Book excerpt: This lively collection offers a wide-ranging exploration of the erotic and the fantastic in painting, illustration, and frilm. It covers Western art of six centuries--from medieval woodcuts to contemporary poster art--and the cinema of six decades--from horror classics of the 1930s to recent slasher films--documenting the surprising variety of guises in which sexuality appears in fantasy art and cinema. Among the subjects treated are occult eroticism in Medieval and Renaissance art; the use of fantasy as a vehicle for depicting erotic subjects in periods of sexual repression; the fascination with unconscious and aberrant sexuality in the visual arts since the publication of Freud's theories; movie monsters and aliens as emblems of the submerged id or libido; and monstrous metamorphosis as a symbol of the changes accompanying puberty.