Hot Wet Summer: Nigel Wingrove Triple-Bill

Visions of Ecstasy, 1989, 19 mins

Visions of Ecstasy, a short, 19 minute, experimental art film made in 1989, is the only film ever to have been banned outright in the UK solely on the grounds of blasphemy. Further, its depiction and interpretations of the erotic imaginings of the 16th Century Carmelite nun, St. Teresa, were such that the film’s banning was upheld in an historic judgement at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg; in a case that took seven years to reach its conclusion.

Now, due to the abolition of the UK’s blasphemy law in 2008, Visions of Ecstasy is finally available for your viewing pleasure.

Sacred Flesh, 2000, 75 mins

Torn between sexual desire, her vows of chastity and her fear of eternal damnation, a medieval nun struggles with her sanity. Bordering on madness, she seeks solace in the savage words of sexual denial that are spoken to her by a disturbing ‘death nun’ vision. Her sanity is further threatened by the imagined figure of Mary Magdalen who challenges her concepts of sex as an evil, malignant force. In between these discussions the nun’s mind is filled with brooding, violent, sexual fantasies that push her into a world of blackness, blood, and orgasmic self destruction.

Red Kiss, 2004, 81 mins

Dead for centuries, until the smell of freshly spilled blood awakens the sleeping vampire Queen from her slumber, and brings a cruel, depraved creature back to life. Summoned by blood this evil vampiress seeks its source and finds it flowing through the veins of two young Goth girls who have broken into her dark domain to have sex. Soon their pale flesh will be whipped and abused as the vampire satiates her twisted lusts on these two hapless women.

Hungry for blood and hungry for sex the vampires fingers and tongue explore every part of her prey’s young bodies as she prepares them for death and life again, in her world of perversion and depravity!

Due to the even more explicit nature of Red Kiss, viewers in the UK will not be able to access this bundle, but you can watch Visions of Ecstasy and Sacred Flesh individually…