The Sinister Saga Of Nuns In Horror: From HAXAN To THE NUN

We all have our personal sacred horror movie predilections, the subgenre that we will watch every entry for, no matter how bad they get. For some folks, it’s slashers. For others, it’s torture porn. But for me, it’s nun films. 

I’ll begin my dive into nun films by explaining that I’m not religious in any way. I was actually raised by two ex-hippies who were devoid of religion in general. It wasn’t viewed as good or bad, it just didn’t exist in my house. The whole Catholic scene, including nuns, was something I knew nothing about… except for what I saw in movies. And oh, I knew movies. 

Somewhere between The Sound of Music and The Exorcist knockoffs, I understood two facts about these drapey female creatures: 1) they were delightful and prone to singing and dancing, and 2) they could fight the devil. So therefore, they were totally badass. By the time I was in high school, I was actively seeking out nun-based horror films. And still with little to no clue what nuns actually did in real life. I began traipsing through the history of nunsploitation like I was skipping through a convent garden. 

My love of nun horrors has only grown as I’ve seen the subgenre evolve over time. It has waxed and waned, coming in and out of popularity over various decades. But we are currently at a summit. 2023 saw multiple independent nun horrors like Sister Death, Consecration, and Deliver Us, as well as the massive film The Nun 2. It became clear that the subgenre was on an upswing. Then came Immaculate, and The First Omen opens in April. Nuns are back in the habit, bitches! Woot!

Immaculate is everything I love in a nun film. It is visually gorgeous and goes full 1970s nunploitation-style with some of the most wild, gory, and sacrilegious cinematic acts in decades. But to see where we are now, let’s first take a trip back through the history of nun films. 

In the Beginning…

Tales of naughty nuns definitely did not start with cinema. Catholic history is sprinkled with seedy tales of nuns straying from God’s path to pursue more earthly pleasures, and even classic literature is rife with ample sinning religious figures (read Chaucer and Robert Browning). 

Several “real life” legends of naughty nuns served as the basis for future exploitation films. The real-life Sister Monza created a 17th-century scandal by taking up a lover and mothering two kids with him, all while still practicing as a nun.

Sister Benedetta Carlini (another 17th-century nun) supposedly had visions of demonic men trying to kill her and, therefore, decided to begin a lesbian relationship with a fellow nun, claiming that through lesbian intercourse, she experienced “religious epiphanies.” But perhaps the most famous of the infamous real nuns is the notorious Nun of Wanton, who had sex with a monk at a neighboring monastery and eventually became pregnant. 

All these stories were told over and over for centuries, and many became inspiration for books. But then came cinema…. 

Early Cinema and Devilish Orgies 

Within a few decades of the birth of cinema, nuns entered the horror-sphere in Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (1922). Part documentary, part mockumentary, and part fictional reenactments, this movie is filled to the brim with ample amounts of nudity, torture, demons, orgies, unbaptized baby flying ointments, and more. And of course, nuns. 

Though the nuns in Häxan aren’t nearly as immoral as we will see in a few decades, in this film, one particularly corrupt nun sticks her tongue out at the Mother Superior and then leads her sisters in a riotous dance! 

Häxan was banned and censored in numerous counties, not just for the nuns raging against the machine, but also for all the nudity and demon orgy stuff. Clutch my pearls! 

Let Thy Crucifix Shine: The 1970s Nunsploitation Apex

The 1970s saw a massive boom of nun horrors, so much so that it was given its own cool subgenre title: nunsploitation. There are a few reasons for this massive surge. First, after the Hays codes (industry guidelines dictating “questionable” content could never be shown on screen) collapsed in the late 1960s, cinema basically went wild. Film got hyper-violent without a strict governing body telling the world what atrocities were banned from cinema.

This was also post-Vietnam War, and many filmmakers were exorcising mental demons on-screen by way of hyper-violent and morally questionable material. Additionally, in 1973, The Exorcist blew up the box office and won multiple Oscars, so the onslaught of subsequent religious horrors during the mid to late ’70s could have been following the trend. Whatever the reason, nuns exploded into the horror scene with many of these films coming from devoutly Catholic countries like Spain, Italy, and Mexico. 

The first wave of Italian nun films were often versions of the aforementioned infamous Nun of Monza legend including The Nun of Monza (1962), The Monk of Monza (1963), and The Awful Story of the Nun of Monza (1969). Many of these were categorized as “filone”, cheaply and quickly cranked out movies that made money. Even the Italian art film movement joined in the nun-craze as Pasolini made The Decameron in 1971.

Another grouping of 1970s nunsploitation films came from a predominantly un-Catholic source, Japan. Part of the Pinky violence film genre (the Japanese version of Grindhouse), the Japanese nun films feel different from their European counterparts, often more over-the-top and caricature-like. Though some of the portrayals are more comical, the Japanese nun movies ultimately deliver the same plot points of placing nuns in questionable situations and highlighting extreme corruption and hypocrisy in the church. 

So where was America during all this global nun sleaze? Oh, we were working the trend from both the independent and studio sides! 20th Century FOX released The Omen in 1976, but then we also get sweet indie gems like To the Devil a Daughter (1976), The Sentinel (1977), Alice Sweet Alice (1976), and Ms 45 (1981). 

The Current Crescendo

Once again, we are seeing a lot of nuns on screen, and though we are by no means seeing the massive surplus of the 1970s, there were multiple releases last year, and now in 2024, we find two massive nun films almost back-to-back: Immaculate and The First Omen. 

The film history nerd in me immediately pushes my glasses up the bridge of my nose and asks- yes, but why this trend now? I have a few working theories on the recent nun-surge. 

My first instinct is to always look for a catalyst. What element has entered our collective societal psyche that could accelerate how we are creatively thinking about nuns, even on a subconscious level? For the last ten years, our news cycles have been full of reports of corrupt priests and abusive clergymen.

The idea of hypocrisy in the church is already very much part of our current conversation, and this has caused many to lose faith in the church. This is not unlike what happened in the 1960s when the Catholic Church saw a sharp decline in attendance, dropping by nearly 50% in some countries, which ultimately caused the Catholic Church to reform and modernize policies to drum up more business. 

Also, much like the late 1960s/early 1970s, we are in a state of political strife, again seeing the country divided by endless moral issues, including how much religion should factor into our day-to-day lives on a mass scale. Additionally, there is a film that possibly set a benchmark, and others knowingly or subconsciously followed that potential trend. In 2018, The Nun became the most profitable film in The Conjuring-verse. Whether or not filmmakers made a conscious decision to approach religious horrors because of the success of that film (I suspect most did not), it did insert scary nuns into our creative minds and give a starting point for more horror stories. 

Regardless, I’m just gonna sit back and enjoy this current upwelling of nun horrors. I’m hoping for even more in 2025. And I’ll leave you with a few of my all-time favorite nun films. Enjoy, and amen. 

6 Nun Horror Films For a Nunsploitation Primer:

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