The Devil We Know: Juan López Moctezuma’s Alucarda and the Limits of Anticlerical Horror

“There is not enough religion in the world to destroy religion.” – Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

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Introduction: A Hysterical, Historical Subgenre

Cinema has often imagined nuns in parodic, polar extremes, as either asexual yet perfectly adjusted pillars of the community or as repressed neurotics prone to self-flagellation, erotic hysteria, or demonic possession. One might conjecture that such unsubtle perceptions are the products of secular filmmakers confounded by the realities of ascetic and asexual female lives. Yet nonreligious directors have made films that, though not strictly pious, demonstrate profound understandings of radical Christian ethics: consider Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) or Rossellini’s Francis, God’s Jester (1950), a lyrical fable in which a cast of real-life monks impersonates the itinerant St. Francis and his disciples. The tendency toward clerical stereotypes more likely stems from a cultural predilection for psychoanalytic explanations, especially when the cinematic gaze is directed toward female clergy. The contentedly chaste nun is surely the product of successful sublimation, while her hysterical counterpart, failing to sublimate, signifies the return of the erotically repressed. A few rare works, admittedly, rise above the fray: the suppressed longings found in Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (1947) and Alain Cavalier’s Thérèse (1986) are as sensual as any self-professed erotica, without ever descending into paroxysmal hysteria. But for every subtle example there are countless that resurrect the hysterical stereotype, from trite, commercial horror items such as The Nun (2018) to the cycle of nunsploitations spawned by Ken Russell’s Huxley-inspired The Devils (1971).

Not merely an exercise in titillating excess, the nunsploitation film “exploits” the predisposition of audiences who believe that repressed (or actively suppressed) sexuality must erupt eventually in mad frenzy. This prejudice is hardly new. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, a consolidation of lectures delivered between 1901 and 1902, William James already had critiqued psychological frameworks that monothematically explain – or simply dismiss – subjective religious experience as sexual neurosis. Much as nunsploitation audiences expect cloistered novices to shed their habits and derange Catholic doctrine, turn-of-the-century psychologists assumed that “the hysterical nun, starving for a natural life,” sees Christ as “but an imaginary substitute for a more earthly object of affection” (James 22). But even the imaginary substitute, the husbandly Savior, is rendered impotent through the corrupt, torturous Church patriarchies that populate the nunsploitation universe. Films such as The Sinful Nuns of Saint Valentine (1974) and Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun (1977) reiterate a litany of predictable tropes: nuns who succumb to lesbian temptation; handsome rogues who seduce (or abuse) lustful novices; overlording inquisitors who embody Catholic patriarchy; wretched abbesses derived from Vanessa Redgrave’s hunchback in The Devils; and an implicit equation between the passions of St. Theresa and unrepressed orgasmic function (perhaps Wilhelm Reich would approve). If the typical Italian or Spanish nunsploitation positions itself as a critique of Catholic institutionality – and not of Jamesian subjectivity – it nevertheless summons Church dogma to undermine Church dogma. Apart from Russell’s seminal film, the satirical perspective of Huxley’s The Devils of Loudon is rarely present.

Most nunsploitations are pseudo-historical melodramas that identify the abuses of the Church as the true sacrilege. A few, such as Bruno Mattei’s The Other Hell (1981), are supernatural horrors that make “real” (if also evil) the metaphysical pathways along which eroticized nuns are misled. Nearly all nunsploitations focus squarely on images of female abuse, torture, and suffering. Almost none grant besotted or bedeviled nuns any sense of agency or allow them to mount substantial threats to patriarchy – with the partial exception of Juan López Moctezuma’s Alucarda (1977).1 Moctezuma’s cult film reinvents nunsploitation through the Jungian lens of the Panic Movement, the Surrealist-Artaudian collective advanced by Fernando Arrabal, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Roland Topor, and of which Moctezuma was an ancillary member. On the one hand, the film posits as subversive agents demonized nuns who mock, desecrate, and bewitch Mexico’s Catholic patriarchy. On the other, the film ultimately confirms the religious ontologies it tries to upend, sabotaging its anti-Catholic antiheroines and turning them into generic monsters that must be expelled from a religiously ordered world. Like many horror films that situate supernatural mayhem within a modern setting, Alucarda emphasizes (inadvertently or not) a stubborn desire for “safe” metaphysical conclusions within a post-Enlightenment universe. But before examining the film’s thematic content, we should first situate the film within certain cultural contexts of Latin American cinema.

Part One: Alucarda and the Panic Movement

As a cult horror film, as a surrealistic text, and as an ostensible work of religio-erotic “subversion,” Alucarda presents viewers with confounding paradoxes. With Alucarda, director Moctezuma had created a film that improbably negotiates two irreconcilable tendencies: the conservative, Manichean Catholicism typical of the vampire film and the eclectic surrealism of the Panic Movement. After coproducing Jodorowsky’s Fando and Lis (1968) and El Topo (1970), Moctezuma became a fleeting if intriguing figure in Latin American surrealism, versed in the Panic Movement’s erotic provocations but never claiming the auteurist aura of a Jodorowsky or Arrabal. Moctezuma’s reputation rests primarily on two films, Alucarda and the Poe-inspired The Mansion of Madness (1975).2 Both were produced a few years after the films that marked the Panic Movement’s cinematic heyday: Jodorowsky’s El Topo and The Holy Mountain (1973), Arrabal’s Viva le muerte (1971) and I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse (1973), and Rafael Corkidi’s Angels and Cherubs (1972). Because the Panic Movement dissolved in 1973, Moctezuma’s films act as a kind of appendage to Panic surrealism, at once inheriting Jodorowskian aesthetics but also serving as a skeptical commentary on the movement’s embrace of irrationality as a catch-all solution to the “rational” alienations of late capitalism.

