The Nun II is hitting theaters, and those who love the concept of a nun gone evil will no doubt be looking for similar movies after watching it to satisfy their cravings. Taissa Farmiga returns as the young Sister Irene, and Bonnie Aarons as her nemesis, Valak, the demonic nun. When a town in France is beset by eerie and strange events after a priest is murdered, Sister Irene travels to investigate. She soon pieces together that the evil behind it is the same evil that tormented her in the original 2018 movie, and she must once again stop the nun’s evil from spreading.
There are plenty of movies about priests–and in the case of The Nun movies, a nun–battling evil. There are few people out there who haven’t ever heard of The Exorcist. And nuns, even in demonic horror movies, are usually presented as beatific forces of good–if they are corrupt, it is because they are only temporarily possessed by a demon. It gets a lot more interesting, however, when it’s the nun or priest themselves who are evil for the duration of a movie. Here are 5 movies to watch with killer clergymen and psycho sisters after watching The Nun II.
Killer Nun (1978)
Something is wrong with Sister Gertrude–very, very wrong. After the removal of a brain tumor, the formerly kind and benevolent sister starts to exhibit increasingly erratic and alarming behavior. First, it starts with violent rages and a most unchaste string of anonymous sexual encounters. Then, she becomes obsessed with the torture and death of saints. Soon, Sister Gertrude has descended into a frenzy of drug addiction, sexual depravity, and eventually gruesome and sadistic murder and the patients start dying one by one. Making it all even better is that Killer Nun stars the iconic Swedish sex icon Anita Ekberg as the twisted sister.
The Other Hell (1981)
If nun-on-nun violence is your thing, then The Other Hell might be right up your alley. Nunsploitation is indeed a subgenre of horror, albeit a small one, and few are more twisted or gleefully depraved. And few movies in the nunsploitation subgenre push the boundaries of good taste and capacity to be offended than director Bruno Mattei’s The Other Hell. When an isolated convent’s nuns become possessed by the Devil, all Hell quite literally breaks loose. Babies are murdered, wombs are ripped out, and killer dogs attack the creepy gardener. And the nuns start murdering each other in a truly gonzo, eight-minute-long scene that’s pure madness.
The Cleansing Hour (2019)
The most modern movie on this list, The Cleansing Hour is a departure from old priests in black robes investigating the hallways of a dusty old convent or standing in front of a possessed woman growling at them from a bet. Instead, the story follows a young exorcist and his live-streamed exorcisms. It’s not that Father Max is evil…he’s just a fraud. Every single “exorcism” he and his best friend Drew have ever streamed is fake. But it all goes to hell and everyone is tested to the limits of their sanity when one of their routine fake exorcisms turns out to be the real thing, and Max is suddenly faced with the task of exorcising a very real, very malevolent demon while millions of people watch.
The Rite (2011)
Sir Anthony Hopkins turns in his creepiest and most chilling performance since The Silence of the Lambs in The Rite. Father Lucas Trevant is not an inherently evil man, but he’s one full of darkness and strange crevasses in his soul. It makes for a rich and fertile landscape for a demon to take hold, and that’s exactly what it does after a failed exorcism attempt leaves the exorcist wide open to be consumed by evil. When he starts behaving strangely, it’s up to his apprentice, the inexperienced and doubting seminary student Michael Kovak (Colin O’Donoghue) to save him. But his paper-thin faith may not hold up to the demonic priest who now sits before him.
The Convent (2000)
The other movies on this list have been straight-up horror, but killer nuns still exist in movies with a comedic bent. Such is the case with Mike Mendez’s 2000 horror-comedy The Convent. A group of bumbling, amateur Satanists learn the hard way that they shouldn’t go messing with things they don’t understand when they break into an abandoned old convent and accidentally resurrect a group of demonic, bloodthirsty nuns. It’s less pure evil and more Evil Dead, but watching a bunch of inept college students trying to fend off a gaggle of demons hellbent on bringing about the birth of the Antichrist is a great deal of fun for those looking to balance out the scares with some laughter.
