Adult Contemporary: Sliver (Phillip Noyce, 1993)

First things first: The first issue of Hello Darkness, Boom!'s horror anthology, is out today, and my short story "Contagious," which reunites the Neighbors team of Letizia Cadonici, Alessandro Santoro and Becca Carey, is kicking it off. Pick it up online or at your local comic store, and prepare to be amazed.

When you were a kid, did you ever sneak out of your room to watch the grown-ups having a party? I did. When my Dad had people over on a visitation day, I would huddle at the door of my bedroom, listening in to the roar of clinking bottles and rock records and grown-up laughter. At family gatherings, I’d drift away from the kids and hide on the stairs, listening to my Mom drinking wine and chatting with my aunts in our living room.

I never really understood what they were talking about. I knew that about half of it was inappropriate for a kid to hear, and this was alternately scary and thrilling — scary, because my parents and aunts and uncles weren’t who I thought they were, because they had this whole other life full of mean thoughts and curse words and dirty jokes that only came out when I wasn’t around. Thrilling, because this is what you hope adulthood will be, when you’re a kid — a secret world of wine and coffee and R-rated movies and cigarettes, all the pleasures that are too rich or risky for children. 

 In 1993, when I was ten years old, I firmly believed Sliver to be the biggest movie of the summer. I thought this mostly because of the tie-in UB40 music video “I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You,” which played on VH1 every fifteen minutes. 

The video features footage from Sliver, so I had some vague idea of what the movie was about — Security cameras??? Maybe??? — but the overall effect was baffling. What did all those intense facial expressions mean? Why did Sharon Stone have a ska band hiding in the walls of her apartment? What was the significance of Sharon Stone taking a bath — the most frequently played clip from the film, by a long shot — and why was she moshing around and gripping her own flesh in there? What primal and seemingly dire emotion had been unleashed in her by bathing?

Sharon Stone is masturbating in that bathtub. As an adult, I can tell you that. I can also tell you that she is doing it to a soundtrack of thunderous classical piano, not UB40, to signify that this movie is Classy and For Adults. Watching Sliver now is fun precisely because it feels like sneaking out of my bedroom to spy on an adult party in the early ‘90s. All the cheugy glamour of my parents’ generation — “California red!” Techno-Gregorian chants! Earth tones! Tom Berenger! Adults expressing bafflement and disgust at the name “Pearl Jam!” — is revived and put on display, and this time, no-one can catch me and tell me it’s past my bedtime. 

It also has a quality that is frankly bizarre in an erotic thriller, something I barely noticed until I’d seen a dozen other movies and realized what Sliver was lacking: Sliver, unlike basically every other movie in its genre, does not hate women.