In both Alucarda and Mansion of Madness, Moctezuma engages the Jungian archetypes and Sadean violence the Panics embraced as tools of transcendence and provocation. Rather than positing irrationality as a deliverance from oppression, however, Alucarda sees irrationality as a potentially benevolent force easily corrupted and colonized by hierarchical or bureaucratic systems. In Alucarda, shadowy Jungian spirits undergirding a convent romance become, in the film’s second half, signs of a demonic possession typical of generic (i.e., Catholic) horror tales. Similarly, in Mansion of Madness, a gloss on Poe’s satirical “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” (1845), a dreamlike treatment for madmen becomes the oppressive tool of a colonialist doctor madder than his patients.

In each case, irrational inspirations are neither liberating nor cathartic, and irrationality’s potentially comic or anarchic qualities become themselves subverted by conservative institutions – the Church in Alucarda and the disciplining, Foucauldian asylum in Mansion. That Moctezuma works both against and within genre filmmaking clearly separates him from Jodorowsky, who in El Topo contrives to transcend the spaghetti western through messianic allegory, and from Arrabal, whose films, arguably, belong to no established genre. Alucarda’s adherence to the horror genre seemingly limits what Moctezuma can accomplish. Rather than celebrating irrational spirits, he only critiques conservative social institutions that corrupt them. If we add “cinema” to the list of corrupting social institutions, however, Moctezuma’s critique extends not only to the horror genre he confronts but also to the limits of the Panic Movement’s own Jodorowskian irrationality, which briefly became a tiny institution unto itself, a cinematic cult that sought (unsuccessfully) to replace the larger “religion” of mainstream filmmaking.

Poe “Panicked”: Imprisonment and rebellion in The Mansion of Madness

Recall that the Panics had only a threadbare relation to the first generation of postwar European surrealists. Though their psychoanalytic tendencies can be traced to Breton’s dreamworlds and their anticlericalisms to Buñuel’s cavalier defenestration of a bishop in L’age d’or (1930), the Panics rejected Buñuel’s matter-of-fact presentation of the uncanny in favor of self-conscious symbolism and neoprimitive ticism. While naysayers rebuked the Panics for their mystical posturing, their metaphysics distinguished them from the materialist trends in 1960s revolutionary movements, from Viennese Actionism to the post-Marxism of Herbert Marcuse and Paulo Freire. If Actionist art was founded on notions of scandalized, agonized embodiment, the Panics more naïvely attempted to transcend the body through Jungian “alchemies” and allegories of the collective unconscious.3 True, Jodorowsky, trained by Marcel Marceau, engaged in intimate performance art events in the 1960s, but his desire for popular acclaim pushed him from underground enclaves into the commodifying interests of pop counterculture.

Ironically, Jodorowsky’s alchemies wound up transforming his art not into golden enlightenment but into a baroque commercialism embraced by a youth culture far less erudite than Jodorowsky himself. Cannily aware of this problem after the success of El Topo, Jodorowsky parodied in The Holy Mountain his own status as a profiteering counterculture guru. As Doyle Greene says, “The Holy Mountain can be read as a deft satire of a counterculture [ . . . ] in which the most powerful capitalists in the world – the postmodern Illuminati exploiting art, sex, war, and revolution for profit – become epic heroes seeking immortality and omnipotence through spiritual enlightenment” (Greene 136). But satire, not all-cleansing, can itself become a camouflage. The Holy Mountain’s infamous “cheat” of an ending reveals the spiritual quest as a cinematic sham, and Jodorowsky’s sage Alchemist exhorts the film’s assembled industrialist gurus to live beyond the objectifying frame, to cast off their cinematic personae and live as embodied actors in the material world. As Jodorowsky the auteur, then intent on filming Dune, declined to take his own advice and abandon the expensive illusions of cinema, the film’s ending becomes yet another egoistic legerdemain, a mock-absolution for the inadvertently capitalist auteur but a desolation for those already condemned to live within an untransformed reality.

In fairness, the Panics presented themselves as followers as well as gurus. The Panics – including Moctezuma – were themselves under the spell of Jung, and their cult hardly invented the notion of an all-embracing spiritualism. As early as 1933’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Jung had already claimed that the disillusioned postwar generation was supplanting traditional belief systems with eclecticism and “Gnosticism” in “an attempt to draw knowledge of the cosmos from within” (Jung 1933, 122). But the subjectivities of the Panic Movement were so eclectic and freewheeling that they, lacking critical perspective, raised new problems of interpretation – not because these subjectivities replaced rationalism with chaos but because they saw the Freudian problem of overdetermination as a desirable goal.

We should briefly revisit Freud’s notion of overdetermination in The Interpretation of Dreams, particularly because the term’s current, common understanding (“reductive”) inverts Freud’s intended meaning. In describing how to diagnose neurotics, Freud explains that a symptom “is not merely the expression of a realized unconscious wish” but something that “must be joined by another wish from the preconscious, which is fulfilled by the same symptom . . . so that the symptom is at least doubly determined, once by each of the conflicting systems” (Freud 297). More simply, a symptom can signify both multiple unconscious and conscious determinants, and analysts (or literary critics) fixate on a single root cause or meaning only at their peril. For the Panics, an excess of overlapping determinants – in this case, visual metaphors – is a hermeneutic liberation. For instance, if one chooses not to see El Topo as a spaghetti western restaging of the Epic of Gilgamesh (as it undoubtedly is), there are enough Christian, Taoist, and Oedipal symbols to accommodate nearly any interpretation, all of which are welcomed within an ecumenical, new-age consciousness.

