Season three of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives debuted on November 13, and among the routine infighting, there’s a heavier topic that has consumed the season’s conversations: the incremental revelations that most of the women in the cast have been sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. (Hulu didn’t include any trigger warnings in front of these episodes.) This isn’t surprising, given the self-reported rates of sexual violence. Similarly disturbing and unsurprising, though, is the fact that for one of those women, the cast and the audience have decided that she’s lying.  Demi Engemann shared this season that Marciano Brunette groped her without her consent while she visited the Vanderpump Villa, a different Hulu original reality show. Brunette, the lead server at the Villa, claims they shared a consensual kiss and denies assaulting Engemann. Vanderpump Villa producers released a statement that they had reviewed their footage and found her claims to be “unsubstantiated.” In early December, Brunette filed a lawsuit against Engemann, claiming she defamed him by lying that she had been assaulted. For those who haven’t watched SLOMW, it follows a group of young women who grew up in the Mormon church, have large social media followings, and started their own “MomTok” group, infamous for a swinging scandal years ago. The group often discusses how they want to modernize the Mormon church and change its stance on traditional gender roles and LGBTQ+ acceptance.  > I found that many of the police investigations hinged on the victim’s behavior > instead of hard evidence: were they sad enough, did they try to fight back, > were they flirting beforehand, and had their story been consistent through and > through?  However, their treatment of Engemann’s allegation looks all too familiar to me, as a reporter who has read through dozens of police reports that labeled sexual assault claims as false. My reporting was featured in the Netflix documentary Victim/Suspect, which shows police interrogation videos and first-hand interviews with alleged victims who were accused of lying and charged with crimes. I found that many of the police investigations hinged on the victim’s behavior instead of hard evidence: were they sad enough, did they try to fight back, were they flirting beforehand, and had their story been consistent through and through?  Now, for Engemann’s part, and separate from her allegation of sexual assault, she has been incredibly insensitive to others’ pain and discomfort. She chastised and mocked another wife, Jessi Draper, for having a consensual affair with Brunette (yes, the same Brunette). She orchestrated a very awkward and public Chippendales-like dance with a different cast member, Jen Affleck, who said she was uncomfortable and didn’t give consent.  As happens with a reality TV scandal, Engemann’s accusations turned the audience into pseudo-detectives. On camera at least, she is friendly with Brunette, hugs him, and doesn’t say outright that she’s uncomfortable with anything. Perhaps most suspicious to the online detectives and cast is that she kept in touch with her alleged assailant, sending him messages that included some sexual innuendos. But to be clear, none of these publicized messages mentions anything physical happening between the two of them, consensually otherwise. This vigorous analysis of Engemann’s behavior hasn’t been applied to Brunette, whose character isn’t spotless. In a previous season of Vanderpump Villa, Brunette bragged that he had slept with an “extraordinary” number of his coworkers at an old job. In the Vanderpump Villa episode when Brunette meets the wives, he comments on their looks soon after meeting them, calling them “so f*cking hot”. And after he asks Engemann for a“therapy session”, she is the one who ends the conversation, and Brunette pulls her in for a hug, kissing the side of her head.  Instead, all the shame bore down on the two women involved with Brunette. Draper was excoriated by her husband, who said his own bad behavior toward her was excused because she cheated on him. And Engemann has been called a liar and a master manipulator who made up sexual assault allegations to cover up a consensual affair.  > Reporting a sexual assault has always been fraught because these crimes > usually have no witnesses, leave no physical injuries, and worst of all, > credibility can be made or broken by a victim’s behavior before and after the > alleged assault.  I want to be very clear that I don’t know if Engemann was actually assaulted — and neither do you.  Claire Fallon and her co-host summed up my feelings pretty perfectly on a podcast episode of Rich Text: “We both feel very uncomfortable about the fact that this is a half-season of a reality show about whether a group of women believe another woman’s claim that she was sexually assaulted.” The way that the group of wives has characterized their doubt has been in service of other “real” victims. In a hotel room, Draper, Mickaela Matthews, and Miranda Hope discuss their feelings about the accusation. Miranda says while pinching her fingers together: “You’re taking a situation that’s this big, and using your position as a woman to make it this big, which is actually so much worse for actual assault victims.”  Draper: “Yes, and it makes women not be believed when other women do shit like this.” Reporting a sexual assault has always been fraught because these crimes usually have no witnesses, leave no physical injuries, and worst of all, credibility can be made or broken by a victim’s behavior before and after the alleged assault.  My reporting found that family, friends, and police all come up with remarkable excuses for why they think someone made up an allegation of assault. For a 12-year-old, police said she lied about her adoptive dad abusing her to get back at him for taking her phone away. For a college student, it was so she could get help with her grades. For a restaurant server, it was so she could extort money from her boss. All three of these people – even the child – were charged with crimes for lying. And all three saw their charges later dropped or were fully exonerated. The season’s reunion aired last week, and during it, Engemann again said and did things to others which have no excuse — while pointing to her head, she asked Affleck what was wrong with her brain (after Affleck came out publicly that she recovered from prenatal depression and suicidal ideations). She assumed Affleck wasn’t a victim of sexual assault, which was quickly corrected, and to which Engemann responded, “OK, that’s great.” But something else struck me while watching the reunion that was true for so many of the young women I’ve interviewed. While crying during a break, Engemann said, “It’s more painful to not be believed […]  or to have to go over it over and over and over and feel the pain of past things than to just say ‘F*ck yeah, we kissed.’”  For so many victims, it is easier to dismiss the truth, push down their memories, and say that they weren’t assaulted – especially when there is a culture so ready to accept their admission of fault.  I have no idea where Brunette was that night during the reunion, but for certain, he wasn’t on national TV in front of narrowing and skeptical eyes, facing intense and repetitive questions. 

