Following a horror franchise from the beginning is a rarity. At least it is for me. Now that I’ve seen The Nun II, I’m caught up on the Conjuring universe, for now. I’ve written an article, still awaiting publication, on the Catholicism in this cinematic universe, and The Nun II has me wondering: how hard is it to find out the basics about Catholicism? The movie is okay for big-budget horror, but not great. The Catholicism in it feels like it’s imagined by writers who speculate on what it might be without ever, say, attending a mass to find out. And the demon Valak isn’t exactly rank and file either. The idea of using St. Lucy’s eyes as a relic was, however, pretty creepy.
So, after The Nun, Sr. Irene has gone to a convent in Italy. A series of bizarre clerical deaths sweeps across Europe and all the Vatican can think to do is send the one young nun who’s faced this demon before. No priest this time because Fr. Burke is dead, rather laconically stated. Sister Debra sneaks along and the two nuns find themselves facing a demon that immolates priests because it can’t find a relic it wants that will make it even more powerful—the eyes of St. Lucy. Said eyes are buried in a ruined chapel in a Catholic girls’ school in Aix-en-Provence. This is the school where Frenchie (from The Nun) now works as a handyman. We all know he was somehow possessed at the end of that film. The girls’ school used to be a winery and Valak is defeated when the nuns consecrate a pool of wine that banishes the demon.
At this point in time, the Conjuring universe has grossed over two billion dollars. All of the films are explicitly religion-based horror. Putatively in a Catholic setting, they feel like Protestants trying to guess what Catholicism must be like. At least they feel that way to me. The Nun sequence in particular, has demons responding to defenses that would not, in a Catholic world, work. As much as I may disagree on the theology, nuns can’t consecrate wine. And it turns out that Sr. Irene is a descendant of St. Lucy, one of the virgin martyrs. Although that title is sometimes given as an honorific, it does generally mean that such saints had no progeny. Death by thurible is fairly clever, though. Like all the films of the franchise, The Nun II is worth watching, but it fails to convince on the religion front. It just doesn’t feel Catholic.