As we will see, however, Moctezuma’s Alucarda is critically underdetermined, offering too few explanations for its otherworldly phenomena. By undermining the traditional balance of skepticism and irrationalism that undergirds filmic surrealism, and by improbably embracing only the conventional irrationality of horror films, Alucarda crosses over from the realm of surreal fantasy into generic horror. Yet the film’s embrace of the irrational, as represented in the character of Dr. Oszek, becomes so radical that audiences will see the proceedings not as mere anticlerical parody but as an outright burlesque of what is possible within horror genres. As such, Alucarda calls into question the emancipatory value of irrationality, as antirational actors – even those empowered with healthy, subversive intentions – remain imprisoned within generic lives.

Because it does not pretend to enact great transformations – of genre, perception, or reality – Alucarda exists within an “unalchemized” framework. As much as we wish Alucarda’s heretical, hysterical heroine to truly subvert institutional orders – or achieve enlightenment, in Jodorowskian terns – the film demands that she fail in her attempted rebellion. Analogously, audiences are unable from their passive positions to transform the genres history arbitrates for them, and the Panic movement’s spiritualized confrontations with the body cannot liberate bodies really lived. Alucarda’s ultimate joke (or tragedy) is that it obviously knows better than to remain subservient to its absurd Catholicism, much as audiences (should) know better than to believe in the irrational institutions that dominate their lives. Somewhat despairingly, in Alucarda genre filmmaking wins the day, for Moctezuma’s surrealist technique offers no solution to or liberation from fatalistic genre rules that demand the death of the film’s potentially subversive heroine. Nevertheless, by using Panic aesthetics only to critique existing institutions, Moctezuma finds an ingenious way out of the structural trap Jodorowsky created for himself, for Moctezuma preserves a partly subversive agenda without proposing himself as an auteurist guru whose own idolism must eventually be foiled.

Almost comically embracing the supernatural, Alucarda does not merely parody religious horror but critiques its own surrealistic mode, as surrealistic effects fail to overcome the supernatural horror genre in which the film is ensconced. In Greene’s analysis, Alucarda’s adherence to Catholic possession and vampire motifs allows Moctezuma ample opportunity to spoof the institutionalized neuroses of the Church – especially a Church complicit in maintaining government control after the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre, in which troops fired upon pro-democracy student protestors.4 To write off as spoof Alucarda’s critique of cultish patriarchy – including that of the gurus of the Panic Movement – doubtless undermines potential feminist readings of the film, reducing its antiheroine to an absurd hysteric. Parodic or not, the film’s anticlericalism certainly reflects a minority voice in Mexican cinema, alongside films such as Roberto Gavaldón’s Macario (1960), Buñuel’s Nazarín (1959) and Simon of the Desert (1965), and much of Jodorowsky. But against the majoritarian voice of Catholicism, anticlerical spoof hasn’t much chance, especially given Mexican cinema’s legacy of faithful Catholic horror, from Fernando de Fuentes’s Phantom of the Convent (1934), to Fernando Méndez’s The Vampire (1957), to Alfonso Corona Blake’s camp classic Santo vs. the Vampire Women (1962).

Orthodox horror: Phantom of the Convent (El fantasma del convento)

Part Two: Nunsploitation in the Jungian Shadows

Having outlined Alucarda’s influences, we can now investigate how the film’s underdetermination complicates the notion of the Jungian spirit as a subversive force, specifically when that force operates within a generic (i.e., “nunsploitative”) framework. Ostensibly a lesbian vampire shocker that treads in the well-worn path of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) and its Hammer adaptations of the early 1970s, Alucarda is set in the mid-19th century, when science began to supplant superstition. Like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Alucarda frames the horror genre as a residual symptom of post-Enlightenment rationalism, as supernatural phenomena insidiously defy ascendant reason. By rejecting any post-Enlightenment mediation between reason and faith and by embracing irrationality, however, Alucarda comes to mock the intellectual bargain we too often take for granted. This mockery nevertheless entails a number of problems, not least the demonization of the legitimate bodily desires of Alucarda’s heroines.

In Alucarda’s prologue, a young mother dies during childbirth in an overgrown crypt. Fifteen years later, the doomed orphan, Alucarda, now lives in a repressive convent fraught with sexual tension. Alucarda’s black garb unashamedly contrasts with the nuns’ oddly layered white habits, which evoke deathly mummy shrouds. Arrestingly, the nuns’ habits feature crimson-streaked crotches, as though their clothes were presenting a menstrual protest against suppressed bodily energies. If, as Elizabeth Kuhns says, the habit is “a living cloister” that “serves to shroud the body and to mask the individual,” the habits’ apparently menstrual stains breathe foreboding life into vestments that now betray what has been institutionally suppressed (Kuhns 3, 7).

Soon, Alucarda encounters the newly arrived, naive acolyte Justine (an oblique reference to Sade’s woeful heroine). Emerging from her bedroom’s shadows and into the lit foreground, Alucarda quite literally embodies Jung’s notion of the unconscious “shadow” when she first seduces Justine. In this early scene, the film posits Alucarda’s emergent lesbian anima as a natural force. “Do you know how small creatures love each other?” Alucarda asks Justine, already suggesting that a creaturely taboo might disrupt hierarchical powers. “I’ll take you to the garden,” she continues, leading Justine on a sylvan frolic emblematic of the adolescent feminine homoeroticism more subtly imagined in Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). Discovering two blood-red insects, Alucarda says, “One is identical to the other . . . like an image in the mirror, like you and me.” In “dreams and myth . . . the shadow appears as a person of the same sex as that of the dreamer,” claims Jungian analysist M. L. Von Franz (Franz 175). Here, the mirror-image homoeroticizes the Jungian shadow, as the longed-for reflection is embodied by another girl, forming a queer relationship from what would otherwise be Alucarda’s narcissism.5

In the woods, the girls encounter a grotesque, fortune-telling humpback (Moctezuma regular Claudio Brook) who – confirming the Jungian reading – sees “only shadows” in Justine’s soul. They flee into the prologue’s overgrown crypt, a Gaudi-esque affair of grotesquely snaking, organismic architecture. “I hear a voice from the past,” Alucarda says, and, as if magically recalling her birth, she opens a sarcophagus containing the remains of her own mother. Suddenly hysterical, she rushes from the crypt, presumably having loosed demonic forces. In a visually striking scene, the girls anxiously return to their sepulchral convent to endure a sermon about the devil entering the body for his own pleasure.

