Back to nuns… Pure. Chaste. Pious. Nuns. WOMEN. Red-blooded women underneath their armour of modesty.

Little did I know when I secretly bought myself a DVD copy of Behind Convent Walls the 1978 erotic classic by Polish provocateur Walerian Borowczyk, that there was a bigger audience out there with a lust for deviant nuns. Over a decade later, I found out that the figure of a nun was, in fact, so highly fetishized and aggrandized that they had carved out a whole genre unto themselves: may I present you with… the NUNSPLOITATION film. A genre of sometimes violent, sometimes weapon-wielding, often gutter-mouthed, and always sexually expressive nuns breaking free of the stoic conventions of rigid patriarchal Catholicism.

Although the Nunsploitation film lives on the fringes of the cinemascape, many critically regarded directors have been just as eagerly on the nose with their critiques of the Big C (Catholicism). For example Spanish-Mexican surreal satirist director Luis Buñuel has never minced his views on his disdain for religious hegemony and Spanish queer auteur Pedro Almodóvar who grew up in the post-dictatorship Franco Spain relished in sending up and exploiting the church’s hypocritical misogynistic ideologies. The Nunsploitation genre could be seen as the antithesis – the anti-Christ even – to the patriarchal forces of the Church, almost harking back to pre-Christian times, towards the old pagan ways by pushing primordial feminine energy to the fore. And by edging into the extreme graphic territory, these films transcend the idea of pain, subjugation and suffering of women under repressive religious ideals and transforms them into subversive pleasures – unchartered desires outside of the paradigm of puritanical exceptionalism.  

So why talk about this pretty niche subsect of cinema now? What could we possibly learn from some horny nuns? Because we are at a time when more than ever women’s bodies are being interrogated, prodded, poked, policed, mutilated and murdered – all in the name of religion and religious fanaticism. Sure, our guy Pope Francis spoke out against violence towards women – condemning it – during his 2022 New Years mass (although much of it was coded as woman being useful “hosts” for babies – so back onto the slagheap us childless folk go!). But actions speak louder than words. One cannot ignore the long history of abuse and oppression of women under the Catholic faith – from the horrific treatment and abuse of “fallen women” in the Magdalene laundries in Ireland from the 18th-20th century to the threats of excommunication and religious shaming in cases of abortion (even in cases of rape and incest) post the overturning of Roe vs. Wade in the US. And don’t even get me started on the gross accusations, judgment, interrogation and imprisonment of women during the Spanish Inquisition! Politicians today are increasingly amalgamizing religion into their politics, allowing such draconian misogynistic ideologies to spill into the streets and into our lives.

To the devout worshipper, these Nunsploitation films are downright blasphemous. But for those who recognise how the institution of God (with a capital G-O-D) has been co-opted by some terrible morally corrupt human beings in its history of existence, the Nunsploitation film is a sucker-punch to the huevos of all that lurking patriarchal energy that lays deep within it – an energy that essentially only provides for and respects women on the condition of obedience, chastity or sacrificial motherhood. Nunsploitation films are fucking political. Delectably political. Sexually repressed nuns fashioning dildos out of wooden crucifixes, fantasies about laying bare next to Jesus’ exposed body, hailing Mary with feverish fervour in the confession box – and lesbians.. so many lesbians. Avert your eyes and ears, I dare you!

Here are some of my favourite Nunsploitation films to discover for yourself – 7 films for 7 deadly sins.

It has, it is, and it will always be, their bodies, their rules!

Warning: Spoilers Ahead! 

There was a time that the British relationship to sex was puritanical and juvenile at best – silly innuendos and off-beat camp gags a la Carry On Films. Uncomfortable giggles all round. But come the sexual revolution of the swinging 60s, British directors were emboldened, ready to poke the sexy bear with a stiffer… upper lip – enter Ken Russell, a serious and talented filmmaker but also an utter smut merchant, earning his “enfant terrible” stripes with his Marquis De Sade levels of anti-establishment deviance.

The Devils is set in 17th century France, bringing together titans of UK acting nobility – with Oliver Reed playing the devilishly charismatic priest, Urban Grandier, and Vanessa Redgrave playing the stoic hunchbacked sexually repressed nun (definitely not one for a Tinder profile bio!), Sister Jeanne des Anges who is barely able to touch the hem of Grandier’s gaping garment without sending her into an erotic frenzy. His brutish energy hath overcometh her! But as she watches him do unto other women what she dreams that he would do unto herself, her envy-fuelled hysteria escalates into accusations of witchcraft and demonic possession, torturous inquisitions and botched exorcisms. Her religious delirium spreads, seducing the other nuns of the convent into an orgiastic climax of naked frivolities and masturbation with crucifixes – just another Saturday night at the monastery, it seems. As Urban Grandier is punished by a damning inquisition, we are starkly reminded that all are the victims in the name of the morally corrupt marriage of church and state, which we know now gave rise to witch hunts around the world that would see the murders of tens of thousands of people, mostly women.

