Immaculate and 3 more holy terrors to witness on Showmax

The idea of female celibacy has the internet in a death grip right now…for reasons. And since nobody does celibacy quite like a holy sister, we’ve thrown open convent doors for a glimpse behind the veil. Looking at the horrors going on in Immaculate, The Conjuring 2, The Nun II and The Exorcist: Believer, it seems we’ve come a long way from those nuns singing a diss track about clumsy Maria in The Sound of Music. 

Immaculate

After surviving a childhood drowning incident at the age of seven, Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney, Euphoria) dedicates her life to the Catholic faith and decides to become a nun. She’s still a novice when Father Sal Tedeschi (Álvaro Morte) invites her to join his beautiful remote convent in Italy, which acts as a hospice for dying nuns. 

Soon after arriving, though. Cecilia picks up eerie signs. And she eventually finds out that she’s pregnant, despite being a virgin. 

As well as taking the lead role, Sydney was a driving force behind Immaculate, originally auditioning for the role in 2014 (when the film was centred on school girls rather than nuns), and later using money she earned from Euphoria to buy the rights to Andrew Lobel’s screenplay when it got stuck in development. She then reworked it to suit her age, but kept the script’s key theme – the abuse of women’s rights to bodily autonomy. 

Led by a powerful man with absolute power over the supposedly female space of a convent, the people around Cecilia go to extraordinary lengths to use Cecilia as a human incubator despite her professional abdication from the role of baby making – destroying other women around her in the process. 

The film uses its location to great effect, filming in Rome’s real-life catacombs, and in the Villa Parisi, which horror fans might recognise from cult classics like Blood for Dracula (1974). Nuns cavort in a communal bath, get buried alive, branded, beaten to death, and commit suicide. Tongues are cut out and corpses are mutilated. It turns out that the convent’s relic – a nail supposedly used in the crucifixion – has been put to sinister use. And Cecilia is denied hospital visits even after she throws up one of her own teeth. It’s pandemonium! 

The Conjuring II

Speaking of demons…The Conjuring horror franchise follows two paranormal investigators and demonologists named Ed and Lorraine Warren (played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga respectively, and based on the real-life paranormal investigators of the same names). In The Conjuring II, fresh off their success investigating the Lutz family’s haunting in family annihilator Ronald DeFeo Jr’s house in Amityville, the Warrens travel to England to help the Hodgson family, who’re battling a poltergeist in their council house during the 1970s. 

The Warrens do their best to figure out what’s behind the angry old man spirit who possesses one of the Hodgson children after they play with a ouija board. The case is a thorny one, as Lorraine’s psychic abilities are being blocked by the entity that’s causing all the trouble – Valak the demon nun. 

While working on The Nun II, The Conjuring II director James Wan shed a little light on Valak’s origins. “Anyone that has been through Catholic school would tell me nuns are terrifying – or can be terrifying. I felt like this had this built-in concept behind it. Initially in The Conjuring II, the demon Valak was represented by this huge, horned demon. But it wasn’t right for a Conjuring film. It became too fantastical. I wanted to go back to the character aspect of it.”

The key things that Valak does in The Conjuring II include making Lorraine lose faith in her abilities, stripping her of her psychic powers, mocking her faith, and making everyone think that Janet, the possessed child, is faking her possession and that the haunting is a hoax. It’s all doubly diabolical in a world, especially in this time period, that already discredits women’s words and actions. 

“I remember speaking to Lorraine Warren when she was still alive, and she would tell me that a lot of her friends, close friends, were nuns,” explains James Wan. “And so, it came to me that, wow, if an evil entity was to mess with her, one of the things it would do to corrupt her faith and belief would be to take on the iconic look of something that is close and dear to her heart. And that was how the idea of a demonic nun came about. Because of that, the nun character as an antagonist, a villain, hits in a much stronger personal way.” 

