You might think that movies have had no effect on your sexuality, but unless you live in a snowcave in Antarctica, you probably haven’t had much choice in the matter, so pervasive is the medium, so deeply do its images linger in the subconscious. Voyeurism, after all, is participation, and the power of movies, whether driven by art or commerce, concerned with romanticism or realism, glamour or banality, is tremendous. Those flickering images hypnotize, scandalize, seduce and mirror something of our dream life.

Between reruns of Jackie Gleason or Jacques Cousteau and the fire-and-brimstone sermons of The World Tomorrow (a Christian program that itself possessed a sort of pornographic appeal), I scanned the handful of still-airing channels for any signs of “adult content.” And it wasn’t just the badly dubbed ’70s Swedish soft-core flicks that put lead in my pencil, but the old black and white movies that, while deemed more wholesome than the raunchy releases of my youth, seemed moulded by hands that understood the true nature of suggestiveness and sensuality, movies that, if nothing else, were a hell of a lot sexier than Porky’s.

Sex informs so many of the early cinema’s most memorable moments, from Louise Brooks’s unrepentant pleasure-seeker in Pandora’s Box (1929) to a writhing Fay Wray getting sniffed by the beast in King Kong (1933) to Siamese-twin love in Freaks (1932) to Marlene Dietrich’s cross-dressing power games in Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco (1930)—that immortal vamp in pants, adopting provocative male postures and turning everybody on.

The movies’ fixation on sex has never really diminished or been inhibited, even by censorship. Restraint, after all, is one of the cornerstones of arousal, and, if anything, movies from the studio era, that period during which the Production Code had producers leery even of on-screen kisses, are to this day some of the most sexually compelling in existence.

If Lauren Bacall instructing soon-to-be husband Humphrey Bogart how to put his lips together and blow in Howard Hawks’s To Have and Have Not (1944) was a triumph of showing healthy, happy, hetero sex between a charismatic couple in a mainstream Hollywood film, and Notorious (1946) allowed megastar Ingrid Bergman to seductively glamourize the hedonistic “bad girl,” it was the genre-bound B-movies of the same period that permitted more subversive forms of transgression to slip in.

Film noir is so packed with sex it’s difficult to know where to start pulling examples, though some are more charged than others. I’m thinking of classics like Double Indemnity (1945), but even more of dirtier little thrillers like Born to Kill (1947), that scene where Claire Trevor and Lawrence Tierney get hot while describing in detail a grisly murder scene.

Westerns were always ripe for queer readings, but never more richly encoded than in Johnny Guitar (1954), with Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge upstaging the cowboys to enter a showdown of domination and humiliation.

Horror films were also infused with complicated, kinky and deadly sex, particularly those made for RKO by Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur. They’re fraught with Freudian undercurrents, like Cat People (1942), where Simone Simon fears surrendering to desire will transform her into a man-eating panther.

The beautiful irony of these films is that, in their exploitation of female sexual mystique, they’re able to build some of the most complex and resolutely active female characters in film.

Once we delve into the latter half of the 20th century, everything changes in regards to sex and movies. Restrictions gradually break down and sex is shown in increasingly explicit detail, until we reach the point where strict definitions of pornography and “legitimate” film become blurred, a debate that still overshadows films like the upcoming Shortbus as persistently as it did Nagisa Oshima’s erotic masterpiece In the Realm of the Senses back in 1976.

You have to wonder what we lost when we gained our right to see it all. I mentioned the power of restraint and suggestion earlier: is there anything sexier than Bacall’s smouldering banter with Bogey; than the young Marlon Brando rubbing his lips like a hungry animal; than Bibi Andersson telling the perversely silent Liv Ullman about having spontaneous sex with a strange boy in Persona (1966); than Marcia Gay Harden, her back to Ed Harris, inviting the mad painter to bed with the mere slipping off of her shoes in a dark hallway in Pollock (2000)?

A few movies have managed to use the new permissiveness to evoke the sheer joy of sex, ie Y Tu Mamá También (2001). But uncorrupted, joyful sex can only be so fruitful in movies—we’re dealing with drama here—while our cosmic frustration with the slippery, unstable laws of desire generally make for more vital cinema.

