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Three Fascinating Themes Hiding Under The Nun’s Gruesome, Gothic Horror

Three Fascinating Themes Hiding Under The Nun’s Gruesome, Gothic Horror

Last updated on: September 7, 2018 at 1:45 pm by Paul Asay

Three Fascinating Themes Hiding Under The Nun’s Gruesome, Gothic Horror 2018-09-07T13:45:26-06:00 Paul Asay

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Taissa Farmiga in The Nun, photo courtesy Warner Bros.

Faith Above All

Whether you buy my second point at all, there’s little question that *The Nun’*s world spiritually reflects, in many ways, our own.

The abbey, we learn, was once a castle owned by a very evil master who worked for years to open a portal to the infernal regions below. He was partly successful, but the Catholic Church put a stop to the man’s diabolical intent before it could be completely consummated—sealing the door to hell with a holy artifact containing the blood of Jesus. The nuns helped keep the door sealed with their constant prayer.

But thanks to the bombing runs of World War II, the seal has started to leak, despite those prayers. Valak slips into the abbey and begins to corrupt this sacred place. Our heroes’ only weapons against this terrifying presence is faith, prayer and … the blood of Jesus.

Sounds pretty familiar, really.

Our own world is a fallen, corrupted place, and evil has a mighty big foothold here. Peter tells us the devil “walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.” Christians, of course, believe that we’ve been saved from that evil. Jesus’ sacrifice—His blood—rescued us all.

But evil still haunts us. Temptation still tugs at us. So many things conspire to pull us down, to defile our new life and hope. It clutches and claws at us, like the terrible hands we see grabbing and grasping almost everyone in The Nun.

How do we fight it? We pray. We hope. We face the evil with bravery, as the Bible commands us to time and again. “Be strong and courageous,” we read in Joshua 1:9. “Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.”

And we trust in Jesus’ blood for our ultimate deliverance.

In The Nun, our heroes walk down a terrifying hallway strewn with dangling crosses. The hallway terminates in a door with the darkest of words: Finit hic Deo, they read in Latin. God ends here.

But that’s not true, and *The Nun’*s Sister Irene know it. The Lord, their God, is with them, wherever they go—even into Valak’s profane, diabolical lair.

And in our own world of evil, God’s with us, too.

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