Six Films Featuring Bad Nuns
Six films featuring bad nuns.
Black Narcissus (1947):
There are saintly nuns in Hollywood history. Think of Julie Andrews, Ingrid Bergman and Audrey Hepburn. There's even Mary Tyler Moore opposite Elvis. And then there's the rest--the sexually frustrated, the possessed, even the Satanic. In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's classic, the penguins fall into the former category with Deborah Kerr leading a group who suffer eroding faith, erotic hysteria, even murderous lust in the Himalayas.
La Religeuse (1966):
Jacques Rivette's unusually straightforward drama calmly tells of a teenager (Anna Karina) forced into a cruel and punitive 18th-century convent. Though she eventually makes it to a nicer one, it's not before she's slowly stripped of her personality by fascistic nuns.
The Devils (1971):
The seedy subgenre of possessed and/or randy nuns known as nunsploitation flourished in Europe and Japan in the 1970s with titles like The Nun and the Devil and School of the Holy Beast. A slightly classier version cropped up in England via madman Ken Russell, who--adapting Aldous Huxley's nonfiction The Devils of Loudon--coerced red-hot stars Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave to play a stylish, 17th-century French priest and the head of a nunnery, respectively. Censors forced Russell to snip the infamous rape of Christ sequence.
Dark Habits (1983):
Pedro Almod�var made an early splash with this dark comedy about a woman who takes refuge in a convent populated by nuns who are into smack, sadomasochistic lesbianism, erotic novels and raising tigers.
The Nun (2005):
Though there's also a nunsploitation classic called Killer Nun--with Anita Ekberg as an oversexed, bullying and possibly homicidal sister--this Spanish-American production is the only horror film to sport a nun as the central homicidal baddie. Took long enough.
Doubt (2008)
Finally, there's the most typical kind of nun: the one that's just plain mean. Chew that scenery, Meryl!
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