Take the late Shohei Imamura’s The Pornographers (1966), a bizarre, touched-by-genius cocktail of pseudo-incest, superstition and Super 8 that follows a man’s journey into reclusion and latex doll development as the final sole means of seeking his ever-elusive erotic fulfilment. Or Murmur of the Heart (1971), which audaciously imagines a boy’s more or less healthy sexual development that includes incest. Or Blue Velvet (1986), where immersion into an underworld of co-dependency and sadomasochism becomes the hero’s entrance into adulthood.

Perhaps what’s interesting now isn’t how sexy movies are but how they reflect social changes and the subterranean shadows of our collective sex life, which can now be addressed in broader configurations, finally making room for not only (insert huge sigh of relief here) homosexuality, but a sexuality beyond any rigid classification.

Luis Buñuel’s career spans most of cinema’s history and his films spread out across several countries. It’s an extensive body of work, yet from the surrealist violence of Un chien andolou (1929) through sumptuously neurotic Mexican films like El (1953) to his late French films like Belle du Jour (1967), we’re presented with a filmography virtually unequalled in its consistent and explicit preoccupation with fetish, perversity and desire.

These themes are explored with loving craftsmanship in Hitchcock’s films, in the layers of voyeurism in Rear Window (1954), the reeling sexual obsession of Vertigo (1958) or the Oedipal role play and shocking narrative coitus interruptus of Psycho (1960), but in Buñuel, so fundamentally opposed to the Hollywood “bourgeois” gloss Hitchcock nurtured, we see such motifs taken to much farther extremes, manifesting in characters akin to scorpions or sheep, characters who kill themselves just to keep someone closer, until the equation of desire and annihilation reaches its strange climax in random terrorism in the director’s swan song That Obscure Object of Desire (1977).

Perhaps the only other major career comparably fixated with the undigested murk of human sexuality is that of David Cronenberg, who proudly hails from a country internationally recognized for its cinematic perversity: Canada (also home to such illustrious pervs as Atom Egoyan and Guy Maddin).

Cronenberg’s unflinching interest in the body provides access to views of sexuality found nowhere else in film. Then again, you could say that Cronenberg is simply following through on what’s come before and incorporating more sophisticated investigative processes from other media (visual art, literature, science) into his creative process. The controversy surrounding Crash (1996) focused on the preposterousness of equating arousal with violent collision, but consider what such a connection owes to Born to Kill, or how Cronenberg’s careful arrangements of men, women and various apparatus reflect our relationship to pornography.

Like Videodrome (1982), Naked Lunch (1991) or eXistenZ (1999), Crash proposes that we’ve reached a point where the apparatus of arousal has become inseparable from our investment in the sex act. Torture on television, disorienting drugs or crashed cars offer an entry into arousal via a connection with catastrophe, and Cronenberg’s realization of this connection, however metaphorical, is the modernization of the sex/death equation that lies at the heart of erotic drama.

In turning to filmmakers like Buñuel, Hitchcock or Cronenberg, we can get an idea of how certain artists advance the exploration of sex in movies, but it still limits us to films formed by what’s been termed the male gaze, the breaking up of bodies—especially females—into parts.

An excellent example of a filmmaker whose work is completely antithetical to this is Catherine Breillat, whose confrontational depiction of female erotic self-actualization and use of un-simulated sex scenes, like in the ironically titled Romance (1999), earned her a contentious reputation.

But, while concerned with something as seemingly safe and familiar as teen sibling rivalry, I think Fat Girl (2001) is the one that really stands out as being genuinely provocative and intellectually stimulating. Rather than cutting up her females, Breillat’s camera hovers over them for hypnotic, extended sequences, like the scene in which the prettier, 15-year-old sister negotiates the loss of her virginity with a college student while her obese, 12-year-old sister looks on. It’s a brilliant, observant, sensitive and deeply unsettling film that calls into question social assumptions about the construction of female sexuality.

Once you open the folds of a subject like sex in movies, you realize the possibilities for discussion are almost endless, at least as numerous as there are films to inspire and viewers to absorb.

When I asked my editor if she’d like a sex-in-movies story, I absurdly believed I could somehow lasso the topic, boil it down, contain it; now I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface, addressed only a few of its many facets, and mainly the darker ones, without even mentioning the way movies can use sex to express transcendence, something that pops up in films as diverse as Altered States (1980), Three Colours: Blue (1993) and Battle in Heaven (2005).

This is cache, read story here