Sci-fi has always been one of those genres that allows filmmakers to explore a wide array of emotions, societal issues, and global concerns. It is not surprising that, with the rise of erotic cinema, there would be those out there who would merge the two, whether it be to spice up their fantastic premise or offer up an exploration of the human body and how people perceive sexuality.
Everyone remembers their first one of this bizarre genre mash-up, which for me was stumbling upon the painful Flesh Gordon late at night on TV. Thankfully, as I got older and appreciated the genre, I was able to find many gems, from polished mainstream films to arthouse to exploitation, that embody the best of sci-fi erotica. To get this list together, I went through my favorites in the genre, pulling from different decades, styles, and countries to deliver the best sci-fi erotic films of all time.
Why You Should Trust Me: Having written about movies for over a decade, I began watching international erotic cinema a long time ago and have never stopped digging. Ratings in this genre are notoriously unreliable, so while I have included the scores below, my choices here are based on years of chasing down rare releases and celebrating the best of the genre.
‘Invasion of the Bee Girls’ (1973)
Trashy Yet Outrageously Fun
IMDb: 4.9/10 | Letterboxd: 2.6/5
Men in a small California town keep dying during sex, which prompts a federal agent into an investigation that leads him to a research facility where women are being converted into queen bees. The movie is drive-in sleaze at its best, not fully delivering on its erotic premise, but offering an ample amount of nudity and style as the bee girls take over mankind.
The screenplay is the first produced work of Nicholas Meyer, who would go on to direct Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and that pedigree is why Invasion of the Bee Girls keeps getting rediscovered by people who cannot quite believe the credit is real. The premise is so gloriously deranged that the film earns its cult status on concept alone. This is the trashiest thing on the list by a wide margin, but it is an entertaining oddity worth checking out.
‘Species’ (1995)
The Beginning of a Cult Franchise
IMDb: 5.9/10 | Letterboxd: 2.8/5
SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) receives instructions for splicing alien DNA with humans, creating an alien disguised as a beautiful woman with a single directive: mate. A team including Ben Kingsley, Michael Madsen, Alfred Molina, and Forest Whitaker hunts her across Los Angeles after she escapes containment and starts working her way through the male population. Natasha Henstridge plays Sil in her first acting role.
Species may be a bit of a side note now, but upon its release, it was one of the most talked-about movies around. This came from taking a creature from the mind of H.R. Giger and indulging in his erotic undertones with a femme fatale of an alien man-killer. Kingsley gives a hammy performance, which is rare in itself, with an accent that bounces all over the place, while Henstridge is flawless as the seductive Sil. The movie still stands on its own decades later, and its many sequels are also worth a deep dive for those who love B-movies.
‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’ (1976)
Bowie’s Beautifully Alien Awakening
IMDb: 6.6/10 | Letterboxd: 3.5/5
David Bowie stars as Thomas Jerome Newton, an alien who crash-lands in New Mexico seeking a way to ship water back to his drought-stricken home planet and his family. Using advanced technology, Newton builds a patent empire to fund his return, but love and vices get in the way, leading to his downfall.
Nicolas Roeg’s fragmented, hallucinatory direction makes this the most artful film on the list. Notably, the movie features pop icon David Bowie, in his first major role, and the androgynous singer is perfectly cast as a being who doesn’t know how to fit in his own skin. The eroticism here is strange and melancholy, with sexual awakening tied to human fallacy as intimacy becomes just another Earthly indulgence that leads to Newton’s Downfall. Few films have ever made desire feel this lonely, with the eroticism key to the story but not at the center of the themes it explores.
‘Perfect Sense’ (2011)
The Apocalypse as a Love Story
IMDb: 7.0/10 | Letterboxd: 3.6/5
A global epidemic slowly strips humans of their senses, with touch becoming one of the last refuges people find in one another. A chef and an epidemiologist, played by Ewan McGregor and Eva Green, become the focus as the last form of affection comes through touch in a world where everything else is falling away.
David Mackenzie’s film is the gentlest entry on this list, and an ideal choice for those looking for a more romantic and intimate outing. Perfect Sense becomes the rare erotic science fiction film where sex means tenderness rather than threat, with intimacy becoming the last available human language. The build-up may be slow, but the last 20 minutes of the film cement its place here.
‘The Untamed’ (2016)
Mexican Arthouse Meets Tentacle Horror
IMDb: 6.1/10 | Letterboxd: 3.3/5
A meteorite deposits a creature in a shed outside a provincial Mexican town, where an elderly couple tends to it like livestock. The being offers overwhelming pleasure to those who visit it, but always at a price. It draws a young woman, an unhappy homemaker, and her gay brother into its orbit, and they grow obsessive over their discovery.
Amat Escalante took Best Director at Venice for this, which tells you the establishment took it seriously despite a blend of sci-fi and ample eroticism that often does not land with critics. The Untamed brilliantly paints a grim social-realist portrait of machismo and homophobia around a literal pleasure monster. The allegory stays deliberately unresolved, which frustrates some viewers, but the opening shot alone announces a filmmaker unafraid of absolutely anything.
