Shannon Tweed was one of home video’s most rented erotic thriller goddesses.

“I’d like to say I had foresight and (anticipated the trend),” she says, good-naturedly. I had to end up being a bigger fish in a smaller pond.” It was the only thing I could get at the time. Really, what Basic Instinct did was cast the die and establish the formula for these films: “beautiful woman gets in trouble, is stalked, has a horrible boyfriend, is the target of some kind of sinister plot. But through it all, she has time to take all of her clothes off and spend quite a bit of time making love to somebody,” Arnold explained. When Basic Instinct hit, some savvy producers titled their erotic thrillers with suspiciously similar-sounding names to hook less-discriminating video store patrons. Also celebrating their 25th anniversaries this year are the voyeurism drama Animal Instincts ( All you have to do. is watch), starring Shannon Whirry, and Fatal Instinct ( Following your instincts can be murder)-not to be confused with Carl Reiner’s parody of the genre released a year later. The films flooded shelves, leading Blockbuster-which, as America’s family store, did not stock unrated movies-to create its own rating, 17+, and to establish the erotic thriller as its own genre section.

“There was a point in time when we were a little on the staid side,” he said. But the erotic thriller was fun, and it was just titillation. We were always amused when the screeners would come in.” Executives would try to project how many times a title would rent based on how many nude scenes it contained.ĭirect-to-video producers would generally release R-rated and unrated versions of these films, the latter of which might have mere seconds of extra nudity.

Shannon whirry animal instinct