Even the grisliest portrayals of single-girl city life made lousy PSAs. Their vulgar trappings didn’t repel; they dazzled, perhaps because their layering of sex and murder captured something fundamental about desire—its connection to both pleasure and pain, vulnerability and aggression. Anna gives in to the strange caller’s advances; mysterious and severe, he promises infinite gratification, whereas her droopy boyfriend is a known quantity—she knows he’s incapable of making her come. Obeying the instructions that the caller delivers to her over the phone, she slathers herself in orange pulp, masturbating as the camera zooms in on her legs and breasts dripping with juicy fruit. The scene is as ridiculous and transportive as sex—good sex, the kind of sex that puts you on a different wavelength and makes you forget how you’re supposed to behave.

The artifice of this scene is characteristic of the genre, which abounds in fantasies that speak truths that realism can’t capture. Some of these films seem to declare their own artifice in ways that call attention to the latent archaic and/or bigoted ideas that fuel the cultural imaginary. Take Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion (1984), which explores the ways that, under the guise of sexual role-playing, any proclivity or taboo can be shielded from judgment. A candy-colored giallo set in what looks like Kenneth Anger’s Los Angeles, the film depicts the tawdry nightlife scene where Joanna (Kathleen Turner, fresh off her vampy breakout role in Body Heat) turns tricks with the giddy exuberance of a slot machine. One of her customers is Bobby (John Laughlin), a stunted suburban father too dim to recognize the banality of his all-American life before she comes across his radar. Joanna pops the bubble of his bourgeois satisfaction, but that’s only one of the film’s illusions; Joanna peddles male fantasies as a means of satisfying her own. An austere fashion designer by day, she is an in-demand prostitute named China Blue by night, compartmentalizing to the extreme because she can’t come to grips with being both an intimidating career woman and a highly sexual person. Joanna cheerfully caters to her clients’ bizarre wishes: in one scene, she sodomizes a cop with his own nightstick; in another, she runs through the streets, posing as a victimized woman, to bring a john’s rape fantasy to life. She subverts the power dynamics of sexual assault by generating it on her own terms. The opportunity to escape definition, to buck society’s rules, offers sweet abandon, even as it risks upending the stability of one’s life.

In erotic thrillers, charges of rape and domestic violence are usually revealed to be the manipulations of wicked women. Like the postwar femme fatale, these characters are too smart and too attractive for their own good, making them criminals particularly well suited to an era characterized by a sharp increase in wounded male egos. This trope of mendacious women is rooted in an alarmist reaction to feminist gains. In the eighties, the good old days of horny-bastard-style seduction (i.e., harassment) seemed to be under attack, and many men feared that feminists, hellbent on social climbing, could cry wolf and accuse anyone, guilty or not, of foul play. If the subservient housewife is the good woman behind the great man, the late-twentieth-century femme fatale is the destroyer of worlds—a bank robber, home invader, and defamer packed into a body propped up by stilettos.

One of the most exemplary takes on this updated archetype is the protagonist of John Dahl’s The Last Seduction (1994), Bridget (Linda Fiorentino), a chain-smoking succubus who plays society’s retrograde assumptions about love, race, and women’s essential vulnerability to her every advantage. For her final act, she demolishes her adoring boy toy, a small-town himbo named Mike (Peter Berg), by revealing she knows his deepest secret: that he used to be married to a trans woman. In that charged moment, Bridget beckons him to rape her, which he does—sort of. Hardened vixen that she is, Bridget is an imaginary woman for whom rape doesn’t really exist; she’s too quick, too cunning, to be in a situation that eludes her control. Her sexual appetite, in any case, is too vast to let something as pathetic as a man’s attempts at domination affect her. She plays along, howling like a victim as she covertly dials 911, letting the operator draw his own conclusions.

Many of these villainesses validate the misogynist belief that sexually liberated women are inherently corrupt. At the same time, characters like Bridget and Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone), the heroine of Basic Instinct (1992), aren’t supposed to seem human; they are skyscrapers. Bridget is essentially the world’s greatest con artist. She is a vision of cool, particularly opposite Berg’s whiny beta male; Fiorentino plays her with the mordant charisma and cocksure sensuality of a young Lauren Bacall. Catherine, a bisexual heiress with the IQ of a super-genius, is the equivalent of a female Bond villain. However reprehensible their actions, these female caricatures are also immensely satisfying to watch. We want them to triumph.

There’s a lot of senseless hell-raising in erotic thrillers, but these films are not without their flashes of depth and empathy. In Katt Shea’s Poison Ivy, Barrymore plays Ivy, a teenage seductress who, in one scene, calmly initiates cunnilingus with a hapless family man (Tom Skerritt) as his wife, whom she drugged mere seconds earlier, snoozes beside them. Clearly, Ivy is high off her own recklessness and the ease with which others bend to her will, a power trip amplified by the fact that she is a mere child who comes from nothing. At the same time, the way she looks at her friend-cum-victim Sylvie and holds her tight when she’s in mourning over her mother’s death doesn’t feel phony. When Ivy sneaks into the family’s garage and sits behind the wheel of the mother’s long-unused convertible, she imagines herself as the kind of woman who belongs there—glamorous and beautiful, but also loved.

The most human femmes fatales of the eighties and nineties tend to be the ones who ultimately fail, their unhinged longing for an alternative resulting in tragedy. In Dream Lover (1993), Lena (Mädchen Amick) pulls off her yearslong con of a wealthy businessman, only to admit—once he’s wrongfully condemned to life in the loony bin—that he’s the only one who actually knows her. In Body Heat, Matty (Turner) fulfills her lifelong dream to “be rich and live in an exotic land” but ends up feeling numb. These characters embody the era’s fraught aspirationalism, the emptiness of “success” measured in lifestyle decadence and material accumulation. If the outcome of such striving is hit-or-miss, then perhaps what makes the genre so captivating is the striving itself, these women’s willingness to try—try contemptibly, audaciously hard—no matter the omens of misfortune tugging at their negligees.