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners will be the first movie on a streaming platform that will also be available in Black American Sign Language at the time of its digital release when it hits HBO Max on the Fourth of July. “By amplifying Black Deaf voices and honoring the culture, identity, and history at the heart of this powerful film, Max’s ongoing commitment to accessibility builds off a growing ASL program,” reads a press release from Warner Bros Discovery, HBO Max’s parent company. Black American Sign Language is distinct from American Sign Language—and it developed because Black Deaf students were segregated in their own Black schools for the Deaf. Around eight percent of Deaf people in the US are Black, but not all have access to learning BASL due to ASL being more widely taught now. Franklin Jones, Jr., a lecturer in deaf studies at Boston University, has compared BASL to African American Vernacular English, describing it as: > Compared to those who use standard ASL, BASL signers are sometimes seen as > less animated, Jones says. There are fewer mouth movements (a feature known as > facial grammar) in BASL, for example. In other ways, though, it’s perhaps more > expressive. The sign space for BASL users tends to be higher, closer to the > forehead, and generally wider overall, whereas standard ASL tends to be > farther down and to rely on tighter, more economical choices. People fluent in > BASL also tend to use both hands for signs that might require only one in > standard ASL. Still, BASL is not a monolith. As with any language, there are > noticeable dialects and regional accents.  The film, set in 1932, follows two Black twin brothers, both played by Michael B. Jordan, who return to their hometown in Mississippi, when they have to face a supernatural force. The 1930s were definitely a time period where BASL was more common among Black Deaf people who had access to sign language education. Writer Ashley C. Ford remarked on BlueSky that she had once seen director Coogler sign with another person who he noticed was wearing hearing aids, though it is unclear whether Coogler speaks BASL, ASL or both. > When I met Ryan Coogler several years ago, we were standing in a group of > people chatting, when a woman with visible hearing aids walked up, and he > casually began to sign the whole conversation so she could participate. She > mouthed “thank you”. He nodded and just kept doing his thing. > > [image or embed] > > — Ashley C. Ford (@smashfizzle.bsky.social) June 30, 2025 at 2:38 PM “The release of SINNERS with BASL is a major step forward in accessibility, representation, and visibility in streaming,” the press release also noted.

Why do Republicans and their enablers insist on fantasizing about one of the most evil empires in science fiction? In a recent CNN appearance, former Mitch McConnell adviser and GOP operative Scott Jennings went on the defense, justifying Emperor Palpatine’s violent vision for a galactic empire. When podcaster and contributor Van Lathan pointed out just one of the many war crimes the Empire engaged in—blowing up Princess Leia’s adopted home planet and massacring everyone on it—Jennings replied: “I think some could argue that it was warranted, given their rebellious activities. I mean, he defended the Empire against unelected hippies and violent protesters.” The entire massacre of a planet is justified because of some “unelected hippies” and “protesters”? It turns out Jennings isn’t the only right-winger to defend the Empire’s actions—and specifically the destruction of an entire planet. For decades, the GOP and its allies have played with defending the Empire’s violence for the sake of order. (Republican and former FCC chairman Ajit Pai literally quoted Palpatine in a hearing once.) Now, of course, Star Wars is entirely science fiction. It’s not real. But this past week, the final episodes of Andor, Disney’s critical and audience hit about how the rebellion in the original trilogy came to be, dropped. And the show has pulled the Star Wars franchise into somewhat of a cultural renaissance, as its obvious point of view on authoritarianism marks a return to what made Star Wars: Dissecting the effects of state violence on the everyday people who work toward liberation. “I do think that looking at how Star Wars and other stories like it are used in our political conversation reveals something interesting about our political moment: Republicans are gunning for their own Galactic Empire, and they will blow up a planet to make it happen. Or in this case, they will blow up our country.”

