Nuns are a fixture on the Hollywood screen, even as they fade from real life. What’s behind our timeless obsession?

Nuns are a staple of pop culture. Think The Sound of Music (1965), Sister Act (1992), The Nun’s Story (1959), The Bells of St Mary’s (1945), Heaven Knows Mr. Allison (1957) and Black Narcissus (1947).

Last year brought us The Nun II (following 2018’s The Nun ), The New Boy , Deliver Us , and Sister Death . This year, we had Immaculate and The First Omen . Most of the current crop are horror films or dark dramas — a long way from the sanity of postulant (or apprentice nun) Maria in The Sound of Music , the jaunty lilt of Sister Act , or the bland comedy of Nuns on the Run (1990).

But off the silver screen we see more and more nuns disappearing.

Nuns are disappearing in two ways. Many no longer wear habits, opting instead for conservative everyday dress, a shift spurred by the modernizing Second Vatican Council. Nuns are now unrecognized in the community, rather than being identified by a habit.

The other side is that there simply aren’t many nuns left, especially in the Western world, in countries like the United States, and most of those who remain are in their 80s.

Why are we so fascinated by nuns in movies?

A Dying Calling

In 2020, there were about 650,000 women in Catholic religious orders worldwide, 100,000 fewer than a decade earlier.

It was said of the Irish that every family had at least one nun: in Ireland in the 1960s there were over 13,000 nuns. Now there are fewer than 4,000 and the average age is over 80.

Since 1965, the number of nuns in the United States has fallen by 65%. In Australia, there were over 14,000 nuns in 1966, but now only 3,500.

But in the cinema you don’t notice that decline.

The meeting of nuns and horror

In Immaculate, Sydney Sweeney battled depravity and defilement in an isolated monastery. In Consecration, a young doctor uncovers murder and conspiracy in (once again) an isolated monastery.

Nuns in horror films are nothing new.

Nuns have been characters in horror films since 1922, when the famous silent film Haxen was released.

The roots run even deeper, in the literature of the 17th and 18th centuries. Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun (1689) and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) linked nuns to murder, bigamy, kidnapping, and Satanism, among other themes.

Horror classics (and some not so classics) such as The Devils (1971), The Omen (1976, and a remake in 2006), Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) and The Killer Nun (1979) have kept nuns and horror together.

Why are nuns still so darkly fascinating, even though real nuns are now small groups of elderly women? And why do so many filmmakers turn to horror to tell stories about nuns?

One reason is the age-old fascination with the inner world and inner life of nuns. Although few religious sisters wear the dark habit, the habit is indispensable in cinema.

Nuns, dressed in dark habits and living their lives in closed monasteries, naturally combine voyeurism and horror.

The creative desire to peer into the closed world of nuns is not always sensational. The acclaimed Australian miniseries Brides of Christ (1991) was a sensitive account of the inner spiritual and institutional life of nuns. But recent films such as Consecration and Immaculate show that filmmakers are fascinated by nuns as a source of exploitation, portraying them as violated and sexual objects.

The stories surrounding nuns have changed.

Particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, nuns in popular culture were sunny and positive (such as Maria in The Sound of Music or Sister Bertrille in the 1960s sitcom The Flying Nun), or a reassuring presence (such as the singing nun in Airport 1974’s 1975).

In the years that followed, the world learned more about what happened in the monasteries as survivors came forward and investigative journalists exposed a series of scandals in America, Ireland, Australia and elsewhere.

These events were subsequently dramatized in films such as The Magdalene Sisters (2002) and Philomena (2013), which show a decisive shift from healthy and happy nuns to convents as places of abuse and neglect, particularly of babies and young women.

This dark twist in nun movies is based on the real-life horror of abuse, not the supernatural horror of Consecration and Immaculate. But both kinds of horror—the reality of abuse and the fantasy of the supernatural—are antithetical to what nuns are supposed to be: holy, spiritual, and pure.

This contrast is irresistible to filmmakers and results in striking themes and images.

Some orders of nuns are dying out, but for now they live on in our popular culture.

But what we see is disconnected from reality. Nuns in full regalia and Gothic cloisters in movies are not like the regular nuns in reality, who are more likely to be found in a community center than in a creepy old monastery.

But these dark fantasies are deeply ingrained in our cultural imagination and have persisted despite drastic changes in the real world of the church. The number of nuns continues to dwindle. It is quite possible that in the future, the only nuns we will ever see will be these cinematic sisters.

The authors are not employees of, consultants to, own shares in, or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.