twenty criminally underseen erotic thrillers • Journal • A Magazine • , Life in canada

In the Cold of the Night (1990)

By 1990, Greek filmmaker Nico Mastorakis had made a name for himself as an unpredictable force in adventurous genre cinema, with the unifying characteristic of much of his oeuvre being a gleeful ability to shock or startle his audience, whether by jump scares, gruesome gore effects, titillating sex scenes or even old-fashioned beastiality. Mastorakis did his own thing and he did it very well, all things considered. So, when his American-produced erotic thriller was handed an X-rating by the MPAA, it should have come as a surprise to nobody.

Far and away one of the horniest films in the genre, Mastorakis’s film features Shannon Tweed as a woman featuring prominently in the dreams of a fashion photographer. As one would expect, the dreams are violent and sexual, and fantasy and reality start to blur. In the Cold of the Night isn’t just a controversial, boundary-breaking film; it’s also an exceptional erotic thriller and easily Mastorakis’s best work. It also features Tippi Hedren as a woman who is afraid of a bird, which is a nice nod to Hitchcock, who clearly influenced Mastorakis in more ways than one.