Sexploitation

The American roughie was one strand of sex cinema; this is the much larger European one. Once censorship collapsed across the continent around 1968, softcore became one of the most reliably profitable things a producer could make, and studios turned it out by the hundred.

The waves

France gave the world Emmanuelle (1974), a glossy, upmarket softcore film that became one of the highest-grossing French films ever made and spawned an endless series of official and unofficial sequels. It made sex respectable at the box office.

West Germany had the Report films, above all the Schoolgirl Report (Schulmadchen-Report) series, framed as pseudo-documentary surveys of youth sexuality. Thirteen entries sold enormous numbers of tickets through the 1970s.

Italy had the commedia sexy all'italiana, broad sex farces built around a handful of recurring stars (Edwige Fenech, Gloria Guida, Barbara Bouchet), which ran alongside the giallo and often shared its cast.

And everywhere there was Jess Franco and Jean Rollin, whose vast filmographies blur softcore, horror and the avant-garde.

The line with horror

Sexploitation and euro-gothic constantly overlap: the lesbian-vampire film, the nunsploitation picture and the women-in-prison film are all, in part, sexploitation. Where a film is more interested in the erotic than the horrific, it lands here.

Where to start

Emmanuelle for the phenomenon, a Schoolgirl Report for the sociology, an Edwige Fenech comedy for the fun.