The 25 Horniest Movies of the Decade

9. Crimson Peak

Who’s hornier than siblings who fuck? Between this and Game of Thrones, the answer is absolutely no one. In Guillermo del Toro’s criminally underrated Gothic ghost story Crimson Peak, a young woman named Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowski) is betrothed to the utterly enchanting Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) after her father’s mysterious death, and she unknowingly enters into a love triangle with her new husband and his own sister, Lady Lucille Sharpe (Jessica Chastain) set against their Gothic, ghost-invested mansion atop a fittingly blood-red clay mine. Lucille doesn’t like to share her brother with other bitches – nuh-uh, that d*ck stays in the family, and Lucille has it out for the women that Thomas brings home time and time again; until the siblings kill these women and overtake their vast fortunes, of course. Horny for each other and horny for money, as Thomas’s genuine attraction for poor Edith threatens to conflict he and his sister’s nefarious plans, it seems that putting their entire lives horny on main only led to their untimely demise. (Brianna Zigler)

8. High Life

This sci-fi Robert Pattinson vehicle is more George Bataille than ‎André Aciman. In other words, it’s a cruel, violent, cringe-worthy take on erotic storytelling—one with a debauched nature, not a romantic one. Setting a film in a prismatic, sperm-mining space prison careening through the cosmos isn’t the best way to make it onto a naughty list, but Claire Denis doesn’t play by the rules. Her lascivious tale of prisoners-turned-lab-rats is downright fucked up, but the rich, textural film grain, constant mood lighting, and casting of Juliette Binoche as a witchy, jet-black-haired scientist obsessed with semen will do wonders for your libido. And no matter how lecherous it becomes, or how uneasy you feel about the stimulation creeping up your nethers, remember that it was intended. High Life is a film that wants to confuse your loins. Hell, it devotes several minutes to the filming of what Denis has coined the “fuckbox,” a versatile, hi-tech room cube made to pleasure the person inside and clean up afterward. And yeah, Denis knows we don’t need a shot of the dildo penetrating Binoche from the inside, but she also knows it’ll shock us, and no one else will do it. Horny or otherwise, her films are always one of a kind. (Luke Hicks)

7. Diary of a Teenage Girl

At its best, Diary of a Teenage Girl is a clever and honest look at the double-edged sword of a young woman’s sexual agency. Marielle Heller‘s adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner‘s graphic novel makes teen horniness look like a kind of superpower. Minnie (Bel Powley) begins an affair with her mother’s boyfriend (Alexander Skarsgaard), but quickly grows bored with him as she learns to love her body, own her sexual power, and explore the limits of her inhibitions. Diary of a Teenage Girl isn’t a perfect movie–that punishing third act feels like a cautionary tale we’ve seen way too many times–but its warm and playful approach to teen sexuality winningly flips the script on the stereotypical seducer-or-abuser story while still ultimately treating its subject with care.  (Valerie Ettenhofer)

6. Magic Mike XXL

As fate would have it, nothing fucks harder than positive vibes. And Magic Mike XXL is chock full of unabashed positivity and gleefull horniness. There’s the surface level horniness that comes from watching Mike (Channing Tatum) and his well-sculpted stripping compatriots do what they do best under neon lights (the horniest of all lights). But there’s also a deeper form of horniness on display: the fact that the film is practically screaming from a rooftop about how good it is to make other people feel good. Magic Mike XXL is a film about finding your groove and utilizing said groove to help others. Sometimes that help is listening to people when they have something to say, sometimes it’s giving a stranger a hand when they need it most, and, yes, sometimes it’s a beautifully choreographed lapdance. The point is to find joy in a world that can otherwise be cold and impersonal. There’s nothing hornier than a movie with a great big heart. (Anna Swanson)

5. The Handmaiden

Park Chan-wook’s adaptation of Sarah Waters’ novel Fingersmith is at once an achingly tender love story and a sleekly twisted Hitchcockian thriller. If you were online around the time of it’s release, though, you’d be forgiven for only remembering the thing that everyone talked about: the sex. In terms of kink, The Handmaiden is a bit like the Pornhub category list; it’s got some things you’ll like, some things that’ll make you uncomfortable, and some things you may not have even heard of. Ben-wa balls, self-asphyxiation, and a nefarious offscreen octopus are just a few of the unexpected elements that tie together the film’s psychosexual and erotic sides. But it’s much more than the sum of its kinks: together, Lady Hideko (Kim Min-Lee) and Soo-kee (Kim Tae-ri) are a perfect mix of innocence and elegance, of anxiety and security. Several scenes follow the plotlines of the erotica Hideko reads, but the most overwhelmingly sensual moments go off book, as when Soo-kee sands down her lady’s sharp tooth in the bathtub. Don’t let anything you’ve heard about The Handmaiden keep you from seeing it; despite the men directing this romance from both behind the camera and in front, this lesbian epic belongs to the women who anchor it. (Valerie Ettenhofer)