Honourable shout out to Ken Russell’s Belle Du Jour re-imagining Crimes of Passion which portrays deliciously liberated prostitute played by Kathleen Turner uttering the words to Anthony Perkins’ repressed priest “I never forget a face. ‘Specially when I've sat on it.” *PERVY CHEF’S KISS*

Polish director Walerian Borowczyk was a holocaust survivor whose films had been banned in both Communist Poland and Fascist Spain – a badge that he paraded with honour because it meant that his “portrait of the vices of totalitarianism had universal application”. Hey, a middle finger is a middle finger whatever language you speak! His films famously interrogate bourgeois and religious hypocrisy, much like art-house darling Bunuel, by examining the basest of human desires within environments of oppressive social contracts. Freud would have a field day! And what’s more, his films are a titillating tableau of soft-focus eye candy – with sets and costumes serving as majestic wallpaper for his salacious nubile cast who were freeing the nipple way before it became a hashtag.

Behind Convent Walls is certainly Borowczyk’s most infamous work, pushing that interrogating agenda of his. With little plot, this film is more of a fever-fantasy of vignettes with cheeky promiscuous nuns giving into their sins of the flesh. Some choosing to submit to joyful music, to singing and dancing. Whilst the more uninhibited nuns sneak men into their chambers after dark, cavort around the convent just as God had intended or just masturbate with homemade dildos as they lust over pictures of Jesus (because he really does love you). The wafer-thin holy house of cards finally blows down when the most devout of the nuns, Sister Clara, consummates her sinful surrender in the convent courtyard with the handsome artist Rodrigo crescendoing in a collision of sexual and religious ecstasy. God may enter you in many ways.. but it seems orally is best.

Japanese culture possesses a vast spectrum of subversive sexual fetishes, from hentai porn to shibari the art of rope bondage, all of which deserve their own deep dives into their psychological  complexities. Japanese pink “pinku” films became massively popularised in the 1960s and 1970s and were later renamed the less decorated label of “sexploitation films” due to their display of female nudity and softcore sex. Produced by independent studios which existed outside of the mainstream studio system, they became so popular that they spawned their own sub-genre film stars and auteurs, later spinning off many more funtastic genres such as the “pinky violence” films, the “women in prison” films and, you guessed it, the sexy Nunsploitation films. The Japanese ethics board had its own way of regulation and censorship so it was always clear what level of smut you’d be getting – lots of boobs and bums, some bondage and S&M, even rape fantasies. But no pubic hair – dear lord, no public hair!

At its core, this film is a rape revenge tale in which a young woman, Maya, goes undercover in a convent to learn how her mother was raped and murdered by the priest of the church. As she plots her bloody vengeance her primal vitriol rocks the foundations of decency as she corrupts other nuns around her, emboldening them to rise up and succumb to their inner cravings. Switchblade knife fights between beautiful bare-breasted nuns break out and lesbianic mother superiors dish out erotic flagellations involving rose thorns – it’s a gloriously kinky visual feast and you’re all invited round for the last supper.

Set in the mid-13th century amidst the time of the Spanish Inquisition and the black death, this deranged phantasmagoria of perversion is one of many films that slipped out of the mind of prolific Mexican director, Gilberto Martínez Solares, who made his name during the Golden Age of Mexican cinema between the post WW2 years of 1930-1960. It’s also worthy of mentioning that he was a close peer of Bunuel so upping the establishment was well within his principles.

This is a simple good nun gone bad story (walking so Ri Ri could run), in which a demure pious nun, Sister Maria, is compelled to act on her most wanton impulses when she’s visited by the big evil guy himself, Lucifer, in the form of a handsome naked man (of course he’s naked), who manages to stay very much “on brand” by offering her a piece of forbidden fruit from which she reluctantly feasts on. Soon, her every waking thought is infected with sinful visages of lesbianism, self-pleasure and eventually murder – and just as you thought you’d seen the worst of it, she seduces, rapes then stabs to death an underage teenage boy. That’s got to take the Eucharist – am I right!? It also wouldn’t be a proper ending if it didn’t descend into a sordid mass orgy of naked dancing nuns in the house of sin that she and The Devil had created. “Holy Shit!” I hear you cry! Well, precisely.