Alucarda: Multitudinous Christs in a necropolitan convent

Behind the priest there soars not one Christ but scores of them in staggered layers – a visual quotation of the “Christ factory” sequence in Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain (in which a Christlike hero madly tears apart hundreds of mass-produced, papier-mâché saviors). What was a passing moment of anticlerical, anticommercial satire in Jodorowsky’s film will become here an extended confrontation with church patriarchy. Jodorowsky’s mix of Gnosticism and auteurist egoism usually allows his Christian imagery to retain its hallowed value (El Topo’s final crucifixion by bullets, for instance) even if his Christ figures become declassed, secular saints in a nondenominational landscape. In Alucarda, however, Christian symbols curry no such favor and ominously loom above the heroines as merely another example of inevitable patriarchal domination.

Alucarda and Justine’s first lesbian encounter is orchestrated by the bedeviled humpback, who magically emerges from the shadowy corner of Justine’s bedchamber, just as Alucarda had emerged from Jungian shadows in the girls’ first meeting. In a demonic ritual, the girls position phallic blades at their naked loins, ritually cut one another, and ecstatically feed on each other’s cascading blood. Parallel montage reveals that the girls’ demonic union coincides with a woodland orgy at which a goat-headed cult leader oversees naked revelers – an image that (intentionally or not) renders rather ridiculous the Panic Movement’s own figurehead, the priapic god Pan. A third layer of parallel editing further reveals that a kindly nun – somehow aware of the girls’ demonic mischief – prays for their salvation. Levitating in beams of celestial light, the nun summons heavenly spirits to strike dead the orgy’s goat-headed leader, but her prayerful efforts are in vain. Alucarda and Justine complete their demonic ritual, and with their bloody kiss the humpback disappears with an abrupt, Méliès-style cut.

The bewitched girls are now empowered to disrupt the convent. They renounce God and proclaim their loyalty to the devil during a catechism on St. Theresa, an ascetic quietist. Here, Alucarda again assumes the “emerging from the shadow” pose: her black outfit, positioned against a black background, renders visible only her head, starkly contrasting with the Christ statuaries overhead. The film leaves ambiguous, however, exactly how Alucarda’s emergent lesbianism is “gendered.” Hereon, Justine becomes passive, feminine, and increasingly catatonic, while Alucarda becomes the (hyper-)active partner, at once the hysterical woman of Freud and a masculinized animus whose unconscious desires take an aggressive form at the behest of a phallic Satan. The innocent or “natural” lesbianism of their first encounter – set within a rolling “feminine” pasture and defined by Alucarda’s metaphor of the subaltern insects – has effectively disappeared. Now the girls’ passion is inspired by a devilish, possessive male presence that undermines a potential feminist reading of the film (a problem to which we’ll return).6

After the demonized Alucarda sexually assaults a priest in a confessional, breaking through the partition and ripping apart his crotch, both girls are subjected to a gory exorcism. Alucarda and Justine are placed naked on upright crosses and pierced with needles, while in nunsploitation fashion nearby nuns writhe as if possessed, the menstrual crimson of their habits’ fronts more and more resembling actual blood.

Alucarda: The menstrual exorcism

After Justine apparently dies under torture, the nuns summon Dr. Oszek – played by Claudio Brook, who also acted the role of the humpback – to examine the corpse. Presumably, Oszek should represent a requisite Van Helsing figure, a post-Enlightenment arbiter between anachronistic occultism and ascendant science. Horrified by the sadistic exorcism, Oszek proclaims, “This isn’t the 15th century. . . . I thought that reason had replaced superstition . . . this is the most primitive expression of ignorance I’ve ever seen!” But when Oszek witnesses the inexplicable resurrection of a demonized nun, his belief in science is shaken to the core, and he instantly rejects his prior conviction that “religion is a farce and form of slavery.”

We thus arrive at the film’s ironic crux. Dr. Oszek, who should be the central point of identification for a “rational” audience, not only abandons his reason without reflection but undermines the necessary, enlightened half of the typical Van Helsing role. Initially, when Oszek witnesses the exorcism, he embodies Tzvetan Todorov’s idea of the uncanny, “that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event” [my emphasis] (Todorov 24). On the basis of a single piece of evidence, however, Oszek unhesitatingly comes to believe in the supernatural, violating the “historical” compromise represented by Stoker’s Van Helsing, who practices science but acknowledges the superstition that horror conventions make “real.” At this point, the film crosses over from the realm of the uncanny (or “suspended” belief) into what Todorov would characterize as outright fantasy. For our purposes, the film here transforms categorically from a surreal, Jungian fantasy into the sort of generic, underdetermined horror exemplified by The Exorcist (1973), in which the “reality” of Catholicism, once revealed, terrifyingly trumps all hesitation.7