4. Climax

Imagine if thirty people in your vicinity wanted to kill you and fuck you at the same time: that’s Gaspar Noe’s Climax. When an already incredibly horny dance troupe is lured to an empty, possibly witchcraft-adjacent school, some sangria spiked with LSD turns their dance rehearsal turns into an erotic, drug-fueled nightmare that descends into a mess of blood and perversion nearly beyond comprehension. The film is a constant push-me, pull-me between revulsion and arousal, between eroticism and nausea – one could even say the two opposites end up complementing one another, as acts of horror run parallel to acts of pleasure. The film is as if a wet dream and a fever dream held hands and did cocaine, less of a structured narrative and more of a test of one’s willingness to witness a total deterioration of humanity in real time. If you’re horny for horrible things, you’ll probably love Climax. And even if you’re horny for normal things, you still might like Climax. There’s truly something for everyone in there. (Brianna Zigler)

3. Nymphomaniac, Vol. I and II

Horny movies are like a charcuterie board: there’s a wide variety of tastes, some that are expected, others that might surprise you. One that surprises, courtesy of Lars von Trier, is the “I don’t know if I like this but it’s weird and I’m intrigued” type of horny movie. Nymphomaniac (or, more precisely, the very good Nymphomaniac: Vol. I and the absolutely fantastic Nymphomaniac: Vol. II) chronicles Joe’s (Charlotte Gainsbourg) sexual exploits from adolescence to adulthood. Sometimes her escapades are devilishly enjoyable, other times rather dire. Either way, she be fuckin’. A lot. Joe dips her toe into every type of sexual (mis)adventure imaginable and von Trier takes us right along with her. The film and its protagonist have a penchant for pushing boundaries and even the most seasoned veteran of NC-17 fun will find something here that jolts them. Anyway, the moral of the story is that you should definitely watch Nymphomaniac on a plane. Just trust me on that one. (Anna Swanson)

2. The Shape of Water

Okay, so it didn’t quite make the top spot, but Guillermo del Toro’s fairytale-like reimagining of The Creature from the Black Lagoon as an interspecies romance is hands down the horniest Best Picture winner of all time, so there’s that. I mean, it’s a movie about a woman who wants to bang a fish-man. Fish-god? Point is, it’s worth noting that the Amphibian Man definitely does not have your standard parts down below, and Elisa (Sally Hawkins) really wants to open up that mystery box. So much so that she risks life and limb to break him out of a super-secret military research facility run by the menacing Colonel Strickland (Michael Shannon) to keep him in one sexually-functional piece. There is no menacing more menacing than menacing Michael Shannon. Willingly making an enemy of him is like going to war against a demon. It is not something you do if you are being logical and making decisions with your head. Oh no, these are the sort of choices you make using different, lower parts of your anatomy. And if you’re the sort of sweet, pure soul who read that last sentence and thought I was suggesting she made these decisions with her heart… sure, her “heart.” Let’s go with that. Anyway, the OG Creature from the Black Lagoon was a seriously horny dude, and the entire existence of The Shape of Water seems to rooted in GDT asking “but what if a woman was horny back?” and that is a powerful act of cinematic horniness right there. (Ciara Wardlow)

1. Phantom Thread

How horny do you have to be to not only poison the love of your life, but to want to be poisoned by them in turn? Truly couple goals of the century. Paul Thomas Anderson’s lustful lil period drama is number 1 on this list simply because it defies all expectations of horniness. The film is the cinematic equivalent of edging – like fucking yourself until you’re on the cusp of climax but forcing yourself to stop, doing this over and over so that the eventual orgasm you have is especially pleasurable. The film is restrained, sensible but entirely repressed and positively throbbing with pent-up sexual energy, released at the end of the film when two ever-embittered lovers Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Alma Elson (Vicky Krieps) discover their constant cycle of affection and distaste for one another can be sated by indulging in an act of masochism. The bourgeois sensibilities of 1950s London – given immense delicacy and care by Anderson’s filmmaking – find themselves at odds with Alma and Reynolds’ sexual perversions, making the whole thing even more delightful. It makes it feel ok to indulge in the couples’ masochistic tendencies – like a veneer coating covering up a base layer of grime.

There’s a scene in which Reynolds peeps at Alma wearing one of his dresses through a keyhole, a seemingly innocent act, and that’s what the entire film ends up being like. A perverse act of voyeurism glittered up in beautiful wrapping to shelter the deviance underneath it. The most fucked-up things are the ones that don’t appear fucked-up at all on the surface, and the kinkiness at the heart of the prim and proper Phantom Thread makes it a masterful horny film for the ages. (Brianna Zigler)

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