Killer Nun
HORROR-THON 2025 • BAD BLOOD
5/10
DIRECTOR: Giulio Berruti
STARRING: Anita Ekberg, Alida Valli, Massimo Serato
RELEASED: 1979
RUNTIME: 1 hr, 28 minutes
WATCH ON: Tubi, Pluto TV, Apple TV
SCARE LEVEL: Low to medium
TRUSTING THE NURSE: Nope
The title does all the work. You know exactly what you’re getting, and you press play anyway. That’s the deal with ‘70s Italian exploitation: it promises sleaze, and it delivers sleaze with a habit on.
Sister Gertrude runs the ward at a hospital full of elderly patients. She’s recovering from brain surgery, she’s convinced something is still wrong, and she’s quietly hooked on morphine. She’s also mean. She steals from patients, and she stomps on one woman’s dentures for fun.
Then the patients start dying, horribly. Gertrude has blackouts and can’t account for her nights. The Mother Superior, played by Alida Valli, starts watching her. So does a new young doctor. And Gertrude starts wondering whether she’s the one doing it.
MY HUMBLE OPINION
Anita Ekberg, the woman who waded through the Trevi Fountain in La Dolce Vita, plays a nun on a morphine bender. The casting alone makes it worth watching.
It’s low-key sold as a horror movie, but it plays more like a giallo in a habit: black gloves, a mystery killer, and a lot of suspicious people in one building. If you liked Blood and Black Lace and The Evil Eye last year, this is their much trashier cousin.
The hospital is all cold tile, steel bedframes, and fluorescent light, which is its own kind of scary. Nobody wants to get sick here.
It was also on the UK’s banned “video nasties” list in the ‘80s, which tells you how seriously it takes good taste. It doesn’t.
FUN FACT FOR YOUR NEXT DINNER PARTY
Killer Nun is loosely based on Cécile Bombeek, a middle-aged nun who became addicted to morphine and committed a series of murders in a geriatric hospital in Belgium from 1976 to 1978.