Life Finds a Way: Immaculate (Michael Mohan, 2024)

Immaculate bills itself as a movie with things to say: About gender, about religion, about horror. It’s got a pedigree and a list of references ranging from Suspiria to Rosemary’s Baby. Nonetheless, while I was watching Immaculate, the movie I found myself thinking of most often was an Irish historical drama called The Magdalene Sisters, directed by Peter Mullan. 

The Magdalene Sisters is a more or less non-fictional account of four women’s time in a Magdalene laundry. These were facilities run by the Catholic Church, where women were locked up against their will and made to do hard labor, supposedly for the crime of having premarital sex. Some women were sent for getting pregnant out of wedlock. Some women were sent there after being raped. Some were sent for being a financial burden on their families; some queer daughters and trans sons almost certainly wound up there, given the history of these things; and some girls, particularly orphans under institutional or church care, were sent to the Magdalene laundries just for being too pretty and “putting men in the path of temptation.” 

A Magdalene laundry was not a jail — there was no trial necessary to lock you up, and no limit on how long they could keep you. Many women remained imprisoned for their whole lives. The work, mostly scrubbing laundry by hand with lye, was painful and unceasing, not to mention unpaid. The nuns who ran the institutions were licensed to use corporal punishment. The most common punishment was withholding food and water, but prisoners could also be stripped and sexually humiliated, beaten, forced to kneel in stress positions, you name it, in order to rid them of “pride” or “vanity.” Catholic priests did what Catholic priests will do, faced with a helpless and captive population, and so rapes and unwanted pregnancies continued on the inside. It was forbidden to communicate with the outside world, so you could not tell your family or friends what was being done to you. If they’d sent you there thinking you would receive real care, they would never find out their mistake. 

In time, word got out. The tide of public opinion turned. The laundries were shut down. The last one closed on October 25^th, 1996. 

To put this in perspective: The Wachowski sisters’ Bound, the fourth season premiere of the X-Files, and Ross and Rachel’s first kiss on Friends all pre-date the closure of the Magdalene laundries. Tori Amos’ feminist art-pop album Boys For Pele was recorded in a Catholic church in Delgany, Ireland in 1995, while the Church was still locking up and torturing people essentially just for being women (or assigned female: again, I have no doubt that at least some gender non-conforming kids got the boot) in that country. Sinead O’Connor, Dolores O’Riordan of The Cranberries, and chart-topping New Age-to-pop crossover artist Enya recorded all their greatest hits, up to and including Crystal Lite commercial jingle “Orinoco Flow,” whilst knowing that they could wind up in a Magdalene laundry.

It is very, very hard to make a horror movie about Catholicism that is scarier than the actual Catholic Church, is my point here. That said: You know how my two favorite things in the world are (a) Jurassic Park and (b) hating Catholicism? Well…