sometimes hard to define these things. The intercourse in most of these scenes is more or less consensual… or at least within the context of the story. Please note that I’m trying to avoid scenes depicting overt rape, as that represents a very different kind of monster (in other words, no Evil Dead tree-porking or rape-revenge scenarios like I Spit on Your Grave). ![]() Not all of these scenes come from horror films, but they are all unquestionably the stuff of nightmares… and probably caused many hours of intense therapy among sensitive viewers. In that light, I’ve selected some significant cinematic examples of physical love taken to its most horrific extremes. Of course, wherever fear lurks, eventually someone will step in to capitalize on it… and no creative medium captures the collective imagination more completely than the movies. ![]() As open-minded and progressive as we often pretend to be as a culture, I suspect that, deep down, Americans are still pretty scared of sex – and even of ourselves as sexual beings. Whether Hitch made that exact declaration or not, the concept is still disturbing – and says a lot about artists, storytellers and audiences’ relationship to sex in general. Alfred Hitchcock once delivered a disturbing bit of directorial advice: “Film your love scenes like murders, and your murders like love scenes.” Or something like that… the details are a bit vague.
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