Kareem Tabsch, co-founder of Miami Beach’s O Cinema, loves his hometown. He’s made an award-winning movie about Miami Beach’s historic Jewish community. He has been lauded in his local press for his contributions to South Florida’s artistic culture. And in 2008, he co-founded an arthouse movie theater to give his neighborhood access to independent films that would otherwise pass it by in favor of more lucrative screens elsewhere. But, until last week, Tabsch had never interacted much with Miami Beach’s municipal government. That changed on March 11th, when the cinema received a letter from Miami Beach mayor Steven Meiner, telling the business they had to cancel their planned showings of “No Other Land,” a documentary about a Palestinian village struggling to survive in the West Bank amid Israeli government and settler violence. If the movie theatre failed to comply, Meiner said he would introduce a City Council resolution to terminate the cinema’s lease in a city-owned building and revoke at least $40,000 in grant money.  On March 3rd, “No Other Land” made history when it won the Oscar for Best Documentary. But it still does not have a US distributor. That means that one-on-one deals with independent theaters like O Cinema are the only way US audiences can see the film. Tabsch’s patrons, he told Mother Jones, wanted “No Other” Land in particular: so, despite the eviction threat, O Cinema went ahead and screened the film. They sold out every single showing.  “We recognize that some stories—especially those rooted in real-world conflicts—can evoke strong feelings and passionate reactions. As they should,” O Cinema CEO Vivian Marthell said in a statement. “Our decision to screen ‘No Other Land’ is not a declaration of political alignment. It is a bold reaffirmation of our fundamental belief that every voice deserves to be heard.” T he resolution canceling O Cinema’s lease and withdrawing city funding is due for a vote on Wednesday. That same night, O Cinema’s public schedule lists another showing of “No Other Land.” I talked with Tabsch about what happens when your local government decides screening a film is “not consistent” with your city’s values.  How was the decision to screen “No Other Land” made?  The film had been on our radar pretty much all last year, because it’s been so universally lauded. People started asking us: When are you going to show it? So discussions began in the fall of last year. It’s a 69-seat theater, so scheduling is tricky…we kind of earmarked this early 2025 window. That was before the Academy Awards. We always try to show as many of the Academy Award nominees as possible, which is pretty common for art-house theaters.  At the time, when we programmed it, we were the only theater in South Florida showing “No Other Land.” We may have been the only theater in the state of Florida.  Now, after we’ve shown it, other theaters are coming in to show it.  O Cinema movie theater.Courtesy O Cinema Let’s talk about what happened with the mayor. How did you first hear about this threat of eviction?  We received a letter from the Mayor. The initial reaction, from many of us, was that this very clearly felt like a threat from our elected officials. And I don’t think in our history we have ever received any outreach from any local politician asking us about or questioning our programming.  It came across as a not-so-veiled threat to our future. Initially, we felt the future of our indie theater was threatened, and decided that we were not going to show the film. Vivian [Marthell, CEO of O Cinema] sent a letter to the mayor saying as much. But, very quickly, I think we all realized that was really against the mission of our organization, the spirit of independent film, and really an affront to the First Amendment. So, within 12 hours, she sent an email to the mayor where she informed him that we were actually going to go through with the screenings. And we went through with the screenings! Every screening of “No Other Land” at O Cinema was sold out.  The overwhelming feedback that I heard from members of the community was very positive. They were thankful that we were showing the film. Folks walked up to the staff and thanked them for showing the It’s very clear that Miami Beach audiences, in particular, wanted to see the film and were grateful to be able to do so. You, yourself, are a documentarian. As someone who makes documentary films, what was your reaction to all this?  As someone who’s born and raised and lives in this community and has seen the trajectory of its growth and evolution, I was really taken aback by the course this has taken. We see more and more attempts at censorship at different levels—especially at the federal government level, we’re seeing a lot of threats to freedom of expression. But I never truly expected that in this vibrant cultural community that is Miami Beach, where folks have so many different backgrounds, and many of them came fleeing oppression… I never expected our local government to decide that showing a film was so much against the values of the city that they had to shut us down. I never expected our local government to enact retribution against an arts organization for extending and fulfilling their artistic license and freedom to show films.  So, what happens now?  The Mayor’s resolution to defund the cinema and cancel its lease will come to a vote and a discussion on Wednesday. It’s my sincere hope that we will find an amicable solution to this.  I mean, listen, I respect deeply held views. And I know the subject matter of the film is certainly provocative, and it could evoke strong feelings. But good films evoke strong feelings. As a filmmaker, I always say you don’t have to like my movies, but I want to make you feel something one way or another.  This film, clearly, evokes strong feelings in local government. But I hope cooler heads will prevail and we can move forward operating in the city, because we love the city of Miami Beach, and our community loves us. That’s evident by how they come out to see our films, and how they came out to see this one. 

