Anytime the cult media distributor Vinegar Syndrome advertises an online sale, I immediately start perusing the offerings on their sister site Méluisne, where they’re also selling discounted Blu-rays of vintage pornography. Since most streaming services won’t touch hardcore titles of any quality, the only legal way to access most Golden Age pornos is to collect them on physical media, which makes Mélusine an irresistible siren during sales. That’s not to say that Vinegar Syndrome’s work restoring vintage horror schlock like Nightbeast, Demonwarp, Devil Fetus, or The Suckling is any less important than their restoration of retro pornos, but there’s something about the physical-media-only exclusivity of Mélusine’s library that routinely has me reaching for my wallet. It’s highly plausible that I could catch up with an Italo horror relic like Burial Ground on Tubi one day, for instance, while the same can’t be said for the hardcore cuts of titles like SexWorld, Blonde Ambition, or Pandora’s Mirror. So, during Vinegar Syndrome’s recent “Halfway to Black Friday” sale, I picked up a trio of Golden Age pornos to add to my personal schlock pile simply because they were discounted and looked interesting. As a group, the movies ultimately didn’t have much in common besides their shared X rating, their early-80s premiere dates, and their universal inclusion of a gentle lovemaking scene on the carpet in front of a fireplace. Individually, however, I found them taxonomically clarifying in the way they identify three distinct modes of traditional pornographic storytelling: the expected collection of standalone sex scenes that became an industry standard in the VHS era, the saga of absurd letters-to-the-editor sexual fantasies you’ll find in stereotypically airheaded pornos, and the shockingly thoughtful & tragic dramas that are too much of a bummer for you to imagine anyone actually getting off to them despite all of the exposed & penetrated flesh.

1981’s Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle was the directorial debut of its titular star, who makes direct eye contact with her audience while inviting us along to indulge her hottest sexual fantasies, one at a time. Sprinkle starts the picture pouring a glass of wine under the candelabra lighting of her living room piano, then shows the audience childhood photos from her life before the industry, when loved ones knew her as Ellen. After this photo album nostalgia trip, the camera pans over to a fireplace that’s been cropped just outside the frame, where two naked men are arm wrestling on the carpet as foreplay, waiting for Sprinkle to use their bodies. She quickly obliges, guiding the audience through her individual fantasies as she fucks new scene partners in every room of the house, narrating instructive demos for novelty sex acts like tit jobs, golden showers, and prostate play. The one-on-one intimacy of this non-narrative hangout would become much more common in the home video era that would soon snuff out the industry’s Porno Chic boom. In order to properly break the fourth wall, Sprinkle has to film herself instigating an orgy in the rows of a 42nd Street movie theater, exciting the audience with the fantasy that she might sit next to us at any time. It’s more an elaborately mediated act of mutual masturbation than it is a proper Golden Age porno, which has only become more standard and more direct in the modern era where performers can now interact with their audience in real time on video chat sites like OnlyFans. Sprinkle’s early prototype for that modern porno template—wherein narrative has been excised in favor of stringing together a collection of standalone sexual stunts—is still heavily scripted, though, and it includes such delightful cornball dialogue as, “Do you like big tits? Well, as you may have noticed, I have rather larger ones.” It’s just a nice, holesome hangout with our good friend Annie, who would later push its interactive format to much more psychedelic extremes in the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop, an all-timer in pornographic video art.

You can tell Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle was ahead of the curve in its audience-interactive intimacy by watching the bonus features for Neon Nights, which was also released in 1981. While providing commentary for a reel of unused outtakes, Neon Nights director Cecil Howard calls attention to the shots where Kandi Barbour makes direct eye contact with the camera during her own fireplace lovemaking scene, which had to be trimmed as a result. Neon Nights is much more traditionally narrative than Deep Inside, following the hitchhiking adventures of a horny runaway teen (Lysa Thatcher). That’s not to say Howard’s movie is better behaved than Sprinkle’s, though. It starts with Jamie Gillis fisting that teenage runaway’s mother while the teen listens intently from the opposite side of her bedroom wall, brushing her hair & practicing her makeup before using her beauty instruments as makeshift dildos. She decides to hit the road when her stepfather hits on her the next morning, in one of two scenes that reference the infamous shower stabbing sequence from Hitchcock’s Psycho. The horrors continue on the road, where she encounters swinger magicians who make her levitate out of bed like Linda Blair, an unscrupulous nude photographer who likes to fuck on a bed of porcelain babydolls, and a dreamworld doppelganger for her creepy stepfather that she’s much more willing to sleep with. Neon Nights is one of the few movies where you’re grateful for a last-minute “It was all just a dream reveal,” since it recontextualizes a series of seemingly nonconsensual sex acts as the incoherent fantasies of a young woman who doesn’t know what she wants. More importantly, it’s an instructive look at the thin border that separated horror & pornographic filmmaking sensibilities in its era — two disreputable genres that were culturally dismissed for their shared cheapness & prurience. The runaway’s far-out sexual exploits are often set to the spooky theremin sounds of a sci-fi soundtrack. Veronica Hart’s sex scene among her babydoll collection is frequently punctuated by flashes of lightning to accentuate the taboo. Much like many dirt-cheap horror titles of its time, Neon Nights would make for an excellent classroom tool to demonstrate how simple lighting & color scheme choices (from the titular neon hues of a motel sign to the more porno-specific contrast of a pink-flushed face pressed against a lime green bedspread) can make even cheapest sets look fantastic … if it weren’t for all of the vigorous onscreen penetration that would alienate most students. It’s also just a very silly story about a teenage hitchhiker’s letters-to-the-editor sexual fantasies, nakedly so.

