If you choose your home movie viewing extensively from the International Horror section of Netflix, sooner or later you are likely to find yourself watching some soft-core nun porn. At least that has been true at my house.
The proper name for this genre, produced mostly in Italy (big surprise) during the 1970's, is Nunsploitation. But I like the taste of "soft-core nun porn" when you say it.
These movies have titles like Nuns of St. Archangel
, and Flavia the Heretic
, (In Italian that last film's title appears to translate literally as Flavia the Muslim Nun.) The films tend to have historical settings, with the period of the Spanish Inquisition taking pride of place, and most fall back on the cowardly disclaimer "Based on a true incident." That is the thin excuse that justifies as many naked novitiates, flagellations, and lesbian scenes as can be worked into a ninety-minute feature film. Producers also sometimes bolstered their historical settings with literary pedigrees. I have seen films attributed to stories by Alexander Dumas and Stendhal, although I doubt these authors would recognize their material. For my money the best of the lot is also the only one with a contemporary setting. In Killer Nun
, a forty-seven-year-old Anita Ekberg, already well into her second growth, stars as the morphine-addicted and homicidal Sister Gertrude, the terror of a Belgian Catholic hospital for the mentally infirm.
,, and Flavia the Heretic, (In Italian that last film's title appears to translate literally as Flavia the Muslim Nun.) The films tend to have historical settings, with the period of the Spanish Inquisition taking pride of place, and most fall back on the cowardly disclaimer "Based on a true incident." That is the thin excuse that justifies as many naked novitiates, flagellations, and lesbian scenes as can be worked into a ninety-minute feature film. Producers also sometimes bolstered their historical settings with literary pedigrees. I have seen films attributed to stories by Alexander Dumas and Stendhal, although I doubt these authors would recognize their material. For my money the best of the lot is also the only one with a contemporary setting. In Killer Nun, a forty-seven-year-old Anita Ekberg, already well into her second growth, stars as the morphine-addicted and homicidal Sister Gertrude, the terror of a Belgian Catholic hospital for the mentally infirm. A generous view of the genre would link it to a rich tradition of anti-clerical satire dating back to The Decameron, but really it's just intermittently entertaining lurid trash. And you don't have to be Sigmund Freud to detect in this rich stew of guilt-fueled anger and outrage a certain amount of sweet revenge-taking for both the filmmakers and their target audience.
The genre soon made the leap to Japan, where it underwent an interesting transformation. Gone is any pretense of sadly necessary muckraking or the thrilling suspicion among those involved that they might be doing something that will send them to hell. Watching a film like I had the sense that perhaps all the girl's school uniforms that are usual to Japanese soft core were stuck at the dry cleaner's that week, and so the studio went with nun's habits instead. As costumes, they look just as good when ripped halfway off the young actresses. The Japanese filmmakers, with zero investment in the religious setting of their story, nonchalantly employ outrageous blasphemies as mildly titillating plot points. One novitiate is subjected to a trial by ordeal for witchcraft that would make Andres Serrano cringe.
Although these films survive today in deluxe, DVD box sets, their production faded with the decade that saw their birth. Which in a way is surprising. Given the ongoing horror show of sexual abuse within the Catholic church, and the repulsive spectacle of decrepit octogenarian clerics claiming that journalists who expose these crimes are doing the devil's work and comparing the treatment the church has received in the press with anti-Semitism, surely anger is mounting to a level where a new spate of soft-core nun porn might be in the offing.
But contemporary filmmakers have found a new, if less satisfying, means of goading the church. Today we get films like Priest
or mature, sensitive explorations of clerics coming to grips with their own sexuality.
or mature, sensitive explorations of clerics coming to grips with their own sexuality. 
I wonder if Anita Ekberg might not be available for Killer Nun II?
Additional nunsploitation films come in these handy box sets:
thank you- this is wonderful!
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