[Pride 2021] Embracing Hell in Alucarda (1977)

It’s odd how much shame and guilt Christianity can have. Even when you’ve been an atheist for over a decade. Even when most of your every-day life has nothing to do with God or Hell or what’s going to happen after you die. The idea that you could be a sinner just by existing persists. This is made all the more absurd when you’re a queer atheist, who didn’t absorb this shame from your time in church, but from the Christianity that seeped into your culture, be that from the “debates” around gay marriage from Christians on TV or from the priest who will pop up every now and then to say that gay people are responsible for climate change. 

It can therefore be very empowering to just indulge. To just lean in and be like, “Yes, I am a sinner. Take me to Hell.” The controversy around Lil Nas X’s music video for his song ‘Montero (Call Me By Your Name)’, where the artist actively chooses to go to hell and seduce the devil, has given a decent amount of empowerment to those who grew up gay and religious, but also for our culture in general, which has had Christianity permeate it. With the rhetoric around him, Lucifer seems like a much better ally than God ever was. 

When I watched Alucarda (1977) for the first time, this was what I experienced. Similar to that of ‘Montero’, the devil in this film is in support of Alurcarda and Justine, our two main characters, entering into a relationship. The character of Satan even seems to officiate a kind of wedding between them, which ends with a passionate kiss. Their relationship, and the powers they unlock, consume them, and thus they refuse to be repressed by the church. As backlash, they are punished, both by the nuns and by the text, in presenting the relationship itself as demonic. Despite this, the effect they have on those around them is immense. Whilst the institution remains, the nuns who are alive at the end of the film are not left untouched by the experience. Their existence and refusal to repress what they desire disrupts what is meant to be a sacred space, interrogating the rigidity of its inhabitants’ beliefs. 

As history has come to recognise that LGBT people have not just suddenly popped into existence, there have been many revelations about where people sought refuge from heteronormativity, and one that would surprise many people is that of the convent. Nuns have historically been very gay, with several accounts of affairs between women in these spaces being found, which is seemingly antithetical to the condemnation of homosexuality Christianity has espoused. Furthermore, it’s interesting that this film uses tropes from what’s called ‘Nunspoitation’, a genre of film where the main conflict of the story is an exploration of ‘religious oppression or sexual suppression’; these films often seek to sexualise but also interrogate how the role of the nun would differ from that of the average woman, and why they would choose this lifestyle over being married to a man. James Newton explains that it may be tempting to write off films in this genre as ‘a barrage of images of female masturbation [and] lesbianism’ but often these films explore ‘the historical treatment of women, and sexuality and its necessity to the human spirit’. As ‘Nunsploitation’ often does, Alucarda argues that much of the moral purity attributed to these spaces is a facade and that the institution itself is what conceals the darkness. 

That darkness is often queerness. There’s a tension when watching this film because I know that it was not intended to be a positive representation of lesbianism, or queer women in general. In fact, horror has a habit of representing women in love with other women as horrific, and it typically ends in death. This film is no different. There’s no doubt in my mind that this was meant to be a degrading depiction of the horrors of queerness, particularly when it enters the church. 

Liking this film as a queer person, as Harry M. Benshoff argues when talking about queer horror, means a vastly different watching experience to that of the straight members in the audience: 

‘While straight participants in such experiences usually return to their daylight worlds, both the monster and the homosexual are permanent residents of shadowy spaces [...] Queer viewers are thus more likely than straight ones to experience the monster's plight in more personal, individualized terms.’ 

Whilst Alurcarda and Justine are destroyed and pushed into the shadows once more, I’m stuck at whether to recommend this film to people at all. It comes with the caveat that these women can never be together, and that kind of ending, unfortunately, makes up a lot of queer film history. With all that said, I can still say there’s a small satisfaction in watching the powers that seek to oppress these women be so shaken by their encounter with them. The true horror of this film depends on its audience, and I imagine for homophobes, it’s the fact they had to witness this at all. 

Sources: 

Harry M. Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the horror film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). 

James Newton, ‘Nunsploitation: The Forgotten Cycle’, Offscreen <https://offscreen.com/view/nunsploitation> [accessed 27/04/2021]