With not one but two nunsploitation movies about to be released soon, I have taken the cue that it's time for a blog post of collected nun and religion horror movies that are worth something for all I know. Because there are a lot useless ones, looking at you The Unholy and The Nun.
To make it clear, the two upcoming movies are Immaculate in which a woman of faith moves into an Italian covenant, and The First Omen, which is ... about the exact same thing. Both movies interestingly revolve around women sent to Italian churches, maybe that's a thing right now?
Let's take a look at other good movies set in creepy religious schools/covenants where younger and older women are being squeezed out of their joy of life or films which have an overall religiously portentious feeling. I tried to leave out classics such as The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby or The Omen because everybody knows them, but there might be some well-known films in my list still.
A very quiet, unassuming movie which revolves around two girls who, over the winter break, are being left at their boarding school where the nuns are being rumored to be satanists and a third girl who escapes a mental institution.
This film is so fantastic... As one of the few directors who doesn't undermine the intelligence of his audience, Oz Perkins gives the viewers just enough clues to figure out plot and causality, and lets them relish the horror of quietude and solitude.
I have to return to a very oddly specific memory every time I watch this movie until the end - which, by the way, is akin to a punch in the gut. In my mid-twenties I went through a very tempestuous and rough breakup when I separated from someone very important to me. Someone I had grown up with, someone with whom I learned to live and to love, with whom I came to Germany. Someone who used to have stinky feet too, something I kept on complaining about because I did the washing and if it were up to me he could have used his socks as throwaways, it was that bad.
The day he left I was brave and kept my composure. I went to the airport with him, we sat next to each other on a bench until his departure was announced, I hugged him, took the train back home. In the train a slight pain in my heart started, but I still managed to control myself. I'm pretty good at that. I went home and started cleaning and tidying up. It was when I found a pair of socks he left, that I lost it. I crawled under my bed duvet, pressed those socks into my face and started crying, bawling, howling like I never did before and would never again. My only consolation, the only thing that could soothe, alleviate, cool off what was in my chest, was that gross potato-like reek and its familiarity that I inhaled, breathed in, welcome into me without any disgust.
Every time I watch the finale of The Blackcoat's Daughter I remember that same solitude, that calling out but not being heard anymore, that left-behindness, that sock stink.
If a movie can do that to you, it's pretty powerful.
It's the 50s and Mary is pregnant out of the wedlock. Not very promising, but it gets worse when a nun offers her to stay at a convent, where she is basically being tortured throughout the whole movie by strict nuns. She tries to run away - torture. Her boyfriend comes to get her - torment. Her baby born - more torment. St. Agatha takes some time to get going, but I personally like watching it, the corrupt nuns make for nightmarish villains.
OK, strictly this isn't a nunsploitation movie at all, it's a rape revenge movie, a genre which has been tagged as problematic, maybe in some cases justly. The reason this movie goes under nun-horror is that a considerable slice of it is set at a costume party and the main character who naturally has been giving a traumatic response to being raped twice in one day, is dressed as a nun.
There's a budding awareness on the net about how men acting/walking/standing thoughtlessly on the street can trigger fear in women, and there's lots of advices going around, like not to walk right behind her, or don't corner her, or cut her way when she wants to go by you, especially in the dark, because it does scare us. Because globally one in three women experience or have experienced sexual violence and even people with good intentions can incite panic. So main character Thana's reactions of shooting men who run after her on the street may seem exaggerated, but the true horror in this movie is her state of mind. This movie is actually more heartbreaking than scary.
At this point, I'm throwing in some more enjoyable religious horror movies which have nothing to do with nuns.
I miss 2015... With releases such as The Witch, The Blackcoat's Daughter, Devil's Candy, Green Room, The Circle it was an above-average year for horror movies and I'm still waiting for a re-run.
Watching The Witch, which is a very soft, stripped movie interrupted by violent outbursts of terror, was a very singular experience and the ending, which I personally interpreted in a rather feminist, emancipatory (emancipation from religious and social strains) way, still gives me goosebumps whenever I think about it.
Yes, the ultimate SM-horror movie Hellraiser is in fact a religious movie too. Hell constituting a big part of Christian punitive system, and the Cenobites being hell priests whose ultimate pinnacle is a good suffering, plus Barker's statement that he is in fact a spiritual person, are all components which make up the bigger religious picture that Hellraiser is.
Can Evrenol is a director I was hoping to hear a lot more from, to be honest, though he has been consistently working on new movies during the last decade. The religious element in Baskın is that a group of policemen raid a house where a black mass is being performed, which provides a passage to hell. With nightmarish visuals and a petrifying villain, this is a heavy, impressive film which will stay with you a long time.
I personally interpreted the film as a reverse narrative of the Turkish police torture trope, but I'm not sure if that was the intent.
Both Dabbe and Musallat are series which constitute the staple of Turkish horror cinema and both are based off religious motives. Being born into and raised within Islam, to me, horror and religion are very tightly weaved together on many levels and I will make the arguable and bold claim that you can't fully know cosmic horror without knowing Islam. But the elements used in both these series are not of such structural nature, but of course the Jin, the demons, the people made of fire which cross a border not meant for them.
As a non-American, it is weird to watch a horror movie from where you were born and where you grew up, because a US movie doesn't reflect your reality, your daily life and these movies do to a certain degree. That's so much more frightening than any new CGI enhanced franchise.
Zombies, demons, shamanistic rituals, Korean symbolism and Christian rosaries... The Wailing, besides being one of the most genuinely frightening movies I saw, is also a highly original flick and is like nothing I have seen before. The landscape pictures are equally beautiful as the special effects are well done, truly an unusual movie and a must-watch.
I'm also very interested in the Indonesian and Malay horror industry, though I have never had the time to delve into these. I'm currently not in the head space to do that, but it's definitely on my to-do list for the future.
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