Directed by Ken Russell • 1971 • United Kingdom
Starring Vanessa Redgrave, Oliver Reed

The most controversial film of the 1970s was banned across the world for its deliriously overheated, shockingly blasphemous tale of sexual frenzy and demonic possession in a seventeenth-century French convent....

Directed by Peter Sykes • 1976 • United Kingdom, West Germany, United States
Starring Richard Widmark, Christopher Lee, Nastassja Kinski

The final horror film released by legendary British studio Hammer Films until its revival in the 2000s, this adaptation of a novel by occult specialist Dennis ...

Directed by Abel Ferrara • 1981 • United States
Starring Zoë Lund, Albert Sinkys, Darlene Stuto

Abel Ferrara’s exploitation-scuzz classic takes place in the cesspool of 1980s New York, where mute garment-district worker Thana (Zoë Lund, who also cowrote Ferrara’s BAD LIEUTENANT) is raped once, t...

Directed by Juan López Moctezuma • 1977 • Mexico
Starring Tina Romero, Susana Kamini, Claudio Brook

Directed at fever-pitch hysteria by Alejandro Jodorowsky collaborator Juan López Moctezuma, this ultrablasphemous satanic shocker is one of the unholy grails of the nunsploitation genre—an orgiast...

Directed by Walerian Borowczyk • 1978 • Italy
Starring Marina Pierro, Ligia Branice, Howard Ross

Boundary-pushing director Walerian Borowczyk brings his gauzy, symbol-laden eroticism to this typically provocative tale of a convent turned into a hothouse of depraved lust. Pushed to the brink by ...

Directed by Giulio Berruti • 1979 • Italy
Starring Anita Ekberg, Joe Dallesandro, Alida Valli

Anita Ekberg is a sex-crazed sister with some seriously bad habits in this lurid cult classic. One of the most notorious nunsploitation films, KILLER NUN tells the sordid story of Sister Gertrude (Ekber...

Directed by Pedro Almodóvar • 1983 • Spain
Starring Julieta Serrano, Marisa Paredes, Chus Lampreave

Pedro Almodóvar’s third feature is an outrageously funny, gleefully subversive skewering of Catholic piety bursting with his bold visual imagination. In trouble with the law, nightclub singer Yola...

Directed by Paul Verhoeven • 2021 • France, Netherlands, Belgium
Starring Virginie Efira, Charlotte Rampling, Daphné Patakia

The ever-provocative Paul Verhoeven brings his subversive vision to a seventeenth-century convent for this ecstatically blasphemous tale of religion, sex, scandal, and pla...

Directed by Benjamin Christensen • 1922 • Denmark

Grave robbing, torture, possessed nuns, and a satanic Sabbath: Benjamin Christensen's legendary film uses a series of dramatic vignettes to explore the scientific hypothesis that the witches of the Middle Ages suffered the same hysteria as turn-o...