Growing up in Brazil around the turn of the millennium, I was too young to have lived through the violent years of the military dictatorship that last almost two decades through the mid-1980s. But my parents remember it well. In the 1970s, at the height of the regime, they were both medical students entering a public state university in Rio de Janeiro. My parents recalled seeing older people in the classroom who weren’t actual students, but undercover informants for the government. Some of their classmates were disappeared never to be seen again, while the “lucky” ones returned after days or weeks with accounts of beatings and torture. The dictatorship wasn’t openly discussed at my mother’s home. And because of censorship of the media, her family only learned about high-profile arrests or kidnappings after the fact. “It was a Brazil of the ‘economic miracle‘ and the 1970s World Cup,” my mother said. “It was easy to ignore.” It wasn’t until she got involved with the student and organized resistance movements that she became aware of the reality of what was going on not only in Rio de Janeiro, but across the country. My mother remembered the fear of having phone calls intercepted or being followed in the streets. I felt compelled to ask my parents, now in their 60s, about their lives under the dictatorship after seeing the Academy Award-nominated film I’m Still Here. Directed by Walter Salles (also known for Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries) and starring best actress contender Fernanda Torres, the movie is a subtle but poignant portrait of a Brazilian family caught up in the brutal military regime hat kidnapped and murdered thousands of people. It has become a box office phenomenon—reaching more than 5 million viewers in Brazil and bringing in $27.4 million internationally—and earned a spot as a frontrunner in the Oscars’ international feature film category, as well as a surprise nomination for the biggest prize of the night. Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m Still Here‘s depiction of quiet resistance against creeping authoritarianism struck a chord with the Brazilian people. Only 40 years after the restoration of democracy, the largest country in South America is again grappling with the very real specter of an oppressive regime in the form of an attempted coup orchestrated by former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and military officials. At a time of encroaching anti-democratic movements both abroad and in the United States, I’m Still Here is a testament to the dignity of individual acts of resilience and a call to preserve memory and record the truth, no matter how elusive or delayed. “The film is the product of the return of Brazil’s democracy,” Salles told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, saying that the movie, which took seven years to make, would not have been possible during the Bolsonaro years. “We shot it in 2023 without having the slightest idea that there had been a failed attempt of a military coup d’état at the end of 2022. As the film was being launched in Brazil and embraced by the audience, the news actually was unearthed by the federal police that that coup d’état that included the assassination of President Lula and of Vice-President [Geraldo] Alckmin had almost been the reality of the country.” While releasing the movie, Salles added, “We realized that more than ever it was a film about today, about what was happening in the country at this very moment.” Based on a 2015 bestselling memoir of the same name by author Marcelo Rubens Paiva, I’m Still Here follows Eunice Paiva, a mother of five, as her affluent family’s seemingly idyllic life is turned upside down when her husband and former congressman Rubens Paiva, played by Selton Mello, is taken away by military agents. From that point forward, Eunice, an educated housewife who would later become a human rights lawyer and activist, is forced to reinvent herself to preserve her family, while relentlessly fighting to keep her husband’s disappearance at the hands of the military junta from being forgotten. It took 25 years for the Brazilian state to so much as acknowledge Rubens Paiva’s death. In one of the most moving scenes in I’m Still Here, Eunice talks to reporters as she finally obtains official proof of her husband’s passing. “It’s odd, you know, to feel relief with a death certificate,” she says. “Forced disappearances were one of the cruelest acts of the regime because you kill one person but condemn all the others to eternal psychological torture.” The body of Rubens Paiva was never found. The five military officers charged with torturing and killing him benefited from a 1979 amnesty law and were never brought to justice. But I’m Still Here has had an impact, leading Brazilians to protest outside the houses of perpetrators of dictatorship-era crimes. It has also led to revisions to death certificates, including that of Rubens Paiva, to characterize the cause of death as “unnatural, violent, caused by the Brazilian state.” And this month, Brazil’s Supreme Court decided to revisit whether to revoke amnesty for the officers involved in the cases of Paiva and two other opponents of the regime. I’m Still Here aptly captures a feeling that, at least on the surface, daily life carried on as usual during the years of the dictatorship. At first, Rubens Paiva downplays the looming perils, reassuring a publisher friend fleeing to London that “it won’t be long” before things normalize. But from the first scenes, Salles’ movie also establishes the insidious presence of the repressive state. Early in the film, one of the Paiva’s daughters is left shaken after being stopped and interrogated during a traffic blitz; in another scene, Eunice watches military trucks parading the streets of Leblon while the happy family snaps photos with friends on the beach. In showing us these mundane moments, I’m Still Here renders the sudden but permanent violence that afflicts the Paivas all the more jarring and chilling. Later in the movie, Eunice and one of her teenage daughters are arrested and taken to a military facility inside the army headquarters to be interrogated. The building, where dozens were tortured and killed, has been at the center of a dispute over turning it into a historical landmark. Many Brazilian movies over the years have helped memorialize these events, including The Year My Parents Went on Vacation and Four Days in September, which also stars Torres and Mello and has Alan Arkin in the role of a kidnapped American ambassador. But I’m Still Here, perhaps through the sheer force of prescient timing and a great award-season campaign by Torres and Salles, has taken on a life of its own. In the process of captivating audiences worldwide and bringing renewed attention to Brazil’s rich filmmaking tradition, it has propelled an entire country to look at an open wound. As my mother put it: “It helps to realize that this is a real threat.” I can’t imagine I’m the only person my age having these conversations with their parents in Brazil or who has found in the movie a new window into the atrocities committed at that time. But I’m Still Here is more than an exercise in remembering some of the darkest chapters in our country’s past. In light of January 8, 2023, when Bolsonaro supporters stormed Brazil’s capital in a January 6-like insurrection; the ongoing revelations about how close we came to history repeating itself; and continued efforts to rewrite this painful history, the movie transcends its historical context. With or without an Oscar nod, I’m Still Here invites a reckoning with the present and offers a warning for the future.