Fun fact: Salma Hayek’s sexy vampire seductress character in Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn is named after this film.

Fast forwarding to 2024 when actress Sydney Sweeney becomes unwillingly embroiled in a media rhetoric by the north-American far-right in their war against “wokeism” – essentially, politicising her body by declaring that the popular acceptance of her “conventional” blonde hair, blue eyed, buxom beauty signalled the “end of woke-ism” for they are tired of the democratisation of representations of beauty in the media. No more black/brown models, no more trans models, no more fat models – they yelled through their drooling underbites. How dare not every women look like a Barbie clone with DD cups?! So then Sydney, like the queen that she is, produces and stars in Immaculate. Which is the ultimate MIC DROP.

A gothic tale of a young woman, Sister Cecilia, who has chosen to devote her life to the church as a nun only to become pregnant by a seemingly immaculate conception. Her precious cargo elevates her to a miraculous holy figure by the church but her protection soon turns to a malignant imprisonment as they begin to control what she eats, when she sleeps, who she can speak with – big fat Rosemary’s Baby vibes. She comes to discover that she is, in fact, a part of a long line of failed demented experiments by the Father of the church to create the second coming by impregnating nuns with the DNA of Christ himself. It doesn’t get more f*cked up than artificial non-consensual impregnation! But Sister Cecilia fights back the nefarious patriarchal forces – her wrath quaking the convent with a hyper bloody Giallo-esque vengeance and an arresting final scene that will scorch your mind (and ears) for many moons after.

I’m cheating here by allowing myself double the trouble because these films were made in the same year by the same Italian director, Domenico Paolella, so you could definitely speak about them both the same breath. Unlike the more nastier Italian Nunsploitation films of the 1970s (such as Joe D'Amato’s Images From a Convent) where we see lewd sex and violence for the sake of sex and violence (which has it’s time and place – usually Sunday evenings at mine), Story of a Cloistered Nun and The Nun and the Devil offer scathing portrayals of monstrous female desire and ambition under the crippling suppression of a misogynistic society. You could also definitely argue these films into the realms of arthouse cinema after a good round of negronis.

Director Domenico Paolella delivers his tale of religious corruption and greed with the romantically-arresting language of extravagant costumes, opulent sets and an epic score of swelling strings. They’re also beautifully shot by a cinematographer who has worked with the likes of Pasolini so you’d be forgiven in forgetting what you came here for when we are offered sprinklings of bare breasts, lesbians, and a sexually repressed Mother Superior fawning over impressionable young blood amongst the well-scripted narrative. Our minds are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars (I’m pretty sure Oscar Wilde would’ve loved a bit of Nunsploitation).

The root of Nunsploitation stories can be traced back to gothic fiction which has a long history of tropes that call out the corruption of the clergy – with scheming confessors, pernicious priests, and iron-fisted mother superiors. Come the commitment to celluloid, I believe the Nunsploitation film genre started with Black Narcissus directed by the British writer-director auteur duo, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. This film is the OG of putting the forbidden eroticism of religious repression onto celluloid – nestled between their metaphysical WW2 epic A Matter of Life And Death (1946) and psycho melodrama The Red Shoes (1949)). For a film to dare to push the boundaries of political sensibilities and to have reached as big an audience as it did at the time – it’s a feat that could only have been made possible by already established Oscar-winners. Of course, it still suffered a butchery by censors and was banned by the Catholic Church, which only served to intrigue audience’s further.

This melodramatic masterpiece sees a group of nuns, the Congregation of The Servants of Mary, tasked to establish a school and hospital at a dilapidated palace high upon a cliff in the Himalayas. Soon they discover the palace used to be a harem, a place humming with untapped erotic energy, which starts to feel more and more palpable as the changeable winds rush the empty halls with poetic urgency to free the chaste nuns. One by one, they lose control of themselves, as paranoia and madness sets in cumulating in Sister Ruth’s maniacal surrender to her sexual appetite for the handsome grounds keeper Mr Dean.

Some may find it blasphemous to even categorise this as a Nunsploitation film, what with it being so well regarded by the highest of a cinéaste’s brow, but this is my article and I’ll cry “Nunsploitation” if I want to!! There are no peeps of naked flesh nor excessive perversions here. Instead there are stolen glances, simmering desires, intense death stares, scandalous seductions and tragic misadventures all percolating in the suffocating prison of religious duty. Let’s give all the Hail Mary’s to this stunning masterpiece please.