When most modern audiences picture a narrative porno, they’ll think of outlandish fluff like Neon Nights, wherein a hitchhiker’s road trip storyline is used as a flimsy excuse to connect a series of standalone goofy sex scenes, even if artfully staged. There was a brief time, however, when Porno Chic features were thought to have a “crossover” commercial appeal and, thus, were expected to be populated by real characters with real emotional crises that could be resolved dramatically instead of pornographically. 1982’s Roommates (directed by Chuck Vincent) is the rare hardcore title that leers harder at women’s internal lives than their external ones, the kind of Golden Era porno that’s so dramatically heavy that it’s difficult to imagine anyone being turned on by it. Samantha Fox, Veronica Hart, and Kelly Nichols star a trio of young professionals sharing rent in a New York City apartment while struggling to break into the entertainment industry. Fox is eager to get into movie production work but is professionally haunted by her previous career as a callgirl; Hart is getting her feet wet as an off-Broadway stage actor but is caught between the affections of her seemingly gay costar and her older, married drama teacher; Nichols is a fashion model whose escalating drug addiction leaves her vulnerable to creeps & stalkers (most notably Jamie Gillis, again playing to type). All three women are on the verge of thriving, with only the universal problem of men being disgusting getting in the way of their success. As a result, most of the sex they have along the way is intentionally, uncomfortably bad — tainted by coercion, extortion, intoxication, and abuse. It’s the only professional porno I’ve ever seen where women immediately disengage from oral sex to spit in disgust, once in a toilet and another time onto the trousers of a reviled colleague. It’s also the only professional porno I’ve seen that convincingly stages actual, recognizably human arguments instead of bouts of belligerent shouting (give or take Andy Milligan’s Fleshpot on 42nd Street). It’s as heavy on dialogue as it is short on sex, to the point where even its obligatory fireplace lovemaking scene is staged in front of the punier flame of several candles instead of the real deal. As a result, it’s the only title out of this trio that could be convincingly passed off as “a real movie” to most discerning audiences, which is a designation that’s often saved for pornos that are too dramatically upsetting to function as a genuine turn-on.

Obviously, the major cinematic draw of these vintage porno titles is the opportunity to see extreme images no other filmic genre would dare show onscreen. There is no shortage of those extreme moments in Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle, but I think I was most surprised by the infinite angles & configurations Sprinkle (along with uncredited co-director Joe Sarno) came up with to capture the action of Ron Jeremy’s hardon sliding between her “rather large” breasts. On the opposite end of the dramatic-pornographic spectrum, Roommates thought to include representation of cis women huffing poppers on a nightclub dancefloor, a salacious pastime that has become something of a trend among young partygoers in recent years but has obviously been in practice for decades. The real standout moment to me, however, is a scene from Neon Nights where actress Arcadia Lake is painting a giant cock on her home easel while actively masturbating between brushstrokes, which is just about as honest of a depiction of artistic process as I’ve ever seen in cinema. While cheap-o horror schlock and other disreputable genres have gradually been legitimized as worthy cultural artifacts, vintage porno is still a niche beat for professional critics & academics to cover, if it’s touched on at all. Since sexual fantasy is just as integral to human life and cinematic expression as any other natural impulse, it’s a shame that it has so little room for discussion or exhibition in the modern discourse, while half a century ago it was being covered by outlets like Variety and The New York Times. Even as someone who already values this kind of cultural runoff, I’m struggling to not make qualitative judgements about the naked titillation tactics of Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle or the daffy daydream fantasies of Neon Nights against the more somber downbeats of Roommates, which earns instant respectability by undercutting its own eroticism. I’ll need to watch more vintage pornography to work on that. In fact, all serious cinephiles should be watching more pornography of all varieties, the more outdated the better. There’s much left to interrogate & discuss, while most avenues of vintage horror discourse have already been exhausted well past their dead ends.

-Brandon Ledet