Sisters of Sacrilege

Nunsploitation flourished in Western European countries like Italy and France, which were both shaped by Catholic traditions and home to film industries eager to capitalize on the exploitation movie craze—though prudish pushback from mainstream sectors of the biz still ruffled some veils. Certain films of a higher pedigree and intended for much wider distribution than their schlocky counterparts were considered more dangerous to the public good. Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), a UK and U.S. coproduction, was banned in several counties and highly censored upon release. Criticism of the Church was punishable under law in Francisco Franco’s Spain, though his death in 1975 led to the gradual relaxation of censorship rules that once curbed some of the country’s most able practitioners of sororal sacrilege. Jésus Franco (Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun, 1977), for instance, had to use the French or English-dubbed version of his films and seek out international financing to bypass his country’s restrictions. Even for the French and Italians, Pedro Almodóvar’s Dark Habits (1983) went so far in its depiction of nuns who take heroin and write erotic novels that it was rejected from the Cannes Film Festival and stripped of its official-selection status at Venice. Ironically, the film’s seedier elements pale in comparison to that of true-blue exploitation films whose sole aim, it would seem, is to provoke. Though perhaps Almodóvar’s spin on the subgenre is more menacing precisely because it treats its sisters’ sinning in a relatively blasé manner. His women are crooked, eccentric humans, but humans all the same—not the pent-up, wild-eyed perverts one can easily brush off as mere fiction.

In general, movies about nuns—from Black Narcissus (1947) to Sister Act (1992)—illuminate the alternative lifestyles historically available to women who opt out of the heterosexual order. As Sister Jeanne des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave) explains to a potential new sister in The Devils, most of the other women in her order had been forced to take their vows because their families couldn’t afford a dowry, or because they had been deemed, as the hunchbacked Sister Jeanne was, unmarriable. Cut off from the secular world and forced to rely on the other female members of their group for intimacy and companionship, these nuns often find strength in sisterhood and feminine solidarity. Jeanne’s sisters rush to her defense, all too willing to incriminate themselves, when she’s tried for heresy. (Her sin? Having unclean thoughts about Oliver Reed’s hunky Father Grandier). The convent also cultivates queerness. Lesbian sex scenes are an obvious draw for the randy B-movie spectator, but sisterly homoeroticism can also become a force of power in and of itself when charged by the occult.

The two teenage nuns in Juan López Moctezuma’s Alucarda (1977)—one of the grisliest entries in the canon—develop an obsessive bond that entails performing blood rituals in the nude. Because their love is condemned by the Church, they pledge their allegiance to Satan, which turns them feral and grants them violent supernatural abilities. Their convent’s leaders respond in comparably sadistic ways, even killing one of them during an exorcism. Alucarda was reviled in Mexico when it came out in the seventies, which is not to say that nunsploitation films were absent from the country’s cinematic output. The nation’s B-movie sector was robust, and Mexican Catholicism, which is infused with folk practices and Indigenous traditions, lent itself to the subgenre’s fantastical side. But Moctezuma, a fringe figure who made only five films, perhaps pushed the boundary beyond what Mexican audiences were expecting from their uproariously libidinous nuns. Alucarda is plainly a child, not a habit-clad Lolita like Kinski in To the Devil a Daughter. She may act like Regan, the possessed girl from The Exorcist (1973), when she spits profanities and sets her enemies ablaze, but Moctezuma doesn’t make hard distinctions between good and evil. Extracting the demon from Alucarda will solve nothing if she’s only thrown back into a life of self-denial and subjugation, which makes her final act—the burning down of the convent—somewhat triumphant, if also limned with nihilistic despair.

The nun’s rebellion prompts questions about the meaning of faith and innocence as it relates to gender roles. Purity, under the tenets of religion, is considered a feminine virtue precisely because it ensures women remain small, silent, and passive, naive victims and poor souls being much easier to dominate than dastardly succubi. This patriarchal dynamic runs through the history of the Church and its fixation on regimenting women’s behavior and bodies, though the same could be said for the setups of sundry horror and crime films that direct their sadistic games toward gals viewed as helpless. Less a nunsploitation film than a sordid rape-revenge thriller, Abel Ferrara’s Ms .45 (1981), however, disrupts this duality with a pointed use of religious iconography in its blow-out finale, when our misandrist vigilante (Zoë Lund), dressed as a bride of Christ for her work’s costume party, unleashes gunfire upon all the men in her midst. In other films, sororal disobedience means manipulating these gendered expectations: Sister Jeanne and her fellow nuns feign demonic possession as a way of infantilizing themselves before the Church inquisitor. In other words, they play dumb, descending into a mass orgy to prove that they’re in thrall to the devil—and mocking their persecutors in the process.

Religion relies on the formless logic of faith—belief that is felt in spite of tangible proof telling us otherwise—which the nuns of nunsploitation cinema routinely toy with to serve their own purposes. Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta (2021)—which features a dildo carved to resemble the Virgin Mary, sensuous dream sequences of a jacked Jesus, and sapphic sex scenes on sacred grounds—understands this particularly well. If “God is not bound by a rule book,” as its rabble-rousing heroine, Benedetta (Virginie Efira), declares, then he’s also open to interpretation, his laws capable of being determined by mere human whims. Is Benedetta really perceiving divine signals, or is she faking her hallucinations to leverage her position in the Church? If the scene when Benedetta slices open her wrists to simulate the stigmata tells us she’s a fraud, her full-body commitment to the act tells us, at the very least, that the stakes are real. Nuns like Benedetta wager nothing less than their own bodies knowing that pain and pleasure are just two sides of the same coin. In nunsploitation, there is no such thing as good or bad girls. To paraphrase Linda Williams, these parameters remain, but within them our naughty nuns renegotiate their terms in liberating ways: good girls can pretend they don’t want to be pleasured; bad girls can pretend they don’t want to be punished. With a twinkle in their eyes, they’ll find holy release.