Because the same actor, Claudio Brook, plays both the bewitching humpback and Dr. Oszek, Moctezuma at first appears to allocate to two characters the irrational/rational schism that the Van Helsing figure represents as conflicting perspectives within himself. By having Oszek abandon his rational side, however, we are left only with horrific irrationality – that of the humpback compounded with that of the newly credulous, devil-fearing Oszek. Possibly, we might see Oszek’s spontaneous embrace of faith as a satire of Enlightenment rationalism, which tried (hypocritically) to reconcile reason with liberalized visions of faith. If we see Oszek’s transformation not as a critique of rationalism itself but as a critique of the relationship we perceive between rationalism and irrationalism, the film comes to satirize the expediency of the Van Helsing compromise, which suspends reason and faith in an uneasy balance analogous to Todorovian fantasy. If Alucarda thus spoofs the very notion of intellectual compromise, it nevertheless reverts to a conventional structure that demands the destruction of disobedient, demonized lesbians. Whether we are meant to see this final turn toward generic horror as a straight-faced satire of formulaic conclusions or as a sincere homage to atavistic genres remains ambiguous given the solemn presentation of the film’s fiery, gruesome finale. In either case, once the Oszek character abandons reason and takes up arms as a demon-hunter, he becomes the film’s de facto hero, decentering Alucarda’s lesbian ethos and reinstating the patriarchal subjectivity that the film’s earliest scenes of “natural” (i.e., pre-demonic) lesbianism opposed. In the film’s final scenes, Oszek destroys a resurrected, hysterical, and murderous Justine with holy water and rescues his blind daughter from the clutches of Alucarda, who now plays the role of monstrous villain. In a pyrotechnic finale, Alucarda unleashes her powers on the convent, setting aflame nuns and statues of the savior. Warding off Alucarda’s demonism, the nuns hold aloft the kindly nun who had earlier prayed for the girls’ salvation, summoning heavenly forces that reduce Alucarda to vanishing cinders.8 This infernal climax ironizes Jung’s idea of the Catholic Mass, in which “two distinct ideas are blended together” through the Greek word thysia, which means both “to sacrifice or slaughter” [and] “blazing’ or “flaring up” (Jung 1958 204-205). In Alucarda’s demonic mass, the fires that consume the rebellious heroine facilitate a conservative, godly sacrifice that (presumably) restores order to the convent. Moctezuma’s final image settles on a Christ statuary aflame, an image of imperiled religion that nevertheless reiterates the salvation Christianity conditionally guarantees.

Though a nuanced reading of the film might minimize the film’s (apparently) conservative finale and highlight the anticlerical subversions of its middle sections, it remains true that as soon as the “converted” Oszek becomes narratively centered, Alucarda becomes one-dimensionally monstrous and, by the final scenes, entirely unsympathetic. No longer a mischievous, amorous nun who reasonably subverts church dogma, she victimizes church dogmatists along with girls undeserving of punishment. The church’s final “conquest” of Alucarda’s rebellious body – her becoming a routine monster – thus belies the proposition of Moctezuma’s Mansion of Madness, in which subaltern madmen cast off the colonial shackles of a dictatorial doctor who proposes pseudoscientific cures.9

Part Three: Female Desire, The Devils of Loudon, and the Order of the Fiesta

If Moctezuma’s underdetermined horror turns out to be nearly as bemusing as Jodorowsky’s overdetermined surrealism, it nevertheless does critique the liberal duplicity of balancing faith and reason. By extension, the film critiques any institution that authorizes such impossibly “democratic” compromises, in which opposing yet intellectually unequal forces engage in an endless discursive stalemate. Alucarda’s engagement with generic horror is rooted in such long-standing historical negotiations between the rational and irrational, the skeptically empirical and the blindly idolatrous. In particular, Alucarda takes narrative and thematic cues from the infamous 1634 case of the demonically “possessed” nuns of Loudon, France, an incident that informed Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Mother Joan of the Angels (1961), Russell’s The Devils, and Krzysztof Penderecki’s opera Die Teufel von Loudun (1969). It is Aldous Huxley’s “imaginative nonfiction” account The Devils of Loudon (1952), however, that endures as the most detailed record of Urbain Grandier, the priest accused of seducing and demonizing Loudon’s nuns and who eventually was burned at the stake. Even more than Russell’s film, Huxley’s account is satirical rather than merely skeptical. Whereas overly credulous Dr. Oszek’s worldview is readily transformed in a few seconds, Huxley reports that Loudon’s faithful villagers largely disbelieved claims that Grandier was bedeviled – an incredulity Russell exploits in The Devils through comic scenes in which supposedly spooked nuns fiendishly writhe when exposed to an empty box rather than a holy relic.

Despite (or because of) his sardonicism, Huxley’s account constitutes one of the great commentaries on mass delusion, following social psychologist Gustav Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895) and Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933). For Huxley, humanity’s desire for social belonging lays the groundwork for its eternal tragic flaw: “Always and everywhere, human beings have felt the radical inadequacy of their personal existence, the misery of being their insulated selves and not something else, something wider, something in [the] Wordsworthian phrase, ‘far more deeply interfused’” (Huxley 314). The phrase is from Tinturn Abbey, whose speaker discovers cosmic oneness with the totality of nature. It cannot surprise us that Wordsworthian “interfusing” becomes confused – even malignant – when transferred to the far messier business of human community.

Nevertheless, Huxley does not reduce the nuns’ supposed possession to sexual neurosis; rather, their desperate need to “interfuse” with “something wider” is only a tightly focused microcosm of alienations that exist throughout religious and secular spheres. The repressions of laypeople and clergy differ only in degree, not in kind: whereas laypeople have multiple avenues for sublimation (family, children, work, etc.), nuns rely predominantly on a metaphor that begs for sexual interpretation – the image of a Christly husband, so tenderly illustrated in Alain Cavalier’s Thérèse. While Huxley frames the nuns’ possession fantasy as an especially neurotic manifestation of the basic human need for belonging, we cannot forget that Alucarda entertains the Jungian perspective typical of Panic aesthetics. For Jung, “submission to any metaphysical authority is, from the psychological standpoint, submission to the unconscious” [my emphasis] (Jung 1958 183, fn. 4). As Alucarda fails to fulfill the promise of its Jungian metaphors, quashing a rebellious feminine unconscious with patriarchal genre tropes, Huxley’s herd mentality emerges victorious, at least as far as genre filmmaking frames constructions of mass psychology.