“I was like, Oh, my God, look at her. She’s like me; she speaks Spanish, and she has an accent like my mom.” That’s how Mathia Vargas describes the first time she remembers seeing a Latina in an American movie: Salma Hayek in the 1997 romantic comedy Fools Rush In. “I grew up, and we’d look nothing alike, but at the time, I was like: there’s people that look like me in [an] American, English-language film.” Vargas is a Dominican-American actress from New York who—like many Latino movie and TV lovers—didn’t often see people like herself on screen growing up. More than two decades later, that’s still the case.  According to research by consultancy firm McKinsey & Company released last year, which looked at movies and shows released from 2013 to 2022, Latinos only held four percent of lead roles on theatrical films and television shows, and seven percent on streaming series, despite making up 19 percent of the US population. That makes Latinos one of the most underrepresented groups in Hollywood; only Native American representation is similarly bad.  Vargas says she fell in love with acting when she was a little girl: “I moved back to the States when I was three and I learned English watching Sesame Street and Barney, and I always wanted to be a kid on TV.” But outside of those shows, Vargas says, she “rarely saw kids that looked like me, so I never really thought it was a thing I could do.” Still, she never let go of her dream: she became a pre-med student and minored in theater before deciding to pursue acting as a career.  The challenge ahead of her was clear from the beginning. She recalls a meeting with a manager early in her career—who she described as great—whose office had a wall of shows casting in New York, with every actor who could be the right fit: “I look across this wall,” Vargas says, “and there’s not one person that looks like me up there.”  This lack of opportunity for Latinos in the industry isn’t just limited to on-screen roles; it extends to behind-the-scenes talent as well.  > Films were half as likely to revolve around crime when Latinos had significant > behind-the-scenes roles. The same McKinsey study also found that only five percent of theatrical film directors, and one percent of broadcast and cable TV showrunners, the most senior position on television shows, were Latino. The consequences extend not only to the career prospects of Latino directors but also the types of stories about the Latino community that make it on screen. Hiring Latino talent off-screen, the study found, leads to fewer stereotypical stories about the Latino community, and to more nuanced depictions of the diverse groups that make up that community: films were half as likely to revolve around crime when Latinos had significant behind-the-scenes roles like producer, director, or writer, and 3.5 times more likely to revolve around family. “Latino directors understand that where you come from, your ethnic background and your culture,” Vargas says, “influences how your character expresses themselves and walks through the world.” And while opportunities for Latino talent are limited, those films Latinos lead or direct are more likely to be nominated for an Academy Award or Golden Globe, and more likely to win an award once nominated, according to the study. Recent examples include Ana de Armas’ Best Actress nomination for her role as Marilyn Monroe in Blonde, and Colman Domingo, who became the first Afro-Latino nominee for Best Actor for his portrayal of activist Bayard Rustin in 2023’s Rustin. Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón have both won the award for best director, in Cuarón’s case for the beautiful black-and-white 2018 film Roma, telling the story of an Indigenous live-in housekeeper in Mexico City.  The crowning irony: despite the fact that Latinos are underrepresented on screen, they are actually overrepresented when it comes to spending on movies and TV.  The two biggest movies of 2024 were Pixar’s Inside Out 2 and Marvel’s Deadpool & Wolverine, both produced by Disney subsidiaries. Both made over a billion dollars at the box office, and if you looked into the crowds on opening weekend, you would see a disproportionately high number of Latinos. Despite making up just under a fifth of the population, Latinos were about a third of Deadpool & Wolverine’s opening weekend audience and nearly 40 percent of Inside Out 2’s. And that’s the rule, not the exception. The McKinsey study found that Latinos had the highest per-capita spending at cinemas of any demographic, watching an average of 3.3 movies a year in theaters compared to 2.3 for white audiences. Latinos also account for 24 percent of streaming subscriptions. And the study didn’t just find that Latinos spend more, but also that movies featuring Latino talent made more money.  