‘Shivers’ (1975)
Where Body Horror Started
IMDb: 6.3/10 | Letterboxd: 3.2/5
A parasite engineered as a combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease escapes into a luxury Montreal apartment complex when an infected woman arrives. The infection spreads through contact, and the residents turn on one another as it takes hold. Barbara Steele and Lynn Lowry appear among the infected in a film that treats an entire building as a single organism getting sick.
If you are upset your favorite Cronenberg film did not make it here, consider this a placeholder for just that. However, I wanted to highlight one of his most overlooked and impactful works, his first commercial feature, Shivers. Here, an entire building turns into an odd orgy of sexuality and terror, as impulses break down and desire and obsession take over, culminating in the infamous pool scene.
‘Barbarella’ (1968)
Classic, Iconic, Sci-Fi Erotica
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Paramount Pictures -
Paramount Pictures -
Paramount Pictures
IMDb: 5.9/10 | Letterboxd: 3.2/5
Barbarella follows a 41st-century agent (Jane Fonda) who is dispatched to locate the missing scientist Durand-Durand and stumbles through a series of increasingly psychedelic encounters involving killer dolls, a blind angel, and a labyrinth full of exiles. Fonda spends the opening credits performing a zero-gravity striptease before falling into the hands of different men across the galaxy on her mission.
Roger Vadim’s adaptation of the Jean-Claude Forest comic is where erotic science fiction properly begins, and its influence is undeniable across the medium. If you are looking for campy eroticism, this is the movie; the “Excessive Machine” sequence, in which a torture device designed to kill through pleasure simply burns itself out, is a prime example. The plot is nonsense, and that is often why it lands a bit lower for some, as the movie thrives on the charms of its lead, who is impeccable throughout. This one is pure eye candy, and if the remake starring Sydney Sweeney comes to fruition, there will be a whole new fandom coming back to this classic.
‘Under the Skin’ (2013)
Seduction as Predation
IMDb: 6.3/10 | Letterboxd: 3.6/5
An alien disguised as a young woman drives a van through Glasgow, picking up lone men and leading them somewhere they never return from. Many of the film’s Glasgow scenes were shot with hidden cameras and unsuspecting members of the public, while Scarlett Johansson delivers what many consider the best performance of her career despite having remarkably little dialogue.
Jonathan Glazer spent more than a decade developing this, stripping an effects-heavy concept down to something almost wordless, and Mica Levi’s score does half the work of making it so unsettling. Under the Skin takes the oldest premise in erotic science fiction, the beautiful alien who lures men to their deaths. There is an undeniable eroticism in the motion, but here the titillation is replaced by a genuinely inhuman perspective on human bodies as objects to be assessed and harvested. The film is cold, slow, and purposefully obtuse. I also recommend reading the novel of the same name by Michel Faber, which brings an even more disturbing edge to the story.
Honorable Mentions
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Liquid Sky Media Home Entertainment
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Agathe Rousselle in ‘Titane’ (2021) Neon
Narrowing this to eight meant leaving out some other notable favorites, alongside a few that I think did not fully fit the bill of the article I was going for. Still, if you are craving more erotic sci-fi films, certainly check these out as well:
- Liquid Sky (1982): Slava Tsukerman’s No Wave fever dream about aliens developing a drug through orgasms. It is a wild and unique visual ride that you will either obsess over or hate.
- Demon Seed (1977): Julie Christie is imprisoned in her own smart house by an AI that has decided it wants a child. Nasty in the best sense, underscored by a sharp look at the dangers of growing technology.
- Lifeforce (1985): obe Hooper adapts Colin Wilson’s The Space Vampires into a genuinely unhinged spectacle involving everything from naked energy vampires to a zombie outbreak in London – complete lunacy, and a film that never got its deserved accolades.
- Titane (2021): Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or winner is a bit of an outlier here, as its sci-fi elements are debatable and dependent on interpretation, but it is just so phenomenally bizarre and charged.
- Possession (1981): Andrzej Żuławski’s Cold War Berlin nightmare features an Isabelle Adjani performance so unhinged and charged it reportedly took her years to recover from. Whether it counts as sci-fi is up for debate.
- Splice (2009): Vincenzo Natali’s creature feature sees two scientists splice human and animal DNA into a being named Dren, only for the experiment to cross lines no one should. A queasy, provocative take on creation and desire.
- Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989): Shinya Tsukamoto’s black-and-white cyberpunk assault is body horror at its most frenzied, fusing metal, flesh, and sexuality into a relentless 67-minute onslaught; more for the extreme and experimental film crowd than erotica.
Sci-fi erotic films are few and far between, but there are many other phenomenal ones out there that did not make this list, especially once you broaden the scope to international and cult cinema. So, make sure you let us know what you think is the best erotic sci-fi film of all time.
