A suicidal priest (Kang-ho Song) volunteers to test an experimental medication, which turns him into a vampire. It ends with Valerie curled up in her white bed in an autumnal wood: lost innocence nestled in the heart of death. “Valerie” is staccato and disturbing, with images of incest and of sexual abuse by clergy. The local beehive, a wooden statue of Adam and Eve in which the bees dwell in their groins, suggests both the weirdness of this haunting film and its insistence that adulthood is a fall from innocence. Valerie (Jaroslava Schallerová), a girl who has just reached menarche, discovers that the adults around her, including her long-lost father, the bishop, are vampires. “Valerie and Her Week of Wonders” (Czechoslovakia, 1970): a sun-soaked fable of corruption-including sexual corruption within the church. Both the incongruities and the prescience (not to mention the fashion) will delight contemporary viewers.Ĭatholic faith and practices offer a striking visual and auditory language through which horror films can explore the limits of human endurance. One of the government slogans for the reality show is “Why Control the Births When We Can Increase the Deaths?” The portrayal of sexual conservatism married to murderous consumerism is done with the lightest possible touch-it’s social critique as soufflé. The hunted man makes sure to note that while he is divorced, his marriage was annulled, so he’s available. Paganism is retaking the country as the Vatican feebly opposes reality-TV murder. It’s a sunny, cavalier, semi-psychedelic film, alive to the religious conflicts of its day. The hunted (Marcello Mastroianni) and the huntress (Ursula Andress) are competitors on a government-run reality-TV show about hunting humans, so the press eagerly follows their public chase and covert courtship. Closer to thriller than horror, this film from the “Dolce Vita” era is a romantic comedy about the love between a man and his would-be murderer. “Rosemary’s Baby” is fantastic-but there’s a whole world out there! Here are eight films in which Catholic horror speaks in less familiar accents, films I have never seen on other Catholic horror lists. Catholic faith and practices offer a striking visual and auditory language through which horror films can explore the limits of human endurance, the persistence of mystery in a world colonized by science, the realities of death and evil, and the desire for rescue.Īnd yet discussions of Catholic horror cinema often revolve around the same few films. The sumptuous vestments, the Latin chants, the millennia-old practices-not to mention the extremely literal belief in a living Devil, who, as Pope Francis frequently notes, still works in the world today-all seem custom-made for a genre that evokes rapture and fear. Everybody knows the Catholic Church dominates the world of religious horror films.