Last year, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice had the second-highest September domestic debut in history at $110 million, and outgrossed the original Beetlejuice’s total worldwide box office returns. The movie went on to become the sixth highest-grossing film of 2024 in the United States, with Jenna Ortega in a lead role coming off of her massive Netflix show Wednesday. The McKinsey study found that movies with Latinos as directors, producers, or in lead roles, like Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, made 58 percent more money at the global box office. Other recent box office successes with Latino leads include the last two Scream movies, led by Melissa Barrera, and Avatar: The Way of Water, led by Zoe Saldaña—who won a Golden Globe and is nominated for an Oscar this year for her role in Emilia Pérez—making her the first actor in history to appear in four movies that grossed over $2 billion. Camilo Becdach was one of the researchers behind the McKinsey study, which estimated that the US film and TV industry could add $12 to $18 billion to its roughly $180 billion annual take if it improved Latino representation, and says it “isn’t just that more Latinos are showing up, it’s that all groups are showing up.”  Vargas says she’s seen improvements in the types of roles now offered to Latinas compared to when she started her career more than a decade ago. “It was rough, because I could get a sense of what they were looking for: Latinas to be sexy, to be sassy. There wasn’t a lot of room for nuance there.” Now, Vargas says, “There’s a little bit less of that stereotypical Latina. I’m auditioning to play lawyers. I’m auditioning to play entrepreneurs and romantic leads that don’t feel like they’re steeped in stereotype.” She partially credits that improvement to an increase in the number of “open-ethnicity” roles, which allow anyone to audition, but still thinks there aren’t enough opportunities for Latinos, and Afro-Latinos in particular. “I’m rooting for everybody with a vowel [at] the end of their last name, but I’m not seeing enough improvement in terms of folks who make up the global majority and are darker-skinned or Indigenous.”  > “The problem is not [James Franco] playing Latinos. The problem is that > Latinos are not playing anything.” Pablo Andrade is an actor from Venezuela working in New York, and executive director of the Hispanic Organization of Latin Actors, which works to expand the presence of Hispanic and Latino artists in the entertainment industry. “It’s hard for the general audience to understand that our community is so diverse,” Andrade says. “We have Afro-Latinos. We have blonde Latinos. We have Latinos from all over America and all other places. For many casting directors, a Latino looks like this, sounds like this—and they are not going to find those Latinos that they have in mind everywhere.” Andrade says his accent has been a major barrier to landing movie roles, which led him to focus on theater, and points out how Hollywood sometimes misses obvious opportunities to hire Latinos, citing the recent, controversial casting of James Franco as Fidel Castro in the yet to be released Alina of Cuba as an example. “Our community was enraged,” Andrade says. “If we had 20 percent of the roles in Hollywood—that guy’s a fantastic actor. Give it a try. A Latino could be played by anyone. But the problem is not that they are playing Latinos. The problem is that Latinos are not playing anything.” The film’s producers, that is, could have given a Cuban actor the opportunity to progress in their career instead of going with Palo Alto Fidel Castro.  Hiring more Latinos, based on the study’s results, would likely net more money for an industry that has struggled to bring revenue back up to pre-pandemic levels, and yield better stories for us to watch. But convincing studios of that is a challenge. Becdach sees many reasons: One is that studios often determine whether they are willing to fund a movie based on “comps,” other projects that they can point to as comparable to the one being pitched. That presents a challenge for Latino creatives: they have fewer projects to point to because fewer Latino-led projects have been greenlit in the past. As one Latino animator interviewed for the study put it, “It’s the chicken and the egg problem: because there are no hits, they don’t want to make Latino movies. And because they don’t make Latino movies, there are no hits.”   The other major challenge for Latino creatives is that—perhaps more than any other industry—the film and TV business relies on people hiring those they know. One non-Latino executive interviewed for the study said, “There are no applications for production jobs…A studio head hires division heads, and the division heads hire other people [they] know, and this cycle perpetuates—and as a result, Latinos don’t get hired.” Entry-level positions are often given to those with university or family connections in the industry, which many Latinos lack. One possible solution is to have more Latinos in creative leadership positions; the study found that when Latinos are in these roles, they are 15 times more likely to hire Latinos than are their white counterparts. Becdach says, “When you have [a] Latino producer [or] director, you’ll see greater representation on screen.” But that’s another Catch-22, because studios have to first be willing to hire Latinos into those positions. Becdach believes Hollywood studios should be thinking of ways to create a pipeline for Latino talent to network and receive mentoring so that more can eventually get into leadership positions.  As with any creative endeavor, mistakes are going to happen; not every movie or TV show will accurately represent every Latino group, and not every story featuring Latinos will be great, but more opportunities will mean more and better stories. “I know it’s hard to get it right,” Vargas says, “but we just want to be in there. Let us be the good guys, the bad guys, maybe less of the bad guys. I would like to see quantity and quality.”  

