Stellar Irish horror film The Devil’s Doorway is the first feature film from Aislinn Clarke, a writer and director from Northern Ireland. Indeed, according to Morbidly Beautiful, which features an interview with Clarke, she is “the first woman in Northern Ireland to write and direct a produced horror film.” Devil’s Doorway was invited to showcase at BAFTA in London and was later screened at the Cannes film Festival. The film has secured international distribution, and will be released in the US by IFC Midnight on July 13, 2018.
The summer of 2018, it seems, is not only witnessing record heat but a surge of scary nuns. The trailer of the high profile film The Nun, directed by Corin Hardy, is doing the rounds at the moment. As a spin-off of the highly successful Conjuring franchise, The Nun (due to be released on September 7) will no doubt do well at the box office. But I doubt it will be as good as Devil’s Doorway. The trailer for The Nun suggest that the nuns in that film are exploited as jump scares, demonic faces appearing in the background, nuns rocketing like high speed trains from outside the frame. The nuns in Devil’s Doorway, on the other hand, are real nuns. And they are terrifying. Helena Bereen, in particular, delivers an utterly chilling performance as the Mother Superior of a Magdalene Laundry in 1960—a woman fully aware of the Church hierarchy and hating, in equal parts, the men above her and the women below her.
Helena Bereen as the Mother Superior in Devil’s Doorway and Bonnie Aarons as The Nun
Devil’s Doorway is a found-footage horror film, shot by Father John Thornton (Ciaran Flynn) as he and the older, disillusioned, Father Thomas Riley (Lalor Roddy) visit a Magdalene Laundry after the local Bishop receives an anonymous letter from one of the Sisters at the home claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary is bleeding. Father Thomas and Father John are instructed to document “everything” as they search for proof of the miracle. They do so, and they find not only a miracle but something less sacred and much darker. The statue bleeds in the chapel but, far under the chapel, other bodies bleed too.
Father Thomas (Lalor Roddy) and Father John (Ciaran Flynn) investigate claims of miracles
Clarke does a great job of weaving real and supernatural horror in Devil’s Doorway. One of the troubling things Father Thomas and Father John discover, for instance, is the strange absence of children in an institution designed to house, among other “strays,” unmarried pregnant women. The question–Where are the children?–resonates with recent revelations of a mass grave housing up 400 bodies of children at the site of the former Tuam care home in Ireland—a revelation that allegedly “shocked” the Church. The mass grave at Tuam was discovered after a historian, Catherine Corless, followed up a report from the mid-1970s of boys who had “reported seeing a pile of bones in a hidden underground chamber.” There is a similar –and shocking –scene in Devil’s Doorway. The secrets of the Church won’t stay buried.
If children are absent in Devil’s Doorway, women are very much present—and they are treated demonstrably badly by everyone. It’s the abused and unwanted women—kept out of the public spaces of the Magdalene Laundry, the literal abject, that drive the plot of Devil’s Doorway.
Lauren Coe as Kathleen O’Brien
What Father Thomas and Father John finally discover is a pregnant girl chained up in the basement, filthy and unfed, her body covered with bruises and cuts. Kathleen O’Brien (Lauren Coe) is pregnant yet miraculously a virgin; she is a young, innocent girl and yet also violently disturbed, possibly possessed. As Father Thomas and Father John confront her simultaneously miraculous and abject body, their investigation veers from uncovering miracles to documenting a possible demonic possession. Or are they just witnessing very human sins? Kathleen’s abject body, chained in the cellar, cleverly juxtaposes the sacred images of the Virgin Mary venerated in the chapels above–and these twinned bodies represent the Church’s divided views of women.
The priests discover Kathleen in the cellar
That Kathleen’s body could be the site of a miracle, a demonic possession, or simply the embodiment of the way in which the Catholic Church abjects certain women is part of the brilliance of Devil’s Doorway. The Mother Superior gives a bitter speech to Father Thomas about how the home she runs is essentially the abject of the Catholic Church—what it refuses to recognize, what it must repress to exist:
“You send all the country’s dirty wee secrets here. Here to my home—and sally off without a care in the world, sweep it all under the carpet and expect us to hide the dirty laundry. Isn’t that it Father? Leave all the dirty work to the women . . . You worry about how we treat the girls. What about how you treat us? Leave us to hide all the messes and cover it all up and swan in all holier than though.”
Devil’s Doorway is a stellar example of the recent trend in horror that has a political edge, and it cuts sharply against the Church. Its aesthetics are distinctive, supposedly shot on 16 mm makes for a realistic early 60s feel. And the performances, Lalor Roddy as Father Thomas, Ciaran Flynn as Father John, and Helena Bereen as the Mother Superior, are all perfect pitched.
Lalor Roddy as the doubting Father Thomas
In the interview with Morbidly Beautiful, Clarke talks about some of the horror films that influenced her: Rosemary’s Baby, Nightmare on Elm Street, and—a film that definitely lurks beneath Devil’s Doorway—The Exorcist. Devil’s Doorway also evokes the more recent and in my view vastly under-recognized found-footage film, The Borderlands (aka The Final Prayer, directed by Elliot Goldner).
In her interview, Aislinn adds, “The world is full of bad throwaway movies, and movies take a long time and a lot of money to make, so I like mine to have a strong reason to exist now. I like to ask myself why this story is important now.” With the Catholic Church still struggling to deal with its own history of the abuse of women and children, Devil’s Doorway is important now. Unlike The Exorcist and The Borderlands, it is about more than a priest’s individual crisis of faith, more than about his confrontation with the demonic even: it is also about the systemic oppressions that are also a part of good men’s existential struggles with God and the Church.
Looking to the future, Clarke notes that a folk horror script she’s working on has been optioned by a producer in London, so she is currently working on that. With my interest in folk horror and with how good Devil’s Doorway is, I am keeping my fingers crossed this project works out. And, in an instance of telling stories that are “important now,” Clarke is also working on a second draft of a thriller set on board a refugee boat on its way to Greece from Turkey.
Here is the trailer:
Devil’s Doorway, dir. Aislinn Clarke, 76 ins., Ireland. Release date, July 13, 2018
Grade: A-
The Devil’s Doorway is available for streaming on Amazon:
Devil’s Doorway is now on Blu-ray from Shout! Factory:
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