(Not So) Forbidden Pleasures

“Dark Fantasies” at London Short Film Festival 2025

I’ve always had a taste for the obscene, and I’m glad to be sharing this predilection with a festival that is as welcoming as it is surprising. Year after year, I find myself excited by the prospect of redrawing my mental map of London, my home, thanks to the London Short Film Festival, whose Special Events are never peripheral to its competitions, retrospectives, and thematic programming. In fact, they inform its ethos by conjuring cinematic encounters that are playful in nature and political in stance. And above all: they make my wish to watch porn on the big screen come true.

LSFF’s programme “Dark Fantasies” comprises seven shorts, all erotic, pornographic, and kinky in various ways, giving cinematic flesh to desires that are often too taboo to visualise, let alone actualise. It’s only suitable that the Rio Cinema would be its playground. Perched on a busy main street amidst the hubbub of daytime and nightlife commotion in Dalston (East London), the iconic art-deco building is part of London that’s hip and trendy to the point of overwhelm. Yet, cinephiles look up to “the Rio”, as they lovingly call it, like an ever-shining monument to the love of underground cinema.

If you have never seen porn at the cinema, you may find yourself taken aback by a small but significant discrepancy: a sold-out screening room with hundreds of eyes glued to the explicit scenes in superhuman size sounds like a turn-on, but it’s not. At least not in the way one experiences arousal in a 1:1 with online porn, behind closed doors. That’s why it’s always helpful to have a guide, and festivals know this already: a good introduction sets the tone and gives just a hint of content, in a gesture of care for the audience.

“Dark Fantasies” was curated by Content Warning, a collective whose Late Tapes series at the ICA in London explores fetishistic desire in collaboration with the Bishopsgate Institute’s UK Fetish Archive. While Content Warning’s Helena Whittingham and Harlan Whittingham usually screen scenes from kink and fetish VHS tapes, at LSFF, they showed films in their entirety, and instead of giving too much away about the films themselves, the duo made sure to list all the content warnings across the programme: lots of taboos, sex, and horror.

The lights go down; silence sets in. The curtains part to an old, raggedy copy of El Satario (1907), perhaps one of the earliest porn films that survived: and it shows. No dialogue in this short, no words needed even: a scene of forest nymphs bathing one another in a stream fills the screen. Their naked bodies confront us from the very first shot, regardless of the low footage quality. The images are overexposed, and their contrast fluctuates, as harsh cuts signal that it wasn’t cheap nor easy to make this film. However, the screen is ripe: the forest fields are, too, but most of all, the ripened joy of sharing queer touch is what animates the nymphs in their hideout. Then, a sneaky devil comes into the picture, a man in full makeup and some prosthetics whose main purpose is to disrupt. No wonder he’s clumsy and displeasing to look at, so by the time he takes hold of a nymph and seduces her (briskly) before he penetrates her (not so briskly), the audience is sure to feel torn between the appeal of the act and the lack of it in its agent.

Under the Cherries (Frida Retz, 2024)

While we watched the first explicit sex scene of the night, I noticed the close-up, a device so crucial for today’s pornographic industry, is a rare delight. Not only did the limitations of a bulky camera mean that filmed sex was more of a performance than a participatory promise, but also physical proximity became a challenge. For that reason, early porn is not as ‘visceral’ as the kind we’re used to consuming today, but one thing that hasn’t changed is the multiplicity of angles. Camera operators were creative, even when they couldn’t get close or zoom in—that said, I couldn’t help but smile knowingly when the few close-up shots of penis-in-vagina penetration were actually the most damaged (paused and rewatched) parts of the film.

During the second short, Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947), one feels the silence in the room tense up. Anger is revered, loved, and worshipped, especially when we find his film sandwiched between two ‘less serious’ works. Fireworks shines bright with a beautiful restoration: a black-and-white vision of “the explosive pyrotechnics of a dream” (as the film’s epigraph informs us) graces the Rio screen, in and out of focus. A high-canted angle close-up of a belt loosening its buckle, muscular arms twitching with desire; these flickering sights of sex without the sex can be either memory, reality, or dream. Perhaps, it doesn’t matter—the logic of an Anger film is sadistic and loving at the same time, and Fireworks being the first gay narrative film in the United States only proves the point. Flaming sticks light up a cigarette, a string score (Ottorino Respighi’s Pines of Rome) intensifies, a sailor’s crotch reveals a Roman candle with a burst, and the pleasures of observing metaphors so potent with eroticism that they have to literally explode are his gift to us, almost sixty years after Anger shot the film in his parents’ Beverly Hills home.