Immaculate may appear to be all about evil nuns. In the movie’s grisly opening, four nuns break a runaway sister’s leg. Another holy mob tries to skewer the protagonist, Sister Cecilia, like a shish kebab just after she takes her final vows—and before she unexpectedly becomes pregnant. Halfway through the film, Cecilia catches two sisters slicing off a mouthy novitiate’s tongue. Candles burn, incense wafts, and their habits conceal evil intentions. But the real villain is the parish priest. A former geneticist who’s found his calling trying to engineer the next messiah, he inseminates Cecilia with DNA pulled from—wait for it—one of the nails used to crucify Jesus Christ. Producer and lead actor Sydney Sweeney said she and the rest of the crew behind Immaculate “never really looked at a lot of nun films.” It appears that they never really looked at a lot of actual nuns, either. Immaculate is hardly the first horror film to commit this sin. Nuns, with their unmistakable silhouettes, have long been made caricatures by the horror genre, revealing that, long before JD Vance became a VP candidate, society was never comfortable with unmarried, childless women, much less those living communally. The fact that nun horror is most often set in earlier eras—­usually back when nuns were sporting habits and chanting in Latin—feels like a middle finger to these women, who had some measure of self-determination in a world long before the Western women’s rights movement. Tales of satanic nuns are older than film itself. For centuries, the expectations imposed on cloistered women were as constricting as the social roles available to them and the walls surrounding them—and speculation ran wild. Some of these accounts went on to inspire late-20th-century nunsploitation films, like Convent of Sinners in 1986, which laid the foundation for modern movies like Immaculate. These days, nuns are an endangered species. The numbers peaked at about 180,000 American sisters in 1965, but declined to fewer than 36,000 by 2023. In 2009, more than 90 percent of American sisters were age 60 or older. While nun characters have appeared in films of all stripes, from a soul-searching novice in Ida to Whoopi Goldberg’s comedic turn in Sister Act, the horror genre seems especially, and lucratively, fixated on them. The Conjuring series, which includes The Nun and The Nun II, is one of the highest-grossing horror franchises of all time. Nuns also star in—or haunt—such recent releases as The First Omen (2024), Sister Death (2023), Deliver Us (2023), and Consecration (2023). “[Nuns] are figures that, for Americans, are very other,” said Ryan Duns, a Jesuit priest and author of the new book Theology of Horror. “And there’s a fascination with that.” Yet nun horror films reflect society’s larger discomfort with these independent women and conveniently ignore that for many real-life nuns, forgoing secular marriage and childbearing has freed them to perform invaluable academic, artistic, and social justice work. Today’s nun horror can best be understood through its progenitor: nunsploitation. This genre, often as blood-soaked as it is pornographic, was popularized in ’70s Europe, largely as a critique of the Catholic religion. Whereas the church believed that vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience could bring women closer to God, these films seemed to posit that such strictures were more likely to turn women into wanton, slutty psychopaths. Italian director Joe D’Amato clearly had a score to settle in his 1986 flesh flick Convent of Sinners, which he made under the name Dario Donati. The film liberally draws from Denis Diderot’s 18th-century novel La Religieuse, a seminal work of anti-­Catholic criticism. Convent of Sinners is one of three major film adaptations, with Jacques Rivette’s The Nun (1966) and Guillaume Nicloux’s The Nun (2013). Rivette’s take is considered an arthouse classic, and Nicloux’s premiered in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival, but Convent of Sinners aimed lower. A foremother of today’s nun horror, the film features exorcism, sexual hysteria, and lots of ominous harpsichord, plus a ­demon-purging douche. > For many women in the past, “marriage, prostitution, and the convent were > about the only choices.” Unlike today, when evil nuns tend to appear in the background, they’re often front and center in early nunsploitation films. In Convent of Sinners, heroine Susanna faces off against a predatory lesbian abbess and her scorned second-in-command. The former wants to show Susanna the ways of the flesh; the latter is so jealous that she poisons Susanna and stages her alleged possession. An opening intertitle quotes La Religieuse: “What need has Christ of so many foolish vergins [sic] and the human race of so [many] victims?” La Religieuse excoriated cloistered life as repressive and intolerable. According to Craig A. Monson, author of the 2010 book Nuns Behaving Badly, there was some truth to that assessment. For many women in the past, “marriage, prostitution, and the convent were about the only choices,” Monson explains, and each came with (usually male) supervision. A woman’s purpose was dictated either by her husband, her male relatives, a brothel owner, or the church. The Council of Trent in the mid-1500s, which called for “the enclosure and safety of nuns,” stipulated that unless approved by a bishop, a nun could not “go out of her convent, even for a brief period, under any pretext.” There was no such thing as a mental breakdown for being shut away against your will, but there was such a thing as demonic possession. Still, while filmmakers like D’Amato may have had some valid points about Catholic repression, they loved to show as much female nudity and sexual violence as possible while making them. Convent of Sinners opens as Susanna is graphically raped by her father and ends with a still of her lifeless, topless form. All the frames in between feature more naked breasts than a French beach in June. As a novice, Susanna sheds her secular clothes and puts on special underwear in front of the entire convent. Later, in a bathing area, the sisters frolic naked, splashing each other with water and giggling. While two nuns are doing laundry, one laughs to her companion, “Whenever I have to wash these, I think of dirty habits.” Many nunsploitation films masqueraded as sex-positive propaganda, but leave it to men to fetishize a ­population of women who have opted out of sexual life altogether. (A nunsploitation sex scene is comparable to two “sexy nun” costumes from your local Spirit Halloween come to life and robotically feeling each other up.) These films also serve as anti-Catholic vehicles, casting nuns as repressed to the point of psychosis (or, gasp, lesbianism). The church might not look great, but neither do these filmmakers’ opinions of women. The best sisters in these films end up dead like Susanna, doe-eyed martyrs to a supposedly