School of the Holy Beast (Holy Beast Academy)

School of the Holy Beast (Holy Beast Academy)

1974

Director- Norifumi Suzuki

Cast- Yumi Takigawa, Emiko Yamauchi, Yayoi Watanabe, Yōko Mihara, Fumio Watanabe

            

     Maya (Yumi Takigawa) is a young girl who takes her vows and enrolls in a local nunnery. We soon find out that Maya is surreptitiously trying to gather information about her mother, who was also a nun and died there mysteriously. Maya crosses paths with Ishida (Emiko Yamauchi), a rebellious nun who delights in questioning authority and seems intent on getting herself kicked out.

Throughout the convent Maya finds a combination of repressed sexuality and religious abuses.  Along with the cruel nuns, the convent is visited by a sinister priest. Father Kakinuma (Fumio Watanabe who genre fans may recognize from his role as the villainous Yagyu in Lone Wolf and Cub) is a charismatic figure who the older nuns adore. He carries on affairs with the nuns and Maya learns a horrible truth; that she is his daughter. When her mother got pregnant, the Father abandoned  her and she was abused by the jealous nuns (who secretly wanted the Father’s attention) until she committed suicide.

The senior nuns learn Maya’s true identity and warn her to leave but she refuses. Maya is intent on destroying the convent from within and gets help from the rebellious Ishida. To deal with her, an Inquisitor is brought in on the pretext of sniffing out any heretical witches. Another nun is tortured to death and Maya herself is condemned but is able to turn the tables. She seduces Father Kakinuma, and reveals to him (after the sex) that she is his daughter and he has committed the damnable crime of incest.

Most examples of “nunsploitation” have two recurring themes; religious abuse and lesbianism. The best examples of both of these combining artistically in a movie are the Mexican films Satanico Pandimonium and Alucarda. School of the Holy Beast is not as sexually graphic as those films or other examples of 70s lezploitation. This is Japan after all with their taboo against showing genitalia (an odd taboo considering the other things that they are quite OK with; school girl tentacle sex anyone?).  

What the film lacks in graphicness it makes up for in creativity. We see two young nuns make love in a garden, a topless nun flagellate herself, two topless nuns forced to whip each other for stealing food, and the most memorable scene in the film, where Maya is bound with rose vines, the thorns digging into her naked breasts.

As for the religious abuse, this film seems much more relevant than perhaps it did when it was made. The abuse in other similar films is of the more abstract kind; accept our way of thinking, bow down to our authority etc. With the subplot of the Church covering up the Father’s sexual excesses, perhaps this film was rather prescient.

As is true with any nunsploitation film, School of the Holy Beast is filled with sacrilege. The most shocking is when a nun is forced to drink water with a crucifix between her legs until she urinates on it, which then serves as proof that she must be a witch. This is definitely not a movie for anyone who is offended easily.

Now, from my description, you might be expecting some bit of soft core torture porn along the lines of Ilsa She Wolf of the SS. Despite the themes, however, School of the Holy Beast is not really that prurient. While there are a fair amount of naked breasts, the nudity is only a means of storytelling and not the story itself. The movie reminded me of another Japanese film from the same era, Lady Snowblood. That story also involves a woman seeking revenge for something done to her mother before she was born.

I think maybe the most important thing about the film is that it’s a nunsploitation film NOT told from a Western point of view. In the West, most people are mono-religious, often seeing believers of other religions as (at best) naively ignorant or (at worst) an out-right threat to their own beliefs. But not so in Japan. As the expression goes, “Born Shinto, Married Christian, Buried Buddhist.” School of the Holy Beast gives us an East Asian slant on what has traditionally been a Western sub-genre.