In Alucarda, the Huxleyan worldview ultimately overpowers the Jungian one, as the heroines’ unrepressed sexuality merely constitutes the losing side of the possession-horror genre’s religious logic. This defeat is signaled in the film when Justine enters her hypnotic, catatonic state, which connotes not a liberation of the unconscious but merely a devilish form of the “downward self-transcendence into subhumanity” that Huxley sees in all forms of religious groupthink (Huxley 79). Put another way, because the girls’ devilish rebellion is a priori religious, it is already doomed to fail in a Manichean framework. (The problem recalls Nietzsche’s axiom in Human, All Too Human: “There is not enough religion in the world to destroy religion.”) Had their subversion been irreligious – had the “natural” lesbianism suggested by the film’s opening not defaulted to generic possession motifs – the outcome could well have been different, and Moctezuma might have transgressed the limitations of the horror genre, much as Jodorowsky’s self-immolating El Topo attempts to transcend the casual amorality of the spaghetti western.10

Notably, Alucarda is unable to actually catalyze the herd intoxication apotheosized by the Loudon cases, despite her demonic empowerment. The plotline permits her to bewitch Justine and Oszek’s daughter, and the exorcism sequence features ecstatic if not clearly possessed nuns, but the final scene witnesses a (sexually) frustrated Alucarda incinerating a convent she cannot demoniacally convert. Though Alucarda’s fiery images of anti-patriarchal frenzy seemingly beg a feministic interpretation, the girls’ individuated desires are mediated by male powers: by the film’s midpoint, Justine is little more than Satan’s puppet. Moreover, the film’s finale quashes the “good” Jungian spirit (a female unconsciousness seeking liberation) with a “bad” Jungian spirit (a mass unconsciousness manifested as patriarchal order), resulting in a rather fruitless feminine insurgency. This pessimism is rooted in the paradox of the film’s very plotting, which draws from the collective unconsciousness of the Loudon case but also places an individuated lesbian desire in opposition to Catholic groupthink. We have already seen, however, that two such positions cannot be held together in a delicate balance. Much as the film’s plot forces Oszek to jettison the Van Helsing compromise and spontaneously choose faith over reason, the film itself ultimately privileges the structure of the repressive herd over an individualistic cum queer revolt.

Alucarda’s final weakness stems from a deterministic view of gender roles, ingrained not in Biblical morality per se but in a medievalist construction of sexuality that (literally) demonizes feminine identity, as in the Loudon case. As Thomas Lacquer argued in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), premodern Europeans subscribed to a unitary conception of gender identity in which male and female represent points on one “sliding” continuum of gender, the male embodying the perfect form and the female a degenerate form debilitated by phallic lack and a second-class origin (as Adam’s spare rib). This one-gender model was buoyed by leading thinkers of the medieval era and the Renaissance. Medieval Neo-Platonists perpetuated Galen’s notion of a low-grade “female sperm,” and early Renaissance science is littered with gynophobic mysticism. Prefiguring Freud’s notion of penis envy by nearly four centuries, Montaigne recounts the supposedly popular story of a young girl who, when “straining to jump,” found that “male organs suddenly appeared,” as if women could be phallically “perfected” through a mixture of masculine exertion and divine chance (Montaigne 111). At the same time, fears of male impotence abound. In satirizing the day’s demoniacal theories of impotence, Montaigne offers a legalistic fable in which a male’s limp, noncompliant penis, prone to disobey the mind, is “arraigned for rebelliousness” and singled out from all other appendages that happily obey the will (Montaigne 113).

Montaigne’s parable is echoed in Eloy de la Iglesia’s anticlerical satire El Sacerdote (1978). Here, a tormented priest is tempted by adultery and pedophilia and traumatized by a childhood of gluteal whippings and avian bestiality. Unable to constrain his passions, he finally slices off with garden shears a member he cannot bend to his will.11 He survives the castration but emerges from a mental asylum disillusioned and faithless. In the coda, he visits his parish a final time and approaches a statue of the naked, crucified Jesus. Understanding that the icon has little relevance to contemporary mores, he muses, “The Church has castrated you, too.”

El Sacerdote: The doctrine of castration

Iglesia’s satire presents the modern view. In the Middle Ages, male impotence was routinely traced to witchcraft that can render the male organ invisible. Male paranoia and castration anxiety form much of James Sprenger and Henry Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum (1486), the late medieval world’s best-selling witch-hunting manual. Though primarily known as a work of Dominican demonology, the Malleus is equally important as a primitive example of European sexology, a phallogocentric text that authorizes the “one-gender” model with explicitly misogynous assumptions. As Robbins notes, the Malleus’s overall “argument depends on the fantastic sacrifice of logic and common sense to a preconceived theological line.” In an etymological error, Sprenger and Kramer derive “femina [woman] . . . from fe [faith] and minus [less]” and not correctly from “felare, ‘to suckle’ or ‘make fecund’” (Robbins 338). This demonological construction of feminine lack is ultimately what informs – and sabotages – Alucarda’s attempted lesbian rebellion. While Alucarda contains no literal imagery of male impotence, the girls’ lesbianism is tantamount to a castration of both patriarchy and the Church itself. In medieval parlance, female homosexuality and male impotence were effectively the same thing, for they both render phallic authority irrelevant. As we have seen, however, as soon as the girls’ desire loses its natural individuality – as soon as Alucarda and especially the mesmerized Justine become colonized by religious-demonic forces – the film becomes a grotesque genre exercise unwilling to license a serious, meaningful transgression.

