Immaculate, Feminist Horror Homage, and Roe Reversal

Well, I finally saw Immaculate.

The opening shot is of painting of the Virgin Mary, clad in blue, with someone reciting the Ave Maria in Italian. A girl, who appears to be a nun, sneaks into an adjacent room. She finds a set of keys, and runs off, trying to escape by front gate. Flood lights come on. A posse of dark-clad nuns come to get her. They break her leg in an open fracture at the knee as she tries to escape. Fade to black, then we realize she’s been buried alive. She screams for help, and we fade to black.

News flash: something fucked up is going on at the Convent. And it has to do with hot, young nuns.

Cut to Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney), in a nun’s habit, watching Italian border control go through her bag. One guy keeps commenting on how beautiful she is, and how she is wasting her life to be a nun. Too hot, too young to be a nun. Especially at a convent where they bury hot, young nuns alive.

Cecilia gets picked up by a driver, who conveys her to the remote convent from the opening sequences of the film. “Our Lady of Sorrows was founded in 1632,” her nun tour guide tells her, and goes on to explain that it’s a place for older sisters to go to die. “Death is a part of everyday life.” Yeah, no kidding.

Cecilia’s backstory is pretty spare: she’s from Michigan, near Detroit, and nearly drowned under winter ice in the Saginaw river.* She became a nun because she believes God saved her from that death for a reason. But her parish back in Michigan closed; she’s come to Italy to find her true home among the sisters. Soon, the Reverend Mother shows Cecilia very large nail, and reveals that it’s a nail from the True Cross, on which Jesus suffered the passion and died. For some reason, Cecilia loses consciousness.

In a dream-like state, Cecilia is grabbed from behind, while in a confessional booth, and pulled through wallpaper into another state, where a bunch of masked nuns are doing something not-good to her body—it looks like it happens to her face, but there are some unmistakeably gynecological camera angles in there, too. We soon learn that she’s been impregnated, she starts experiencing severe morning sickness, which results in her vomiting up her own teeth. With that, in a very few minutes minute of film, Immaculate has referenced every single film from Roman Polanski’s Apartment Trilogy, and has done so in chronological order: the movies Repulsion (hands grabbing a woman through flimsy walls), Rosemary’s Baby (weird people impregnating a woman while she’s in a trance state), and The Tenant (the main character finds his teeth in unlikely places.)

But of these three films, it’s obviously with Rosemary’s Baby that the film’s affinities are strongest. A virginal, virtuous, innocent woman is impregnated against her will while in some kind of weird altered state. There is a group of religious worshippers (clergy in Immaculate; Satanists in Rosemary) who are coercively controlling the pregnant woman, denying her access to medical care, refusing to let her leave the premises, determining what she eats, drinks, and wears. Of course, in Rosemary’s Baby, the baby she’s pregnant with is the Antichrist, and the Satanists are hoping for a new World Order of Satan. In Immaculate, the baby is supposed to be the reincarnation of Christ himself—using DNA culled from the nail from the True Cross. The Christ-baby, however, is supposed to usher in a new World Order, too, one that, as Cecilia eventually realizes, may well be a destructive one.

To sum up:

-The Marian symbolism of Rosemary’s Baby, which is everywhere, and which I talk about extensively in my forthcoming book Scream with Me,** gets made literal and obvious in this film. Indeed, they actually costume Cecilia in the blue flowing robes usually reserved for iconic depictions of the Virgin Mary.

-The impregnation of Rosemary is Satanic; the impregnation of Cecilia is Christic. But both happen through force and coercion, and both are clearly coded by the films as evil, and horrific.

-Immaculate is thus retelling the Rosemary’s Baby story, but rather than panicking about the death of God and the rise of Satan, it’s panicking about the particular form of horror created by die-hard Catholic Christians in the modern day. Nuns and priests, specifically.

Hmm.

When Cecilia wakes up from her “dream,” there’s a surprisingly sporty and cute nun training montage: we see all the little nunlings learning to caretake the sick -and-dying nuns; we see them learn about hanging laundry, about slaughtering chickens. Cecilia has fun with Guendalina in the bathtubs. Some nuns die of natural causes; it’s totally fine and not creepy.

They bathe in a bathhouse, all wearing white shifts. That are wet. So, yes, it’s a wet t-shirt interlude in the middle of an otherwise fairly serious horror film. Do with that what you will. But during the baths, Guendalina and Cecilia talk, and Gwen reveals that she’s a domestic abuse survivor:  “He hit me, I hit him back…I went to these support groups…” She reveals that, at the support groups, she met some nuns, and found out that they have a good life where they can keep their clothes on. So she is a DV refugee at the nunnery. Marrying Christ is, for Gwen, a much safer proposition than marrying a regular human male.

But not at this convent!

As Cecilia comes to realize the danger she’s in, she begs for access to real medicine, and to a hospital.

Cecilia: “I want to see another doctor.”

Father Tedeschi: “A hospital is not what you need right now.”

