While a somewhat inconsistent viewing experience overall, the patchiness is owed perhaps for the genre-jumping experimenting of screenwriter Quentin Tarantino––who regrettably also co-stars––and overzealous director Robert Rodriguez in this amalgam crime/action/horror/comedy which, despite its many flaws, is still an enjoyable B-movie and something of a midnight cult hit. This one’s for diehards and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else, but the extreme masochism, dysfunction and themes of social isolation and despair combine with a strange eroticism that will appeal to a select and skewered few. Wait, there’s more (including a ménage à trois with a corpse and a steel pipe), but, amidst all the nastiness and taboo smashing Buttgereit actually injects a lot of satire on bourgeois mores––Rob stops defiling corpses long enough for a short-lived warm-blooded romance with Betty (Beatrice Manowski)––and even features a whip-smart slasher parody via an extended film-within-a-film sequence. The film focusses on one Rob Schmadtke (Daktari Lorenz), an employee for Joe’s Cleaning Agency where he cleans up corpses from road accidents and that sort of thing, and this is all catnip for Rob, who loves defiling corpses. On the surface there’s little to recommend about this shocker aside from gratuitous cruelty and, as the title suggests, necrophilia, but what else would one expect from West Berlin exploitation legend Jörg Buttgereit (Horror Heaven)? There’s a few here that are flat-out trash––those can still be fun––and others that are camp, and others too that are thoughtful, artistic, and even, I would argue, grandiose. Rather than delve into the sexual politics at play here this list instead takes pains to detail genre films that see eroticism and sex in ways that are titillating and, on occasion sublime.

Horror by its very nature is exploitative, and combine this with ideas of eroticism and sexuality and you’ll have the pious and the uptight squirming in their seats while the repressed and the churlish similarly agonize and gnash. Many of the films listed here are polarizing, which should come as a shock to no one. Wish-fulfillment sex and violence make for fascinating bedfellows and always have, and this list will please both genre fans and those looking for a chilling provocation.

Horror films have always tiptoed around or bludgeoned straight on through modes of stimulation and fright.

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