If Alucarda’s uneasy capitulation to an anachronistic genre yields pessimistic results, the pessimism may nevertheless resonate within the more particular context of Mexican Catholicism. Indeed, much of Moctezuma’s gory scenography and defeatist narrative evince aspects of the Mexican fatalism Octavio Paz describes in The Labyrinth of Solitude. Theorizing the “Mexican’s willingness to contemplate horror,” Paz notes how laypersons revel in the “bloody Christs in . . . village churches,” eat “skull-shaped cakes and candies on the Day of the Dead,” and participate in other gruesome “habits inherited from the Indians and Spaniards and [which] are now an inseparable part of our [Mexican] being” (Paz 23). When Paz describes the anarchic joy the archetypal Mexican exacts from bloody rituals, he generally speaks of the stoic male participant, the macho. This lively joy is denied the mala, the sinful or devilish woman unentitled to socially acceptable lapses or transgressions. A disciple of the hermeticism Paz sees in Mexico’s national character, the macho becomes the main protagonist of the fiesta, in whose “quarrels, insults, pistol shots, and stabbings . . . the Mexican does not seek amusement” but instead “seeks to escape from himself, to leap over the wall of solitude that confines him during the rest of the year” (Paz 49). This ritual catharsis, however, is not a Bakhtinian carnival of multidirectional energy. Women do not participate in the festive violence expected of the macho. Instead, they are either passive (the good woman); condemned to the flames (the mala); or, in the case of Alucarda, both. Within Paz’s framework, the bloody exorcisms of Alucarda become less ironic than they seem. The film’s early images of female ecstasy are soon replaced by grisly images of female punishment, for women who overstep their social bounds must be returned to their rightful place by the macho’s religious incarnation, the Catholic Church.

Alucarda’s overall structure of wild, libidinous subversion and subsequent authoritarian repression comes to mirror the general logic of the fiesta. As Paz says, “Anything is permitted, the customary hierarchies vanish . . . the army, the clergy, and the law are ridiculed. Obligatory sacrilege [and] ritual profanation are committed. Love becomes promiscuity. Sometimes the fiesta becomes a Black Mass . . . [that] ridicules its gods, its principles, and its laws” (Paz 51). But the following day, law, order, and religion are firmly reestablished, and the previous day’s subversions have been safely compartmentalized. The festive violence that provides the macho temporary respite from his stoicism is thus like the grotesque, parodic Black Mass of Alucarda, with which audiences can profanely “interfuse” within the safe confines of the movie theater.12 On leaving the theater (or stopping one’s video stream), normal life is immediately reestablished, and the cinematic catharsis is revealed as either cruelly brief or a prearranged sham.

If Paz, in one of his poetic overgeneralizations, is correct to say that Mexicans’ “fondness for self-destruction derives not only from [their] masochistic tendencies but also from a certain variety of religious emotion,” the gendered self-destructions of Alucarda reinforce specifically cultural meanings (Paz 23). Justine’s catatonic demeanor aptly fits Paz’s description of the chingada, the abjectly passive Mexican woman who is to be used and who amounts to nothing more than “an inert heap of bones, blood, and dust”13 (Paz 85). Indeed, Justine quite literally dissolves into a pile of bones, blood, and dust when Oszek douses her with holy water. While Alucarda recalls Paz’s description of the mala – the active, conniving woman in league with demons – she is nevertheless “always a function and a means, a receptacle and a channel” (Paz 36). Indeed, Alucarda becomes a vehicle and vessel for a masculine devil too degenerate to seriously challenge churchly powers. That Alucarda is also finally reduced to bones and dust in the fiery climax does not necessarily negate this distinction – it only suggests that she, as a possessed vessel, effectually becomes passive too, for underlying the mala and chingada is the same patriarchal (il)logic.

Justine (top two images) and Alucarda (bottom two), reduced to “bones, blood, and dust” in Alucarda

If Alucarda is active only as far as she is possessed, and if Justine is in turn pacified by a possessed Alucarda, the only result possible is the colonization of their adolescent rebellion. Paz’s account of Mexican history frames the notion of “adolescence” as an overriding national crisis, for young Mexico itself persists in an adolescent state, dually colonized by the old Spanish Church and paternalistic Euro-American culture. In this light, the plight of teenage Justine allegorizes that of adolescent Mexico itself, for she too is twice colonized, first by a patriarchal religion and second by the conventions of allegedly “subversive” horror movies. If we accept nunsploitation as yet another foreign cultural imposition, Alucarda’s pessimistic and self-destructive ending might acquire a new, unexpected layer of critique, as the film borrows from European genre filmmaking only to demonstrate how destructive and stifling the impositions of borrowed culture can become.

As much as we wish Alucarda’s heretical, adolescent heroines would truly subvert institutional orders, the film demands that their anti-Catholic rebellion fail. The possessed nuns’ Jungian spirits cannot “break the frame” (to borrow a sociological term), whether the frame in question is a static horror genre or Catholic dogma. Whether Moctezuma actually respects dogma is at once beside the point (because we can interpret texts apart from authorial intent) and precisely the point (because an alleged auteur should transcend generic expectations). Nevertheless, we should not be surprised that Alucarda seems stranded between rival desires to undermine and pay homage to genre. As much as audiences and critics (and academics) profess a desire for “subversion,” we too often seek succor in easy pleasures and trite solutions – we choose the devil we know, so to speak. Our failures to rebel are as ironic as they are predictable, for revolutions enacted in real, shifting historical time are distinctly more possible than those attempted by doomed heroines trapped in anachronistic, intransigent genres.

