The curtains are open. You look through your window. You can see your neighbors across the street having sex. You can see everything. But should you?
That is the vexing question that writer/directorMichael Mohan seeks to answer in his erotic thriller The Voyeurs. Addressing the gap in the genre on our screens (the last good one was Unfaithful in 2002 according to him), Mohan furthered his education into the genre by watching as many erotic thrillers as he could. “I wanted to rejuvenate it,” he proclaimed. He previously made Pink Grapefruit, an erotic dark comedy, which won the Grand Jury Prize For Narrative Short at SXSW Film Festival and served as the impetus for The Voyeurs as his foray into the genre.
The connection between his short and his feature lied in Mohan’s desire “use sex as story where the plot moves forward, character was revealed, and tension was built.” Oftentimes, sex is gratuitous in many films and it “feels very cheap because it doesn’t resemble what sex looks like. Sex can be funny, awkward and sad.”
Michael Mohan. Photo by Nick Rasmussen
The writer/director sensed the temperature rising when his films were screened because the audience wasn’t used to it. “I tried to figure out how to bring these elements from my short films to a bigger canvas and to a more mainstream audience in The Voyeurs.”
He sought to redefine the lost genre of erotic thrillers back to life. Apart from the sex scenes integral to the story, erotic thrillers explore complex relationships and uncomfortable themes like voyeurism. The idea behind The Voyeurs first began when Mohan visited his friend’s new apartment in downtown Los Angeles, looked out the window and noticed a couple across the street walking around their apartment totally naked. “I immediately felt the tension. I wanted to look. I knew I shouldn’t. But I did,” he confessed.
Curiously, the incident also reminded him of Instagram – hence the social media elements in the film. “We know some social media platforms are deleterious to our mental health, yet we are addicted.” The writer/director expanded on these social media elements in his film. Many people take videos and pictures and add filters to them depicting a lifestyle. People compare their own lives to these enhanced social media posts although they aren’t real.
Mohan then tackled his screenplay. He started with the ending and reverse-engineered the story to the start. “I tried to figure out who were the correct characters to participate in this ending.” The main characters are Pippa (Sydney Sweeney) and Thomas (Justice Smith) who are the peeping toms. Mohan decided to upend gender norms by making Pippa the chief instigator to spy on the couple across the street See (Ben Hardy) and Julia (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) despite Thomas’ feeble attempts to stop her. “Look at a movie like Body Double which is about a man’s desire over a woman. Pippa discovers her dormant sexual desires through voyeurism.”
In terms of other erotic thrillers that influenced The Voyeurs, Mohan looked to the sweaty neo-noir films Body Heat and Wild Thing. He also looked at The Hand That Rocks The Cradle and The Nanny From Hell for additional inspiration. “The films that I most aspire to making are akin to Unthinkable or Indecent Proposal.”
The writer/director is attracted to this controversial genre because the problems the characters face have problematic answers. “Everyone is going to have a strong opinion on the answer and it might be different from the person sitting next to you. Then they could have a fun debate as they discuss what they would do.” In doing so, audiences may reveal parts of themselves they don’t normally reveal.
It’s a steamy, moral dilemma film
Mohan also looked to The Conversation for inspiration. The Francis Ford Coppola film begins with Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) a privacy-obsessed character who has a sliver of information about a potential murder. The more information he gets, the greater the buildup of tension and the more danger he puts himself in. What do you do with information you get? Do you keep it to yourself or tell them? This is the predicament Pippa faces when she finds out Seb is having an affair. What is the morally responsible thing to do?
Build The Tension
The key tenet of a successful erotic thriller is “tension in the sex. You are on the edge of your seat, not because you’re titillated, but because you don’t know what’s going to happen as a result of it.” This underscore every scene in The Voyeurs. “What am I learning about these characters and what danger are they in now that they’ve become as vulnerable as two human beings can be with each other?”
The Voyeurs is ostensibly a contained thriller, mainly set in two apartments. Initially, Pippa and Thomas spied on Seb and Julia with their naked eyes before using binoculars with telephoto lenses for a closer view. This shrunk the distance between the two apartments as they were drawn into other’s webs.
Aside from building tension and exploring the question of why we like to watch people having sex, The Voyeurs explores themes of curiosity, justifying negative actions, morality, obsession, restraint of fantasy, infidelity, setting and breaking boundaries, and revenge. This moral grayness sets the stage for discussion. “For every person who thinks the characters are making bad choices, another would argue that they are morally correct.” The Voyeurs relies on this disagreement to activate audiences.
“Why are we compelled to do things we know are bad for us? What happens when we fall down that rabbit hole?” Mohan cites the qualities of repression and insecurity that drive Pippa and Thomas’ actions. Furthermore, he wanted to ensure the female characters had real agency despite their decisions. “Even if I don’t agree with those decisions, they were theirs. They were believable even if they were self-destructive.” This is the intention of the genre where the characters do things the audience dare not do.
There is also an aspirational component to Pippa and Thomas. Seb and Julia may be better off financially. Seb is a photographer and Julia is an artist. Both are arguably cooler than Pippa and Thomas. “They respond to the intangible allure of something missing in their own lives.”
As Mohan was writing his screenplay, he found that the main story beats, and twists and turns that define the thriller genre, did not neatly fit into a pre-determined genre template. “We need to challenge ourselves and rethink the three-act structure. We need to let the plot points fall where they naturally need to fall.” Rigid story structures can be detrimental to the enjoyment of a film. “We need the rug pulled from under our feet.” This allowed The Voyeurs to shift from being told entirely through Pippa’s lens and allow the story to unfold through the other characters too. This created an unpredictable audience experience where the audience doesn’t know whether to trust what they’re seeing.
Another consideration in writing an erotic thriller is the issuing and withholding of information. “How much of the characters’ motivation do I need to explain?” Ultimately, he decided The Voyeurs was an allegory not a TV procedural. This afforded him the luxury of not having to divulge every story machination to the audience.
“The attraction of the erotic thriller is that “the tension heightens the drama behind it. If the audience is enjoying the ride, they’re not going to want to get off.“
