Black Narcissus and the strange world of 'Nunsploitation' movies
Gemma Arterton has been a Bond girl, the Gretel half of Hansel and Gretel and a depressed rabbit in the 2018 revamp of Watership Down. But by donning a wimple to play a repressed nun in the new BBC remake of steamy 1947 convent caper Black Narcissus the actress has now taken vows with one of cinema’s great unsung milieux: the Nunsploitation flick.
Nunsploitation is a surprisingly broad genre, encompassing serious treatises on faith and desire, trigger-happy revenge stories and schlocky shockers brimming with graphic violence and wanton nudity. The common thread tends to be a psycho-spiritual battle raging within the nun and revolving around external and internal forces.
The external forces are typically unpleasant men and/or vengeful Mother Superiors. The internal ones inevitably centre on the sister’s bottled-up sexual urges. And if obscure, Nunsploitation is nonetheless long-established, having originated during the black-and-white era and found its sinful stride through the Seventies and Eighties. You could say Nunsploitation is a habit Hollywood finds hard to break.
Well, perhaps not Hollywood. In America cinematic nuns on the run from their own carnal impulses remain hugely niche. Sister Act doesn’t count – nor do horror films that merely feature riotous prioresses, such as The Conjuring 2 or Corin Hardy’s The Nun. Nunsploitation is, with a handful of exceptions, thoroughly European, albeit with culturally-specific Japanese and Mexican offshoots.
The milieu is generally agreed to have begun with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s original Black Narcissus (though the first depiction of a crazed nun on screen was a Swedish silent classic from 1922, H?xan). Set in the Himalayas and shot at Pinewood and in West Sussex, Black Narcissus was adapted from Rumer Godden’s 1939 novel of the same name. Deborah Kerr starred as Sister Clodagh, a newly-appointed Mother Superior who find herself attracted to dashing Mr Dean (David Farrar). He’s the agent of the local ruler in pre-independence India and a clear-and-present threat to the purity of Clodagh and her sisters. Gemma Arterton is Clodagh in the remake while Alessandro Nivola is the devilish Dean.
“One of the first truly erotic films,” is how Martin Scorsese described Black Narcissus. With its simmering sensuality, pressure-cooker spiritual angst and nun-v-nun conflict it certainly ticks all the Nunsploitation boxes. Later entries in the genre would be more explicit and lean into the violence. Yet all the tropes are established in Black Narcissus, which culminates in a deadly showdown and also features one dead baby and several broken hearts.
Yet for all its impact it would take another 28 years for Nunsploitation to become properly established. The catalyst was Ken Russell's 1971 art-house endurance test The Devils. This was Black Narcissus stripped of nuance and subtext. It was entirely in the audience’s faces, with its nudity, live maggots, torture-by-enema, and mass orgies.
The Devils was more than mere exploitation, and with Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave starring it certainly wasn’t a B-movie. It was adapted from the Aldous Huxley novel The Devils of Loudun – itself inspired by the supposedly true story of priest Urbain Grandier, burned at the stake in Loudun in 1634 for seducing an entire convent of nuns (and for being in league with Satan).
The charges against Grandier were understood even at the time to be trumped up. He is believed to have been promiscuous and to have rejected the offer of the Mother Superior of the convent to be her spiritual advisor. His real crime, though, was to speak out against Cardinal Richelieu – a transgression that resulted in his being burned alive.
The plot of the Devils follows much the same beats. Reed plays Grandier while Redgrave is Sister Jeanne, the hunch-backed Mother Superior who becomes obsessed with him. She claims Grandier has “bewitched” her and the other nuns. He is tortured – explicitly and at length – and then the nuns holds a mass sex carnival in their church, during which they do rude things with a crucifix.
It’s all quite over the top and often deranged. Which is presumably why it received an X-rating in the US and was banned outright in many countries. In the UK, the BBFC insisted on two cuts. One of the expunged scenes features naked nuns sexually defiling a statue of Christ while “witchfinder general” Father Pierre Barre (Michael Gothard) pleasures himself. The second finds Sister Jeanne suggestively manipulating the charred femur of Grandier after he has been burned at the stake.