In a larger sense, we need to transcend not particular genres but whole artistic modes and regimes of experience. Our attempts must be sincere and free of gimmickry. The final gesture of Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain, in which the camera zooms back to reveal the cinematic artifice, seems anticlimactic rather than transcendent because the notion of “this is only a film” cannot function as a theme (let alone a revelation) in a work that already delights in artifice. Only in a work of devout realism could the gesture work – and even then, it would risk coming across as an embarrassingly undergraduate discovery. For Brecht, the use of alienation effects is integral and cumulative, not a pulling-out-the-rug gimmick. Brecht understood that an ever-present sense of alienation, held in a suspense far colder than Todorov’s, is needed to undercut our unshakable desire to “interfuse” with phenomena greater than ourselves. For the Wordsworth of Tinturn Abbey, interfusion is the sort of Romantic overture that conflates sentimental longing with transcendental aspiration. Within the context of Romantic poetry, the conflation is innocuous. When interfusion becomes part and parcel of dogma, the sentimentality of the lone subject slides into the temptation of religious belonging.

If the religious need to belong is dangerously indistinguishable from Wordsworthian interfusion, it is because the difference between (personal) aesthetics and (impersonal) religion is one of degree, not one of kind. In their Jungian pretensions, the Panics wanted to have it both ways, draping themselves in a pseudo-religious aura whose transcendental symbolisms posed simultaneously as ecumenical art and as mass spirituality. In their attempt to claim an elevated pseudo-religion that itself transcended groupthink, the Panics adopted an idea George Bernard Shaw expressed in Back to Methuselah: “Art has never been great when it was not providing an iconography for a live religion. . . . It has never been quite contemptible except when imitating the iconography after the religion had become a superstition” (Shaw xci). Shaw had in mind art of the most exalted spirit – Wagner’s Ring, inevitably – but if we might amend Shaw’s dictum to include any art of great pretense (not necessarily grandiose mythology), we see a familiar pattern return. Once again, in the name of “art,” an erudite religion attempts to replace an ignorantly superstitious one; in the old manner of Enlightenment incrementality, provincial faith is supplanted by elitist faith. This system of exchange means, of course, that religious aura changes guises but is not destroyed. Thus, it is not surprising that the cult of Jodorowsky is only enflamed by the insufficiently demystifying ending of Holy Mountain, much as (ir)religious rebellion is doomed to fail in the religiously bound Alucarda.

Jung himself imagined meaningful transformations in which the syntheses of binaries do not yield more binaristic cul-de-sacs. For Jung, a truly transformative “transcendent function” should catalyze a supra-dialectic that allows opposites, the conscious and unconscious, to speak to one another and allow a new, synthetic consciousness to come into being. As Jung says, “The shuttling to and fro of . . . two [confrontational] positions generates a tension charged with energy and creates a living, third thing – not a logical stillbirth in accordance with the principle tertium non datur but a movement out of the suspension between the opposites, a living birth that leads to a new level of being, a new situation” (Miller 18).14 The notion of a truly transcendental dialectic, one that exists beyond that of historical materialism, could well remain beyond the mundane possibilities of art (perhaps this explains why Jung recommended alchemy and Jodorowsky LSD). Only though a conversation between the conscious and unconscious minds, Jung suggests, can we leap across the “stillbirths” that plague dialectical thinking and move beyond the “suspensions” that mark our Van Helsing-esque compromises and Todorovian fantasies. It is naïve to think that in Wordsworthian interfusion the conscious and unconscious minds communicate. This was the old claim of surrealism. In artistic experience, even those writ as “communion,” it is really a conscious version of the unconscious that is speaking with the conscious mind in the moment, not an unmediated union of unconscious desire and conscious intent.

Under the false guise of probing the unconscious, Alucarda treats the antipodes of Christian salvation and “evil” – and by extension those of passive Justine and aggressive Alucarda – as a kind of tertium non datur, a shuttling game of opposites that one is tempted to rationalize as parody. This dialectical dead end, of course, also extends to audiences, who remain in a stalemate with horror films that claim to reveal our unconscious shadows and yet recoil at the true Jungian mandate to grow, transform, and shed old generic clothes. As spectators of horror films, we become like Van Helsing, holding in uneasy balance the irrational pathos of genre and the logos of our own desires for progress. This Platonic conflict between a difficult, progressive logos and an easy, comfortable pathos is certainly timeless – but in order to renovate the genres to which we are enthralled, we must set aflame our antiquated rituals, transforming static horrors into multivalent futures.15

Works Cited

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. 3rd ed. Trans. A. A. Brill., 1911.

Greene, Doyle. The Mexican Cinema of Darkness. McFarland, 2007.

Huxley, Aldous. The Devils of Loudon. Harper Collins, 2009.

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Introduction and notes by Wayne Proudfoot. Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004.

Jung, Carl. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1933.

Jung, Carl G. “Transformation Symbolism in the Mass.” The Collected Works of C. G. Jung: Psychology and Religion: West and East. Trans. R.F.C. Hull. Pantheon Books, 1958.

Kuhns, Elizabeth. The Habit: A History of the Clothing of Catholic Nuns. Doubleday, 2003.

Miller, Jeffrey C. The Transcendent Function. SUNY Press, 2004.

Montaigne, Michel de. “On the Power of the Imagination.” The Complete Essays. Trans. and ed. M. A. Screech. Penguin Classics, 1993.

Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings. Grove Press, 1985.

Robbins, Rossell Hope. The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. Bonanza Books, 1981.

Shaw, George Bernard. Back to Methuselah. Brentano’s, 1921.

Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to Literary Genre. Trans. Richard Howard. Cornell University Press, 1970.

Von Franz, Marie-Louie. “The Process of Individuation.” Man and His Symbols. Ed. Carl G. Jung. Aldus Books, 1964.