Porn is coming back to multiplexes, in sneaky, provocative ways

polygon.com:

Writer Harlan Ellison used to tell a story about his very brief stint working for the Walt Disney Company, and it feels so applicable to the state of modern cinema that it might just be too on-the-nose. Ellison, a notorious hard-ass and prankster, claims he was hired as a writer in the Roy Disney era. On his first day, he says, he went to lunch with a group of his co-workers at the studio’s cafeteria. Conversation drifted about, and Ellison cracked a joke about how Disney should make an animated porn flick, which he proceeded to plot and act out, doing impersonations of the House of Mouse’s iconic cast of characters doing dirty deeds. The whole time, he was unaware that the studio brass was only a few tables away. By that afternoon, he says, the name on his studio-lot parking spot was painted over, and he was told to hit the road.

This is, roughly, what it’s like to try and release a movie about sex in theaters today, regardless of whether famous intellectual property is involved. But that hasn’t stopped smaller studios from trying. In a cinematic landscape defined by its utter lack of eroticism, films like Ti West’s new horror movie X are using sex — and specifically, movies set in and around the world of pornography — to provoke audiences and grab attention, while also possibly bringing some erotic heat back to frigid multiplexes.

Make no mistake about it: West’s film is first and foremost a slasher, a lower-rent thrill ride with all the gory fixings. It was released by A24, the chief propagator of “elevated horror,” and one of the few studios willing to take a chance on anything even tangentially related to fucking, such as Sean Baker’s Red Rocket, a recent masterpiece about a former porn star who finds his work in