The Nun II

The Nun II acts as a prequel to The Conjuring II, as it’s set in the mid-to-late 1950s. The story takes Sister Irene (played by Vera Farmiga’s sister, Taissa Farmiga, The Gilded Age), to the South of France around Provence on the trail of the demon nun, Valak, who’s sneakily still possessing Maurice (Jonas Bloquet) despite being “exorcised” in the The Nun. So Maurice is now working at a girls’ boarding school as a handyman by day, killer by night. 

Along with haunted locations and demon nuns, director Michael Chaves was inspired by the iconography surrounding the Catholic martyr, Saint Lucy, whose relic could hold the power to defeat Valak…or make it more powerful. “St Lucy always both frightened and intrigued me. I grew up Catholic and I was always struck by the imagery surrounding her – this martyr whose eyes have been cut out. There’s something really frightening and powerful about that, the idea of sight and seeing as a power to be attacked and desired, especially how it connects to Sister Irene, who’s always had visions. While Irene’s on this mission, there’s also this personal journey within herself to understand who she is – finding her own sight and her own ability to see the world around her.” 

In The Nun II we find out that both Lorraine and Irene have a deeply personal connection to Saint Lucy. In Catholic lore, Saint Lucy was a Christian martyr who took a vow of chastity and gave her family’s riches to the poor, infuriating her fiancé, which prompted the Governor of Syracuse to sentence Lucy to be raped in a brothel. 

When his soldiers were unable to drag her to the brothel, they tried to burn her, only to find out she wouldn’t burn. And when she told the Governor how he himself would be punished, he ordered his guards to gouge out her eyes (another version of her story had her gouge out her own eyes to give them to a suitor who admired them, to stop him from perving over her). It’s small wonder Valak does its demonic best to subvert Saint Lucy as a symbol of women’s resistance. 

The Exorcist: Believer

Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr) has raised his daughter, Angela (Lidya Jewett) as a single dad ever since her mother died in the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. One day, Angela and her friend Katherine (Olivia O’Neill) disappear in the woods to perform a seance, only to return three days later with no memory of what happened to them. Desperate to rid his daughter of what he believes to be an evil influence, Victor turns to exorcism survivor Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), whose daughter Regan (Linda Blair) was possessed by a demon and suffered through the terrifying process of exorcism in the original 1973 film, The Exorcist. 

Writer-director David Gordon Green explains, “Demonic possession is a way that people can explore ideas of more relatable types of possession: internal struggles that we all have. It explores those questions of, ‘Who am I? Who’s within me? Are there things within me that my community might see as questionable? And, if so, can they pull something out of me through relationships, love, intervention?’” Along with these questions, one of the film’s major inspirations comes from the 1983 Oscar-nominated documentary Children of Darkness, which centred on the treatment of mentally and emotionally troubled children and young adults, and their families’ painful stories.

Among the people trying to free the children from possession is their neighbour Ann (played by Ann Dowd), a nurse and former nun who broke her vows. She’s the one who recognises the possession and puts Victor in contact with Chris. And while they’re not nuns in the story, both Angela and Katherine represent celibate young women in the grip of a powerful corrupting force, as they portray deepening levels of demon possession. 

David Gordon Green and Oscar-winning SPFX make-up designer Christopher Nelson created the girls’ transformation in set stages. The first, nicknamed “Naughty”, was just a little off. “It can be a redness to the eyes, some scratches, a pale face, a slight receding hairline,” says David. Stage two was “Nasty.” “The girls might be cutting themselves, scratching themselves, picking at their hair, finding little infections, and the physical attributes get a little bit nastier,” David explains. Stage three, the final stage, is “Gnarly”. David reveals, “By the climax of the film, these characters have not bathed and not eaten healthy foods and have been in violent tantrums. The extreme physical frustrations manifest themselves in these girls, and that’s when we went to full-on prosthetics and the makeup got very intense, and the attributes got horrific.”  

Physical effects aside, for Ellen Burstyn, the idea of possession was worse than kidnapping.  “The idea of a force being able to get possession of you and you can’t control it? I don’t think there’s anything more terrifying.” 

Something taking over your body, denying your agency and free will, or using you as an incubator? Nuns or aliens, it’s a classic horror story.

Stream Immaculate on Showmax now.