Cecilia: “I just puked up one of my teeth.”

Tedeschi: “The safest thing is for you to stay here, until the savior is born.”

Hmm…that feels a whole, whole lot like Rosemary’s Baby. Remember when Rosemary desperately wants to switch from Dr. Sapirstein to Dr. Hill, because she knows something is wrong with her pregnancy? Yeah, this is a hard-core reboot. And an interesting one.

Cecilia—we think—starts capaciously bleeding from her vagina, and is eventually rushed to a hospital. All the while, she’s saying, “I don’t want to die.” It’s a painful moment, at least for me, in terms of fairly recent American history: I’ve read dozens and dozens of articles about how women, denied adequate reproductive care in the 1960s, died en route to hospitals, or died at home.

Back at the convent, a nun laps up the blood left behind in the sheets. And then finds a mutilated chicken under the bed, because Cecilia had in fact doused herself in chicken blood, to fake a miscarriage. The nun at the convent calls the priest’s cell. Now he knows Cecilia has lied, and he stares daggers at her while she malingers parturitional agony in the backseat. They get her back to the Convent and bind her and brand her; she’s made into livestock, effectively. Cecilia starts peeling off her own nails (an homage, of course, to Black Swan). “This is not God’s work,” she says. The Priest responds, “If it’s not God’s work, why isn’t He stopping us?”

Great question. Provoked to think about how and whether to rely on God at all, Cecilia decides to get weaponized by her faith.

She grabs a heavy, huge crucifix and slams the nun in the head hard twice. Then there’s a gruesome kill shot, where Cecilia crucifixes her right into the eyes. That’s God stopping you, alright.

Cecilia’s water breaks. In active labor, she starts killing her oppressors, one by one. She spreads fire accelerant all over the room where the convent stores the prior (failed) Christ-fetuses, from prior (dead) young nuns. She tries to escape the convent through the catacombs, but Father Tedeschi finds her and attempts an awake, unanaesthetized C-section on her. Fortunately, Cecilia has swiped the nail from the True Cross, and she jams it into Tedeschi’s jugular. Dead.

The Lord helps those who help themselves, it would appear.

It would appear that He doesn’t much care for being used as an excuse for reproductive and sexual violence.

Covered in Tedeschi’s blood and her own, Cecilia gives birth. The baby falls out pretty unceremoniously; she looks at it, horrified, in a fairly obvious reference to Rosemary’s face, though with, like, a LOT more blood.

But this is when the most important difference between Rosemary’s Baby and Immaculate comes into play. Cecilia cuts the umbilical cord with her teeth, and then grabs a huge ass rock; in the background, we can see a baby of some kind, though it’s very blurry. It does not look normal. Cecilia raises the rock above her head and smashes the baby-thing to death. Cut to black.

Remember, in Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary is ultimately subordinated to her own innate and apparently unalienable maternal instincts. Despite herself, despite her own horror, she agrees to take care of little Adrian, her son by Satan. Despite being a victim of Satanic rape, despite being betrayed by her horrible, gaslighting husband and her abusive neighbors, Rosemary decides she will, indeed, be a mother to the Antichrist. In Immaculate, Cecilia goes the other way. She refuses to accept the obligation put on her by confused, malicious clerics, who have so badly perverted Christianity, in her mind.

Rosemary’s Baby is a film that, on a profound level, is engaged with the battle for reproductive rights in the 1960s—particularly in New York State.*** Immaculate seems to me a film profoundly concerned with the battle for reproductive rights in contemporary America. The film seems to me to be saying—in fairly obvious terms—that the Church should be in no position to enforce pregnancies on women, and that Christ himself would not want to be invoked in the service of such things, let alone involved in bring them about. After all, there’s no comeuppance to Cecilia for murdering a nun with a crucifix, or a priest with the nail from the True Cross. Quite the contrary, Cecilia is allowed to get away. It appears that all the sacred relics and objects in this film are on her side—advocating for her to have agency over her body, helping her to escape imprisonment and dehumanization at the hands of the cult-like or even coven-like convent.

Put briefly, this film is a reproductive horror of the era of Roe Reversal.

Which is all to say: I’m not sure whether the filmmakers were trying to make an anti-Catholic or anti-Christian film. But if so, they didn’t succeed. Instead, what they did was to make a film that actually asserts a fundamental allegiance between true Christianity—as embodied in the cross and the nail—and women’s rights to freedom, bodily autonomy, and reproductive choice. And in that sense, the film absolutely carries forward the mantle of Rosemary’s Baby, though with more focus on Christianity per se and less on the domestic sphere than its magnificent predecessor.

*A clear reference to a famous under-ice death scene from The Omen 2.

**Yes, it’s true: I wrote a book! It’s about horror and feminism in the 1970s. Scream with Me is coming out with Atria books in 2025.

***Scream with Me has a chapter on this. Stay tuned! In the meantime, you can see hints of the full argument here: https://www.publicbooks.org/guy-horror-rosemarys-baby-coercive-control/