Nunsploitation

Nunsploitation is a cycle of films, mostly Italian and Spanish and mostly made between 1969 and 1985, set in convents, in which the religious setting exists to be violated. Sexual repression, flagellation, lesbianism, possession and corrupt clergy are the standard components.

The literary ancestry

The subject is much older than the films. Denis Diderot wrote La Religieuse in 1780, about a young woman forced into a convent against her will, and it was banned in France for decades. Matthew Lewis published The Monk in 1796, which supplies most of the imagery the cycle would later use: the corrupted abbot, the walled-up nun, the crypt.

There is also a real historical record underneath it. The Loudun possessions of 1632 to 1634, in which an entire Ursuline convent reported demonic possession and a priest named Urbain Grandier was burned for causing it, are documented in enormous detail. Aldous Huxley wrote a book about them in 1952. That case is the direct source of the cycle's best film.

Why the cycle happened when it did

Three things arrived at once.

Censorship collapsed. Italy's film censorship board weakened sharply through the late 1960s. Spain's did the same after Franco's death in 1975, which is why Spanish entries cluster later.

Anticlericalism was live. Italy legalised divorce in 1970 and confirmed it by referendum in 1974, against direct opposition from the Church. Films attacking clerical authority were not fringe provocations, they were part of an argument the country was actually having.

A habit is cheap. It is one costume, it reads instantly on a poster, and the sets can be four stone walls. For a producer working at speed, this matters more than any of the above.

Two strands under one label

Films with something to say. Ken Russell's The Devils (1971) uses Loudun to make an argument about the state manufacturing hysteria to destroy an inconvenient man. Jerzy Kawalerowicz's Mother Joan of the Angels (1961) takes the same case in a spare Polish register and predates the cycle entirely. Walerian Borowczyk's Behind Convent Walls (1978) sits somewhere in between.

Films selling a poster. Killer Nun (1979), Images in a Convent (1979), Sister Emanuelle (1977), and a long tail of productions where the theology is set dressing and the running time is filled accordingly.

Flavia the Heretic (1974) is the interesting middle case: marketed as the second kind, and considerably angrier and more political than it needed to be.

The Japanese branch

School of the Holy Beast (1974) is the outlier worth knowing about. Norifumi Suzuki made it at Toei during the pinky violence boom, and it is the most formally accomplished film in the whole category, with a flagellation sequence staged against falling rose petals that has been imitated for fifty years.

About the word

Video-era critics coined "nunsploitation" retrospectively. It flattens the distance between an anticlerical art film and a softcore quickie, which is a fair objection. It is also how people look for these films, so the tag stays, and the blurbs do the work of telling them apart.

Common confusion

Nunsploitation is not the same as occult or possession horror. The Exorcist is not nunsploitation. The distinguishing feature here is the convent as an institution: the enclosure, the hierarchy, and the vows, all of which exist in these films to be broken.

Where to start

The Devils, with a caveat. Warner has never released the complete cut. The version you can see is missing footage the BBFC removed in 1971, and the full film has still not been legally available in Britain more than fifty years later.