Nuns in Horror: Device or Distraction? 

Nuns are inherently sort of an odd thing because nuns make choices that most of society cannot understand or relate to—that strangeness, that otherness, that level of dedication is a huge opportunity when it comes to horror. But so few horror movies lean into it.  

One of the best Nun Horror movies to do it of late is The First Omen, released this April.

 Following Sister Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) on a voyage from the States to work at an orphanage in Italy, The First Omen ultimately tells the creation story of Damien Thorn, the primary antagonist in the first installment of The Omen franchise.

In a stunning directorial debut and killer prequel, Arkasha Stephens crafts an origin story in which Damien is the result of a series of experiments intended to create an Antichrist that will generate fear and make people return to the church.  

What’s great about The First Omen is how its most terrifying aspect is not the demon they’re using to impregnate young women in these experiments, but instead, the religious fervor that drives the individuals behind the experiments to attempt them in the first place.

And who are these individuals, you ask? One is a nun, the abbess of the orphanage, Sister Silva, who has even participated in the experiments as a surrogate mother herself.

To endure something so awful as to have lain with the demon, known as “the Jackal” in the film, and to then force other young women to do so without their consent is absolutely horrifying, but Sister Silva desires a societal return to religion so deeply, for her it’s an easy choice.  

It’s such a clever idea—using perverted devotion as a motive in this way. All the extremes in The First Omen are rooted in reality in a sense, too, because the way power corrupts is a truth we all know deeply.

The result? The First Omen is the first film in a long while to make a nun herself scary.  

That’s not to say it’s the only film to use religious fervor as an instrument of horror.

Immaculate featuring Sydney Sweeney took a similar approach, but rather than centering the nun as the villain, it centers on a fanatical priest.

Sister Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney) also travels to Italy to take her vows and serve in a home for dying nuns. While there, she falls pregnant despite being a virgin.

It turns out that the priest who recruited her was a scientist in a past life, and he’s using DNA harvested from one of the nails that hung Jesus Christ on the cross in an attempt to usher in the second coming of the Lord.

And surely, it does not work out how he thinks. 

Immaculate is a little less terrifying than The First Omen because we expect this sort of thing from men.

There are nuns involved in the conspiracy, but it doesn’t feel like their movie in the same way The First Omen does, which could very well stem from the fact that Immaculate was written and directed by men.

In Immaculate, the nuns aren’t so much the bad guys as much as they are the victims, and while the film deserves a nod for taking the less-traveled road of religious fervor instead of just being another possession movie, it ends up feeling like someone really wanted an excuse to put Sydney Sweeney in a soaking-wet cassock.  

However, what can be said about both of these films is that they each deal with nuns who become pregnant.

It feels representative of the fact that society cannot accept some women don’t want to become wives and mothers, that a woman’s greatest achievements don’t have to be the children they bear.

Even the church, the very place that needs the nuns in the first place, can’t seem to accept it.

This is another great way of using what nuns represent effectively in horror. 

Honorable Mention: While not technically a nun film, if the idea of horror films based on religious fervor is something that interests you, check out Saint Maud.

The 2019 release from A24 directed by Rose Glass follows Maud, a devoutly religious and mentally unstable palliative care nurse, as she is assigned a stubborn atheist patient who she believes has been put in her path by God so that she may save her soul.

What it lacks in pregnancy conspiracy rings, it makes up for in absolute unhinged-ness. If you take the suggestion, buckle up for a wild ride. 

Outside of films that imagine the dangers of religious devotion, the majority of Nun Horror movies tend to center around demonic possessions and hauntings, which leads us to The Nun.

Starring Taissa Farmiga, this installment in the Ed and Lorraine Warren Cinematic Universe takes us to France this time, where Sister Irene (Farmiga) has been sent along with a priest to investigate the suicide of another nun at a cloistered convent.  

So it goes, the convent is being haunted by a demon named Valek, a demon who takes the form of a nun to mock all the religious clergy who stand against it.

Before Sister Irene’s arrival, Valek had been hopping from Sister to Sister, possessing each of the women, until the last one finally hung herself, prompting the investigation. 

It turns out any of the women seen by Sister Irene and Father Burke, her co-investigator, had been apparitions controlled by the demon all along.  

It's not a bad movie. It’s just that nuns are only used for aesthetics. A demon that looks like a nun is freaky, and the convent is gothic and isolated and gorgeous, but the movie could still function completely if all the nuns were replaced by priests.

At its basest level, it’s about the battle between good and evil. None of the scares in the film tap into what it means to be a woman of the cloth or even a woman period.

Valek isn’t a nun who fell from grace and went to the dark side. Fervor isn’t distorted to extremes.

The perversion of power among those acting in the interest of God isn’t explored. The Nun is a scary movie with nuns in it, but it’s not scary because of what nuns represent.  

And that’s not to say that nuns are inherently scary things, it’s just to say that nuns make unique choices that make them interesting, they’re outsiders in society, and that’s what horror movies about nuns need to explore.  

So, yes, more nun movies, please—but make it about more than just the costume.