The third film in the programme was originally part of the 1974 anthology feature called Wet Dreams, a Dutch compilation of pornographic shorts that considered themselves more an expression of libertarian ideology than explicit sex films. Nevertheless, it was legendary pornographer Lasse Braun (here under the name of Falcon Stuart) who authored the jolly confusion wrapped in a tight seven-minute duration and the zingy title The Happy Necrophiliacs. In it, a country song refrain follows a tall, handsome guy down the streets of Amsterdam, and adding to the (very amusingly subtitled) jingle, two women also seem to tail him. A handheld camera on the street level draws us into the hunt, emulating the women’s predatory behaviour while the scene cuts to the clinking rhythm of their high-heeled walk. The Happy Necrophiliacs makes a comedy out of the poor man’s horror—captivity, rape, and gory mutilation all take place in a grubby bedroom—but it’s impossible not to relish in the assailants’ frivolity, especially when they enact the film’s title to its full extent. At this point, genuine laughter replaces the silent chuckles, and even if I’m sure the crowd (myself included) wouldn’t wish this fate on anyone, for a minute, we all believe that sex is comedy.

The short everyone had been hyping up because of its depictions of ‘monster sex’ also had a comic streak to it. Kaye Adelaide and Mariel Sharp’s MonsterDykë (2021) sees a tentacled prop monster come to life to please its maker in all possible ways. The ‘monster’, credited as Andromeda, has a mermaid’s tail and tentacles for hands; a crossover between, on the one hand, amphibian beings we know from Creature From the Black Lagoon or The Shape of Water and, on the other hand, hentai tentacle porn. Andromeda is perfect: a slimy, pleasure-driven fantasy made true. Lots to be jealous of here, but we were a generous audience and cheered the audible orgasm instead.

MonsterDykë (Kaye Adelaide and Mariel Sharp, 2021)

It’s nothing short of a miracle to stumble across a fantasy of yours, incarnated. More often, a person has to conjure it up, using only words, in front of another. In the casually poetic Bound By Size, United By Heart (2023), two friends share their fantasies: one daydreams about being swallowed, and the other imagines becoming a giantess. For its brief runtime (a very pleasant five minutes), directors Sofie Thijs and Dune Crawshaw create a world in service of playful yearning. Visualising the characters’ fantasies with the help of a green screen as well as (economically used) collage techniques is what cinema can offer as a medium: that very world-building that makes sure two friends can participate in the same fantasy for our eyes only. Thijs and Crawshaw know how to keep it low-fi and intimate; their short is ambitious but never showy, with just the right amount of cheeky humour to bind the otherwise vulnerable act of sharing erotic fantasies. Every articulated desire, however fantastical it may be, brings a certain risk, but as Bound By Size, United By Heart assures us, the joy of imagining alongside someone is unmatched.

Consuming your fantasy, however, may as well be the pinnacle of erotic pleasure. Watching the early porn short Messe Noire (1928), which is set in a satanic cult and in the midst of a ritual, made me wonder about the cannibalistic nature of desire. This originally silent archival film by an unknown director screened with an electronic soundtrack; this was often the case with preserved early films of explicit nature since they would be passed on through VHS tapes with a trace of artistic intervention. Messe Noire’s choppy editing and contained set-up (one man, lots of naked women, bondage, flogging, and fucking) was certainly intensified by the electronic score—its beats seemed to animate the flesh in a new way. Every thrust, every smack rippled through the skin I saw on screen, making me uneasy with arousal. I’m sure that at this point in the screening room, many people felt the same. In moments like these, it becomes physically obvious why curation matters and how short films inform one another in a programme—most of all, how crucial their sequencing is so that it can accumulate desire.

There was, of course, a big release waiting for us at the end: Frida Retz’s splendid Under the Cherries (2024) toes the line between fantasy and the literal in theme and style, embodying pansexuality through nature, flora, and fauna. It’s a magical place—wide-screen and pristinely digital—where the grass is alive and flowers sprout out of asses, waiting to be picked; in the midst of it, a goddess and a goat (figuratively speaking, though) have sex. Under the Cherries is frisky and loving, even somehow idyllic in how the two performers explore each other’s bodies, liberated from the restraints of human gender. There’s no cum shot, but there is a golden shower instead; yet the film is never interested in framing sex as spectacular, however hot and moist it can get.

Porn films are undeniably cinema, but because they have been defined by their commercial purpose in the domain of the strictly personal, we tend to forget their cinematic grammar more easily. Here, long takes are more than just an artistic choice since more of the ‘time passing’ (aka the essence of cinema, according to many) means more of the physical act in question. Long, uninterrupted takes, rehearsals, and reshoots affect the performance of sex in a way that’s different from what we’re used to. Similarly, one may think they know what kind of audience member they are very well but then be surprised when confronted with porn on the big screen. Who said porn is only about projections (be it of desires or expectations), when it can also be a tool for introspection? I bet if more of us took a big, long look at our own fantasies, the world would probably be a more pleasurable place.