L ike many great works of art, the power of religious horror lies in the irresistible tension it portrays: a tension between, as Timothy Beal argues in Religion and its Monsters, ‘order and chaos, orientation and disorientation, self and other, foundation and abyss’ (1).A cafe owner has called for action after sharing 'shocking' photographs of two people sleeping rough at the rear of his business.įountains Cafe at the Oastler shopping centre in Bradford city centre tweeted photographs of two people in sleeping bags apparently surrounded by syringes and what appears to be drug-taking equipment.

This tension is everywhere in Saint Maud (Rose Glass, 2019): between the spiritual Maud and the secular Amanda, between zealous fanaticism and nihilistic despair, Maud’s dual role as victim and villain, the social tension between community and individuality, and the tension created when a desire to do good is marred and warped by neglect and hardship.

Soaked in images of crucifixes and angels, overlaid with Maud’s prayers, dreams of sainthood and (eventually) unforgettable martyrdom, religion unsurprisingly looms large in Saint Maud.īut while religion serves Rose Glass’ phenomenal debut well visually and thematically, if we (the horror-loving public) focus purely on the crucifixes, the iconography of faith, the art of Blake, we risk missing some of the film’s more prescient concerns. For while Glass’ contemporary classic can rightly be considered a religious horror, we must also contend with the fact that Saint Maud is a social horror, in which the pain of loneliness is omnipresent, and a medical horror, in which the grim realities of care, the emotionally and physically demanding work of nursing and the tragedies of an underfunded public service loom equally large. The opening scene of the film makes this everyday horror immediately apparent: the muted colour signifies that what we are witnessing is, though horrific, absolute reality, in contrast with Maud’s moments of religious revelation, which are alive with colour (the levitation scene being the most obvious example of this, taking place against a background of brightly flashing fireworks, (0:54:00) as well as the oversized luminous blue moon (1:09:03), and glowing red cyclones in the sky (1:17:01), among others). While Maud’s gesture-her arms outstretched, looking up to the ceiling (0:01:45)-has obvious religious connotations, what she actually sees is far from divine: the cockroach’s alien physicality foreshadows the abjection Maud is about to experience from society as a result of the elderly patient’s death. But the flash of recognition on her face (0:01:57) suggests that she identifies with the creature, and so casts it, and consequently herself, in a more pleasing (holy) light. The corner in which the roach appears (0:01:55), however, communicates that this coping mechanism will prove claustrophobic: it will entrap Maud, and the longer she spends within this delusion, the more twisted it will become, and the further from herself she will stray.Īs religion takes on a more prominent role in Maud’s life, it becomes apparent that her faith is a veneer, scar tissue from her traumatic experiences in the hospital, both a symptom and an unhealthy coping mechanism shielding her from the pain of isolation and loneliness.

Streets of rogue syringes