Named after a rare butterfly, the extraordinary new film by Peter Strickland is also that lesser-spotted creature: a genuinely erotic British film. As with the sexually subversive dramas of the 1940s and ’50s, the film’s restraint provides the erotic impetus: our beautiful protagonist seduces men, but neither party enjoys sexual release in a traditional sense. As the male victims willingly sink into black goop, their helplessness at the hands of a beautiful woman offers a twisted form of sexual release.

John Kilian Houston Brunner (24 September 1934 – 25 August 1995) was a British author of science fiction novels and stories. A librarian watched over us, we had to hand in the material whenever we left our chair and one did rather wonder what everybody else was reading. A year after the Sexual Offenses Act of 1967 passed, Ken Russell (in partnership with AIDS activist Larry Kramer) made Women in Love (1969), which broke barriers not just for containing full-frontal male nudity, but for the not-so-subtly queer-coded encounter between the two leads in what would infamously go down as “the male wrestling scene.Impossible Gay Lovers uses the Sensual Hypnosis technique of Directed Erotic Visualisation to let you have stunningly erotic gay sex experiences. baptised – 23 January 1789) was an English novelist best known for his fictional Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, whose eroticism led to his arrest. The film’s art nouveau-inspired poses and costumes seem to claim artistic status—and it wasn't the only film featuring nudity that placed itself in the gray area between pornography and educational material. It’s the story of a lonely woman who works as a CCTV operator in Glasgow, who stalks and seduces Clyde (Tony Curran), a loutish man she spots on one of her screens.

Most were neither sexy nor funny, and this one isn’t particularly erotic either, but it does cast a keenly satirical eye on how the sex-film business was run at the time, with wide-eyed ingénues on both sides of the camera and a plot that contrives multiple adaptations of the notoriously filthy poem to please different backers: hardcore porn, a gay western, a kung-fu musical and a family-friendly compromise. Seventeen of the authors are actually dead, which means I am now in the company of Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe, Keats, Chaucer and Freud, amongst others, while my contemporaries include Molly Parkin, Stewart Home, JG Ballard, Sebastian Horsley and Hanif Kureishi, all more familiar names to the general public than mine.The film’s one gay sex scene is neither explicit nor prudish; topless Omar (Gordon Warnecke) and Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis) kiss and mouth-swap champagne in the back room of the laundrette, while Omar’s father dances with his lover among the dryers out front. By the mid-’60s, production had largely ceased as more explicit films began making their way into the country from continental Europe, and British filmmakers increasingly tested the limits of what both the BBFC, and the public, permitted in the mainstream. Mainstream erotica was no different, and grappled—rarely comfortably—with the concept of female sexuality in a state of flux. No missing or damaged pages, no creases or tears, no underlining or highlighting of text, and no writing in the margins.