Sex in Fantastic Cinema

Sex (in the context of this page) refers to the process of attraction and reproduction in human and other species. For films that tells stories about attraction between people see Romance and Romantic Comedies. For horror films set around pregnancy and birthing see Pregnancy Horrors. For films designed for the purposes of titillation see Erotica and Pornography. For more specific discussions about sexuality see LGBT Themes and Sexual Fetishism in Fantastic Cinema. All other discussions are found here.

Treatments of sex in fantastic cinema can range from futures where love is free to those where sex is banned, regarded as obsolete or where humanity has been rendered sterile. Other films deal with ways in which Virtual Reality may transform the nature of sexuality.

There is also some depictions of how aliens might reproduce. In 1950s science-fiction, aliens came to Earth to find women or else male astronauts would encounter all-women planets and introduce them to some good lovin’. As with Captain Kirk’s intergalactic romances on Star Trek (1966-9), it is usually assumed there will be attraction between human and human-like aliens.

We even have several films about robots and computers desiring to have sex. Not to mention that various monsters from King Kong (1933) onwards have a habit of carrying away the heroine of the show. Demons also desire to breed with humans. The most notably different form of alien breeding comes with the title creature in Alien (1979) and sequels, which uses human beings to lay its eggs in.

The horror film has usually had a negative relationship with sex from Norman Bates killing the women who aroused him in Psycho (1960) to the death of the promiscuous and survival of the virginal Final Girl in the Slasher Film to the unhealthy relationship of eroticism and psychopathology in the psycho-sexual thrillers from Basic Instinct (1992) onwards. There are several horror films about deadly infections that can be transmitted sexually.