Killer Nun
Killer Nun is a 1979 film from Italy, directed by Giulio Berruti, running 90 minutes. reelscum files it under nunsploitation and video nasty.
- Year
- 1979 · 1970s films
- Country
- Italy
- Runtime
- 90 min
- Director
- Giulio Berruti
- Updated
- 29 Oct 2026
- Obscurity
- cult (37/100)
- Also known as
- The Killer Nun
- Banned in
- UK
Defined in the glossary: Nunsploitation, Video nasty
A DPP video nasty; the nunsploitation vehicle traded on Anita Ekberg's name and a convent's worth of atrocities.
Anita Ekberg, morphine, and a plot that gives up around the hour mark.
Anita Ekberg, decades past La Dolce Vita, plays a morphine-addicted nun whose grip on reality and vows unravels amid a series of deaths at her hospital-convent. For a while it promises genuine psychological horror, then loses its nerve and its plot somewhere around the hour mark.
Ekberg's committed performance and a few striking images are the draw; the film around her never quite decides what it is. It ended up on the British video nasty list more for its title than its content.
Half a good film, carried further than it deserves by its faded-star lead.
Trailer
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The cycle in depth
- Banned, cut and confiscated
A Fulci print flown out of the country, an Australian rating that just means no, and a German court that filed The Evil Dead under criminal violence. Three states, three machines for making a film disappear.
- The Exorcist was banned on video in Britain by one censor
The Exorcist passed uncut for British cinemas in 1974, then had no legal UK video release from 1988 to 1999 because one censor would not certify the tape.
On these lists
- Nunsploitation ranked by blasphemy
Ranked from the merely sacrilegious up to Ken Russell torching a cathedral. The habit comes off in reel one either way.
Filed alongside
Alucarda
The most hysterical nunsploitation film ever made. A convent, two possessed girls, and constant screaming.
Contamination
Alien via Rome, with exploding chests and a Goblin score doing heavy lifting.
Flavia the Heretic
Far angrier and more political than the packaging suggests.
The House on the Edge of the Park
Deodato points Last House at a dinner party. Grubby, mean, effective.
Successive Slidings of Pleasure
A nouveau-roman novelist makes a nunsploitation film and refuses to let it mean anything.
Anthropophagus
Almost entirely people walking around an island. Then two minutes of infamy.
Eaten Alive!
Lenzi recycling other films' footage into a Jonestown story. Grim work.
Cannibal Apocalypse
Vietnam veterans as cannibals. Sillier and kinder than the jungle cycle.
Images in a Convent
D'Amato's convent, where the theology is a coat-hook for the softcore.
The Driller Killer
Abel Ferrara's debut. More interesting as a document of downtown New York.
The New York Ripper
Genuinely nasty and hard to defend. The killer quacks. It doesn't help.
Behind Convent Walls
Borowczyk brings his erotic art-house eye to the convent. Beautiful, explicit and barely plotted.