Flavia the Heretic

 

Flavia the Heretic (aka Flavia the Muslim Nun)

1974

Director- Gianfranco Mingozzi

Cast-  Florinda Bolkan, María Casares, Claudio Cassinelli, Anthony Higgins, Spiros Focás, Laura De Marchi

From Italy

            Set in the Middle Ages, Flavia is the daughter of a feudal warlord. As a child she witnesses her father murder a Muslim soldier that she had just met. Later, probably due to her willful nature, her father sends her to a convent, where she grows up.

            Flavia is surrounded by cruelty and inequality and is reminded often of the very low status of women; she witnesses a fellow nun being tortured to death after losing her mind, she sees a nobleman rape a girl in a pigpen and get away with it, and the church and scriptures remind her that she is lower than a man.

            She tries to escape the nunnery with the help of a Jew she is friends with (he himself a victim of a similar kind of oppression). Her father has her captured, beaten, put back into the convent, and imprisons the man who helped her.

    

        She sees her chance for liberation- and revenge- when a Muslim war party raids the town. She joins forces, and falls in love, with the young Muslim captain leading the group (played by Hammer star Anthony Higgins from Taste the Blood of Dracula and Vampire Circus, who looks almost unrecognizable with a military crew cut and goatee).

            With the Muslim soldiers to aid her, Flavia sets out on a quest for revenge against her oppressors and she gets pretty bloody, torturing and executing all that have wronged her.

            In the end, her victory turns to ashes in her mouth as she discovers that ultimately, a woman’s plight is no better with the Muslims than the Christians. She rebels again only to find herself friendless when the consequences of her actions come due.

         Nunsploitation had its peak in the 1970s. Most of the best known films of the genre came out in that decade. Ken Russell’s The Devils, Jess Franco’s The Demons, Story of a Cloistered Nun, The Nun and the Devil, School of the Holy Beast, Satanico Pandemonium, Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun, Alucarda, Killer Nun and Malabimba all came out between 1971-1979.

            So why was the decade so prolific? Part of it is that the 70s was a boundary pushing decade for pop culture in general but movies specifically. A good example is Hammer Horror that was still making PG films in 1969 and then made Vampire Lovers in 1970. Another reason is the social memory and reaction to fascism. Its no coincidence that most of the above listed movies were made in Europe and Japan, which had endured fascist rulers through the end of WW2. Portugal and Spain were still fascist through the mid 70s.

            Nunsploitation as a genre questions authority and highlights the abuse of power. Flavia the Heretic spends a lot of time doing both. Flavia’s bloody revenge, though maybe justified, is a reminder that the abuse of power is almost inevitable, even by the well-meaning.

            Florinda Bolkon tended to play less glamorous roles than her contemporaries like Edwige Fenech and Barbara Bouchet, and Flavia is definitely not a sexy role, or a sexy movie, despite being nunsploitation. There is a fair amount of nudity, but it’s presented in an often disturbing way.

            It’s a good looking film, with a lot of effort placed on costumes and filming done in and around preserved medieval structures. It also has a nice score by Oscar winner Nicola Piovani. A combination historical drama /exploitation film, check out Flavia the Heretic if you’re a fan of the nunsploitation genre or a fan of Florinda Bolkon.

The Carpenter's Son

 

The Carpenter’s Son

2025

Director- Lotfy Nathan

Cast- Nicolas Cage, FKA twigs, Noah Jupe, Isla Johnston, Souheila Yacoub

            Biblical horror is a surprisingly tiny genre. Considering that the Bible features infanticide, gang rape, incest, monsters, giants, demons, exorcism, vengeful spirits, cataclysmic disasters, torture, curses, witches and lots and lots of murder, you’d think it would be fruitful ground for horror writers. The Bible is a shocking epic presenting a litany of terrors eclipsing anything Stephen King could write.

            The Carpenter’s Son is inspired by the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which follows the childhood of Jesus. In the Gospel, Jesus is shown with out-of-control powers that he hasn’t learned to manage. The timeframe is interesting because, in the minds of a lot of people, Christ exists as one of two things; baby Jesus being born in a manger or adult Jesus dying on a cross.

The idea that Jesus might have been a snotty kid or a rebellious teenager seems offensive to many. A good example of this is the painting “Christ in the House of His Parents” (1850) by Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais. The painting, which features an endearing scene of Mary comforting her son, who has seemingly hurt himself in his father’s workshop, was controversial in its day, so much so that no less than Charles Dickens himself derided the art for its depiction of Jesus as an awkward child.

Having said all of this, The Carpenter’s Son will present to many, a controversial, if not outright offensive story. Pope Gelasius I, in the 5^th century, declared the Infancy Gospel a heresy, so it has a long tradition of offending.

Nicolas Cage plays Joseph, who is at his wits end trying to keep Jesus’ divine nature a secret from all the various people that would do him harm. He is also plagued with doubt as to whether Jesus is in fact divine, or maybe sent from the devil, or maybe not special at all and Joseph sometimes thinks he has been played for a fool. Jesus, on the other hand is starting to develop an idea that he is something special as his powers start to express themselves. He and his father frequently come into conflict as Joseph treats him harshly in an attempt to make him fit in.

In a stroke of brilliant casting, Satan is presented as a kind of delinquent teenage girl, the kind you might see getting into trouble with the bad kids at school and apparently bereft of any parental supervision. Satan keeps tempting Jesus, not with sex or drugs, but tempting him to break rules and to stand up to his father.

Though this sounds like teen drama, its presented with a lot of creepy ambience and scary visuals. We see babies being tossed into a fire (as Herod’s men try to find and kill the prophesied messiah), a shanty town of rotting lepers, a kind of torture compound where all of the suspected sorcerers (i.e. the mentally ill) are beaten, crucified and left to rot, snakes being pulled from people’s mouths during exorcisms, and a vision of Hell. Over all, the film carries a sense of menace and dread throughout.

Its impossible to forget that Nicolas Cage is Nicolas Cage, so sometimes seeing him is a little jarring (though not nearly as jarring as Harvey Keitel with his thick Brooklyn accent as Judas in The Last Temptation of Christ). But Cage does a good job of conveying the utter sense of frustration and worry that someone would have who is both trying to raise a child and hide a tremendous secret. Think Jim Hopper trying to raise Eleven in Stranger Things and you’ll have a good idea of the feel.

The real genius casting though was of Ilsa Johnston as Satan. Her character goes from friendly, to precocious, to cruel, to sad and makes the character much more relatable than the typical depictions of Satan as a Faustian supervillain.

            Overall , it’s a pretty small scale film that does a lot with very little and enjoyable if you are looking for some out of the ordinary horror viewing.