For every Sister Mary Helena in Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors doing her part to warn Freddy’s victims, it seems as though there’s a Valak or a Sister Jude Martin (American Horror Story) to remind us of the dark side of the archetype. In the 18th century, when both the Gothic novel was born and anti-Catholic furor was still high in Britain, both reactionary and radical authors linked Catholicism to concepts of Old World tyranny: the gated communities of monasteries and convents seemed like hidden worlds hiding secret, sexual depredations and tyrannical horrors. Early horror novels like Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) featured convents that were less religious institutions and more tortuous prisons that would have brought a smile to the lips of the Marquis de Sade or the clients in a Hostel film.
But why do nuns continue to hold their own in the modern imagination? Perhaps it’s still the threat of religious extremism; perhaps as well the intimation of rigid tyranny behind the very structure of convent life, so alien to freer secular or spiritual lives; or perhaps it’s the shocking contrast between the purity that a nun is imagined to represent and the darkness and violence of the genre.
Whatever the reason, nuns have continued to haunt horror literature and cinema – and while you wait for the arrival of Corin Hardy’s The Nun and Aislinn Clarke’s The Devil’s Doorway, here are six of the genre’s scariest nuns to pray by your bedside…
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The Blind Nun in The Sentinel (1977)
Before the iconic blind nun on the cover of The Devil Inside (2012) and the blind, ominous Sister Death in Verónica (2017), The Sentinel firmly established the “blind nun trope” as an eerie visual motif. To say anything further besides providing the haunting still above would spoil the gloriously twisted ending of this classic, cult horror film. But with a movie that features appearances from Chris Sarandon, Burgess Meredith, Ava Gardner, Christopher Walken, John Carradine, and Jeff Goldbum as well as one of the creepiest twist endings in horror history, do you really need any further incentive?
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Mother Ursula in The Monk (1796, 2011)
There’s evil and then there’s Mother Ursula, the head prioress in Matthew Lewis’s horror novel The Monk and French director Dominik Moll’s 2011 adaptation, played to grim perfection by Geraldine Chaplin. It’s her devout way or the highway and Heaven help you if you’re a novice in her convent and fail to keep to her rules. When she discovers that one of her nuns is pregnant, she devises a punishment so cruel that the 2011 film adaptation actually mitigates it somewhat, to avoid shocking the sensibilities of 21st century audiences, keeping it to a Cask of Amontillado-style live entombment. In the original 1796 novel, the victim and her soon-to-be-born child’s fate is far, far grislier and prolonged. “I wish not for your death,” says Mother Ursula, “but your repentance.” As Pet Sematary’s Jud says, “Sometimes dead is better.”
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Sister Mary Eunice in American Horror Story: Asylum (2012)
“We’re all going to be together in the dark watching The Sign Of The Cross, a movie full of fire, sex, and the death of Christians. What fun!” No one has had as much fun with the wicked nun archetype as Lily Rabe in the role of Sister Mary Eunice. Her complicated plot arc takes her from the shy innocent to the knowing seducer; she is a perfect example of the compelling dichotomy of purity and decadence that this particular archetype offers to the genre. Though her demonic possession is played unflinchingly for terror, there is also something perversely entertaining in the way that she entraps the sadistic Dr. Arden and the Monsignor into her hellish designs, both caught off guard by her 180 degree turn from submissive innocence to aggressive diabolism. Also, let’s face it: no one on this list would be as much fun on movie night as Sister Mary.
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Sister Jeanne in The Devils (1971)
Some of the best horror villains exist in that queasy space betwixt monster and villain. Sister Jeanne in Ken Russell’s Gothic nightmare The Devils is such a villain. Persecuted and maddened by repression, she finds escape first in quasi-religious erotic fantasies, then in feigning possession and accusing the priest whom she lusts after of sorcery. In the end, she is tortured by her lies and by the tyrannical State almost as thoroughly as her victim, but this doesn’t alleviate the ultimate carnage that her own agonized repression causes. Definitely not a lady whose eye you’d want to catch.
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The Unknown Nun in Vertigo
Like the Nun in The Sentinel, not much can be said of her role in Vertigo, without giving away one of the most twisted moments not only in Hitchcock’s oeuvre but in all of cinematic history. Suffice it to say that this moment gave me nightmares for a week when I was a kid and, in a film rife with its own nightmarish dream logic and symbolism, serves as a fitting emblem of a cruel, unforgiving, and inescapable karma.
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The Bleeding Nun in The Monk
Unfortunately, Dominik Moll’s otherwise fantastic adaptation of The Monk completely omits not only one of the most chilling ghostly nuns in horror history, but the very first instance of this archetype in popular horror literature. Lewis’s tale of a murderous, licentious ghostly nun whose bloodstained form appears nightly at the bedside of Don Raymond captured the public imagination so powerfully that it was frequently anthologized on its own in horror anthologies.
It also contains, perhaps, the first truly chilling jump scene in horror literature, in this conversation between her victim and the exorcist:
“I have the power of releasing you from your nightly visitor; but this cannot be done before Sunday. On the hour when the Sabbath morning breaks, spirits of darkness have least influence over mortals. After Saturday the Nun shall visit you no more.”
“May I not enquire,” said I, ‘”by what means you are in possession of a secret which I have carefully concealed from the knowledge of everyone?”
“How can I be ignorant of your distress, when their cause at this moment stands beside you?”
I started. The Stranger continued.
“Though to you only visible for one hour in the twenty-four, neither day or night does She ever quit you; Nor will She ever quit you till you have granted her request.”
Pleasant dreams…