Time has been kind to The Devils. Today it is regarded as a searing critique of the abuse of power and the weaponisation of faith, and an insightful commentary on the dangers of sexual repression. Russell oversaw a director’s cut in 2004 – which restored the aforementioned “Rape of Christ” scene – but Warner Brothers has declined to release it, supposedly on the grounds of the “distasteful tonality” of the Rape of Christ and other sequences.
The Devils looms over Nunsploitation and can be considered the Citizen Kane of movies featuring naked nuns defiling crucifixes. It was hugely influential, seeming to inspire directors in Catholic Italy especially. Within a few years, studios there were churning out Nunsploitation.
Sex and violence were the mainstays of Seventies Nunsploitation. Domenico Paolella’s Story of A Cloistered Nun from 1973, for instance, is about a young woman forced to join a convent by her wealthy parents. When she refuses the sexual advances of a particularly forceful nun, the spurned sister murders the woman’s lover.
Behind Covent Walls (1978), directed by Walerian Borowczyk, meanwhile tells of a sadistic Mother Superior who tries, but fails, to stop the nuns in her spiritual care taking lovers. And Giulio Berruti’s Killer Nun (1979) – also released as Deadly Habits – blends sexual obsession and slasher thrills as a nun is driven mad after her brain tumour is removed. She has an affair with another nun and tortures elderly patients. Here, for once, the Mother Superior is the heroine as she confronts the sadistic sister.
“The premise of most Nunsploitation movies revolves around a young woman who has done something to offend male figures of authority and is forcibly sequestered in a convent for her supposed moral protection,” explains online cult film encyclopaedia the Grindhouse Cinema Database. “Once inside the girl often encounters a tyrannical Mother Superior whose own suppressed sexual desires find expression in sadistic punishments meted out to disobedient novices; other young nuns who, when they are unable to smuggle lovers into their chambers under the cover of night, indulge in lesbian liaisons and the exchange of homemade pornography; and a visiting priest whose presence often inspires the nuns to further frottage and frenzy.”
Nunsploitation was largely a European genre, as pointed out above. However, it did take off in Catholic Mexico (1975’s Satánico Pandemonium) and in Japan, where Western belief structures were regarded as a “safe” target for films critiquing religion and female repression (Norifumi Suzuki’s School of the Holy Beast from 1974).
The genre did sputter out somewhat after the Seventies, though it has surfaced now and again. Pedro Almodóvar’s 1983 black comedy Dark Habits is considered Nunsploitation-adjacent. Lindsay Lohan played a machine-gun wielding nun in Robert Rodriguez’s Machete in 2010. And Saw director Darren Lynn Bousman’s gothic horror St Agatha, from 2018, is about a woman in the 1950s American South who seeks refuge in a convent full of dark secrets. Nunsploitation is still with us.
And now it comes to BBC Christmas primetime, courtesy of the three-part Black Narcissus. But how to explain its enduring appeal? One theory is that Nunsploitation provides an insight into male attitudes towards women and female sexuality.
“You don't have to be…the Marquis de Sade to figure out that nun pornography is about as textbook a vehicle as could be devised for men to express their love/hate ambivalence toward women,” wrote film scholar Chris Fujiwara in his 2004 essay on the subject. "A male-defined culture which moralizes about 'sins of the flesh' and the pollution and evil of women's carnal desires sees both nuns and lesbians as 'unnatural' but at opposite poles on a scale of female virtue… Nunsploitation both celebrates and punishes this 'unnaturalness', commends and revenges this inaccessibility.”
But why would the BBC wish to engage with what is generally considered a low-rent genre? Perhaps it is because, even when the films are filled with gore and gratuitous nudity, Nunsploitation is ultimately concerned with how women are marginalised by power structures, religious and otherwise.
“In Ireland and in the UK, young women were forced or pressured into becoming nuns against their wills,” commented Aisling Franciosi, one of Gemma Arterton’s fellow sisters in Black Narcissus. “I feel sorry for her [Franciosi’s character] because I think it’s clear she’s not the kind of person who should be in a convent”.
The first episode of Black Narcissus airs at 9pm on BBC One tonight
