This post contains spoilers for The Afterparty Season 2.
Erotic thrillers are having a moment. The genre that dominated the ‘80s and ‘90s with adults-only blockbusters like Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction, and Indecent Proposal isn’t making a comeback per se, but it’s certainly earning a critical re-evaluation. Over the past few years, erotic thrillers have become the subject of countless online rankings and retrospectives, and they even have their own section on the Criterion Channel. Perhaps most notably, Karina Longworth’s popular podcast You Must Remember This is in the midst of what has become a years-long deep dive into late 20th-century erotic cinema, an exhaustive history that comes complete with a companion screening series in Los Angeles.
The genre may be on the minds of American movie lovers lately, but it’s not exactly having a creative resurgence to match. In 2022, Fatal Attraction filmmaker Adrian Lyne returned to his erotic thriller roots with the Ben Affleck and Ana De Armas-led Deep Water, but the straight-to-Hulu movie, with its symbolic snails and murderous sex games, didn’t manage to turn the genre around. Last week, though, a new, unexpected hero emerged in the fight to revive (and roast) America’s most entertainingly sleazy movie genre: The Afterparty.
Christopher Miller’s homage-filled murder mystery series, which streams new episodes weekly on Apple TV+, has been firing on all cylinders in Season 2. A season-long plot involving an eclectic group of wedding guests, all of them suspects in the murder of the groom, has so far given us a noir-style mystery starring Paul Walter Hauser, a pitch-perfect Wes Anderson parody led by Anna Konkle, and more. But the creativity on display in the first half of the season pales in comparison to episode six, in which the former Detective Danner (Tiffany Haddish) shares the lurid details of one of her past cases with an increasingly grossed-out Aniq (Sam Richardson). The result is a screamingly funny half-hour of television that’s also a pitch-perfect encapsulation of why erotic thrillers rock – and why they often stink, too.
The episode’s most obvious influence is the 1992 Paul Verhoeven film Basic Instinct, though it hilariously flips the gendered script of that movie at every turn. Instead of a male detective being led by his libido, it’s Danner, and instead of a femme fatale with an ice pick, it’s Michael Ealy’s Quentin Devereaux, a smoldering psychiatrist who can’t stop talking about how he’s “a pyromaniac for sex.” It’s a fittingly absurd turn of phrase given that Danner is investigating a series of arsons when she meets him. But like any great, over-the-top erotic thriller of decades past, she soon puts her reason aside to ignite a passionate affair instead.
“Danner’s Fire” nails the silly and stupid tropes of the erotic thriller genre as well as the sexy ones. In a move that would make a Michael Douglas protagonist proud, Danner consistently ignores the obvious – Quentin’s guilt is clear from the start thanks to his intense, fire-filled monologues – simply for the sake of having lots of overwrought, kinky sex. In one scene, Ealy and Haddish gamely parody the infamous food play sequence from 9 ½ Weeks (another Lyne film) in which Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke use a bunch of ingredients from a refrigerator as a form of messy foreplay. Where that movie aimed for sensuality, “Dannier’s Fire” goes for outright comedy, delivering a montage in which Danner puts bagels over Quentin’s nipples, covers herself in condiments, and pours dry elbow macaroni on his face while he talks dirty to her.
What The Afterparty seems to understand that many attempts to revive the erotic thriller genre don’t is that these movies are just as fun because of their bad parts as their good parts. “Danner’s Fire” portrays the genre as thinly written and kind of dumb, overflowing with aesthetic and sexual excesses that are as ridiculous as they are mesmerizing. As Longworth’s Erotic ‘80s and ‘90s podcasts explain, that’s not an inaccurate portrayal of the types of movies that became mainstream when filmmakers like Lyne and Verhoeven and screenwriters like Joe Eszterhas ruled the scene. Erotic thrillers can reveal a lot about our culture’s relationship with sex and gender, but they can also be very silly, and it’s in that silliness that The Afterparty thrives.
Ealy is the episode’s secret weapon, delivering increasingly goofy lines with a sultry deadpan that’s impossible not to laugh at. When asked what his client’s karaoke song of choice is, he answers, “William Joel: “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” In a moment that feels totally in line with the unfortunately under-negotiated kink that saturated the genre, Quentin pauses five seconds into the pair’s first kiss to demand that Danner, in her words, “hit [his] pectoral.” I can imagine The Afterparty could make an entire blooper reel out of this episode alone, as each and every scene asks Haddish and Ealy to do something downright wild.
At episode’s end, “Danner’s Fire” leans into one of the most prevalent genre cliches, in which the protagonist, in an intimate moment, finds out her lover was the culprit the whole time. In this case, Danner unveils a comically awful (and indecent) stick figure drawing of a woman, discovering that Quentin isn’t actually a painter and – duh – uses the massive amounts of turpentine around his house to set fires. Like everything else in the story, the couple plays the scene straight, but when Danner tells Aniq she ended up tied to a bedpost while the room went up in flames around her, he can’t help but comment that this all sounds outlandish.
There’s a lot to love about The Afterparty’s riff on erotic thrillers, but one of its cleverest moves is to insert characters who provide meta-commentary on both the benefits and drawbacks of the now-rare genre. Aniq serves as the voice of a younger generation that doesn’t see the appeal of an excessive and graphic story; he asks Danner more than once if he really needs all these details, and in a moment that feels like a nod to the endless sex scene discourse permeating the internet, she insists that the scene matters because they talked about the case at the same time. His aversion to – and disbelief in – the erotic thriller is countered by John Early’s Culp, who rolls his eyes at Danner’s blind infatuation but also praises her for her sexually liberated adventures.
“Danner’s Fire” isn’t a defense of the erotic thriller genre, because like every other genre included in this series, it shouldn’t have to justify its existence. It’s a wide-ranging storytelling format full of great and not-so-great entries, and this week’s episode clearly understands that. The erotic thriller may not need another defense, but it was well overdue for a funny, melodramatic, and – above all else – genuinely loving skewering. Thankfully, like Culp blindly shooting his gun into a room full of smoke, The Afterparty came along to save the day.