progressive cause. Sigmund Freud famously posited that certain men are unable to be aroused by the women they love and unable to love the women who arouse them. This “psychical impotence,” more commonly known as the Madonna-whore complex, sums up the cinematic nun nicely. She is either too pure, forced by some evil external force to the brink of ruin, or, as with the oft-used Mother Superior trope, she is the one doing the ruining. The moral of the Conjuring franchise—which wildly fictionalizes the lives of Ed and Lorraine Warren, two real-life Catholics and paranormal investigators—is that no evil can truly harm those with enough faith in the Christian God. The franchise’s The Nun and The Nun II have become easily the most successful nun horror films, grossing more than $630 million to date. While it’s refreshing to see our pious protagonists not being brutalized, sexualized, or exorcised, these women are barely human in an entirely different, even nostalgic way: They’re practically divine. This franchise seems to be an effort to memorialize the days when nuns were shut away and, quite literally, holier than thou. “Catholicism has not historically modernized the way that other religious traditions have. There’s something atavistic about it,” Duns, the Jesuit priest and academic, told me when I asked why horror movies are still so obsessed with habit-sporting nuns and collared fathers. “These are people who dwell in our midst, but they’re tied to a past we don’t quite understand.” He pointed out that this must have felt especially true after the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, which, in an attempt to collapse the distance between clergy and laypeople, dictated, among other things, that Mass could be conducted in vernacular languages and nuns’ traditional floor-length habits could be jettisoned. “All of a sudden,” Duns noted, “you show up to Mass the next week and the priest is facing you, he’s now speaking your language, and the liturgy that had composed your sense of space, time, and the sacred has evanesced.” So why does the big screen always show habited nuns chanting in Latin? The Nun films, set in the decade before Vatican II, seem to long for these bygone rituals while exploiting them. In the first film, one nun tormented by Valak—a demon who manifests as a nun—is so pious that she would rather kill herself than be a vessel for evil. Another nun, Sister Irene, takes her vows to become “a true bride of Christ,” and is able to weaponize an actual vial of Jesus’ blood. The Nun II takes this even further. Turns out Sister Irene is a direct descendant of St. Lucy, the patron saint of the blind, and the visions she’s been having are holy rather than delusional. (Convenient!) This time, the power of her prayer turns barrels of wine into demon kryptonite, Christ’s blood. Because convent life “is this weird, sealed, matriarchal thing,” Elle Carroll, the author of Vulture’s “18 Essential Nunsploitation Films,” tells me, “there’s this automatic assumption that insane things must be going on. They must be up to something, be it truly everything from demonic possession to silly, softcore-porn lesbianism.” In reality, the something many nuns have gotten up to over the centuries is innovation, unencumbered by wifely duties or childbirth. Intentionally or otherwise, Catholic nuns were the original female separatists, and convents were often the best option for self-sufficient women. Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana flourished as a singer, organist, and composer from within her convent in 17th-century Italy. Hildegard of Bingen, who made groundbreaking contributions to music and medicine in the 12th century, was a Benedictine nun. The 20th-century artist Corita Kent, who joined the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1936 at age 18, made indelible contributions to pop art with her political serigraphs and advocated for Catholic progressive reform during Vatican II. > “They must be up to something…from demonic possession to silly, softcore-porn > lesbianism.” Their self-government opened opportunities to develop scholarly, artistic, or technical pursuits that Monson, the author of Nuns Behaving Badly, says “would not have been readily available in the world.” He acknowledges that some nuns “got their jollies out of being super-pious,” but others were “more intellectual, whether it was in music or in writing or in becoming accountants—even running the finances” for their convents. The Roman Catholic Church is still one of the biggest charitable organizations in the country, and without its legions of female volunteers, these efforts would grind to a halt. Many nuns see such good works as a specific part of their calling—take the Dominican Sisters of Hope, based just north of New York City, who name “poverty, eco-justice, civil rights, access to health care, and access to education” among their key issues. The St. Louis–based Daughters of Charity work in health care, prisons, and social services. Pope Francis is reportedly friendly to nuns, but in 2012, the Vatican under arch-conservative Pope Benedict XVI accused the largest umbrella organization for nuns of promoting “certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.” Their crimes? Voicing support for the Affordable Care Act and, allegedly, mentioning “patriarchy.” Perhaps nuns terrorize the big screen because their social role is so complex. In a society where the value of exclusively female spaces remains confusing, nuns are reduced to objects of fear (or derision). In nun horror, elderly nuns are always the most monstrous. The nubile protagonists in Immaculate and Convent of Sinners are preyed upon for their fertile wombs and pert physiques, and that the predators are their mothers superior speaks volumes. In a society where churchgoing is on the decline, horror movies may serve a unique purpose. Duns, the Jesuit priest and academic, said he’s witnessed rampant religious alienation among his undergraduate students, but the horror genre offers a novel outlet for existential angst. “Interpersonal communication and shared ritual has been displaced, and I think relocated into horror,” he told me, where “you confront mortality, evil, the meaning of life.” Monsters—psychopathic serial killers, vampires, malicious ghosts—serve this purpose, but assigning that baggage to an actual class of women suggests a deeper problem. Few other professions feature so heavily in horror films, but why? Because these women used to dress strangely? Because they have faith? Because they’ve opted out of the usual marriage-and-children script? With habit reform nearly 60 years in the rearview mirror and many nun horror films painting Catholics as godless hypocrites, it’s hard not to feel as though that last reason is the one with the most sticking power. After all, if Cecilia had just stayed in the Midwest and done the “normal” thing, there wouldn’t be a movie, would there?