What is it about the cinema that makes it such a thrilling sanctuary for sexual adventures? Here, our writer Christina Newland gathers some of her favourite anonymous tales.
From secret rendezvous to teens with nowhere else to go, 1950s drive-ins designed for privacy, or queer spaces perfect for cruising, the cinema has long been a sanctuary for lovers. Onscreen, too, we’ve seen countless examples and reference to the time-honoured tradition of getting up to no good at the cinema. Mickey Rourke’s notorious ’popcorn trick’ from Barry Levinson’s Diner (1982) may be pushing it a bit far, but as the premier date location for most of the 20th century, it makes sense: cinemas were darkened, cheap to access, and away from the watchful eyes—one hopes—of family or neighbours. Throw in some racy scenes and swelling music, and it’s not difficult to see how romance blooms.
I, being a movie lover to the core and stalwart film professional, typically care too much about the film in question to do much but watch the screen. (I’m a liar: I’ve been to see something as innocuous as a James Stewart movie that ended up in heavy petting, and I’ve been to several forgettable screenings I half-watched as a hand crept up my leg.) So—in an age of surveillance, caution, and the general decline of cinemagoing—I was curious to see if people really did still cop off at the cinema. I asked a sample size of friends and film industry colleagues to weigh in. The results were funny, idiosyncratic, and enjoyably perverse. One anonymous person revealed they wear a butt plug to some screenings, while another lost their virginity during Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007). I digress: this is what I learned in my entirely scientific study of the cinema as a sanctuary for horny devils.
You can still get your cinematic education while you’re snogging.
Two—2—people I know recounted stories to me that took place while they were watching films directed by austere arthouse master Robert Bresson. An unlikely choice, but there you go. As one friend had it: “We did not know L’Argent (1983) was only 83 minutes long, and before the end came we unexpectedly glanced at the screen just in time for the axe murder. I could tell it was a good movie from what little I saw of it and went back to see it again the next day by myself.” The other tells me succinctly: “Diary of a Country Priest (1951). Third base.”
Cinemas can be an exciting space for queer sex.
“We were horny queer teens who couldn’t host each other, so a large sweater in the back row would have to suffice,” one pal tells me. “We went to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), but spent the whole time ignoring it and stroking each other,” they say. Another says that their continental European home city “has a long history of hook-up cinemas” so they would “make out and jack each other off in one of the back rows. We sort of took it upon ourselves to revive the tradition.”
Show Me Love (1998)
Sometimes the film is the aphrodisiac.
As an anon contributor has it: “I can get uncomfortably horny when I see movie sex. My boyfriend at the time attended a late morning, empty screening of Gaspar Noé’s Love (2015). The threeway got me so wet that I told my boyfriend to get his dick out. Have you ever chased a load with an ice cold Diet Coke? It’s refreshing.” Another recounts a private screening of 70s hardcore from the ‘porno chic’ era, where couples were practically encouraged to engage in light foreplay and touching throughout, or to wear clothes that heighten the sensory experience. For them: “It’s about the tension: how long can you wait until you actually fuck?”
Horror movies are still a perennial hook-up favourite.
From blowjobs at Amityville Horror remakes to making out with your film professor at The Curse of La Llorona (2019), there was one genre that predictably popped up often: horror. Of course it’s a stereotypical lovers’ refuge—the pulse rates and excuses to grab one another are increased, after all. Unless you are me, and therefore usually too frightened to move.
Sometimes, the film makes the whole thing more memorable.
Per an acquaintance: “The only time I was ‘the other man’ was in high school during the opening weekend of 13 Going on 30 (2004). We just made out but to this day, as my only adventure into abetting infidelity, 13 Going on 30 still holds unparalleled intimate significance to me. What a thrill to be sinful under the watchful eyes of Jennifer Garner.”
A lover’s film guide: five screen kisses to swoon over, as selected by our resident romantic Luke Georgiades.
Show Me Love, 1998, Lukas Moodysson
Lukas Moodysson captured the soaring feeling of young love with his sapphic teen romance Show Me Love, which sees a social outcast fall in love with her much more popular classmate. The two girls eventually kiss in the back of a taxi as Foreigner’s 1984 hit ‘I Want to Know What Love Is’ plays on the radio. Like the twangs of first love, the moment is all-encompassingly romantic, and utterly fleeting.
As Tears Go By, 1988, Wong Kar-wai
OK, so they’re cousins, but a great kiss is a great kiss, especially when the lovers in question are played by Hong Kong cinema icons Maggie Cheung and Andy Lau. In Wong Kar-wai’s melodramatic first feature, after first resisting their attraction to each other, mob enforcer Mong Kok and his younger cousin Nok finally give in to temptation and share a passionate kiss in a Hong Kong phone booth. But the thing that really makes this kiss special is Sandy Lam’s sweeping cover of Berlin’s ‘Take My Breath Away’, which outshines the original song’s appearance in Top Gun (1986).
Singin’ in the Rain, 1952, Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly
In musical theatre, they call it the “hierarchy of expression”: when the emotion is too much for the spoken word, you sing, and when the singing just won’t cut it anymore, you dance. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in Singin’ in the Rain, which sees Gene Kelly’s Don Lockwood explode into the musical’s title sequence after kissing Debbie Reynolds’ Kathy Selden at her door. In this film, it’s not about the kiss itself, but the afterglow—and for a moment so small, simple, and Hays Coded, in the following five minutes the sheer euphoria of falling in love is expressed as accurately as it comes.
The Age of Innocence, 1993, Martin Scorsese
Period pieces have always had a knack for on-screen yearning, and The Age of Innocence is no exception. In the movie, director Martin Scorsese dials up the sexual tension with nothing but a simple hand touching another (this was the 1870s after all), before allowing Daniel Day Lewis’ gentleman lawyer Newland Archer and Michelle Pfeiffer’s countess Ellen Olenska the surrender of a brief, passionate, and socially forbidden embrace in the back of a carriage.
Casablanca, 1942, Michael Curtiz
It’s one of the great romantic lines in film history: “Kiss me. Kiss me as if it were the last time.” Longingly spoken by the dropdead gorgeous Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) to Casablanca nightclub owner Rick (Humphrey Bogart), the moment is followed by a kiss as unbearably bittersweet as the love between the two, cursed to remain—except for a moment— forever unfulfilled.
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