If you haven’t seen a nunsploitation flick you really haven’t lived. Norifumi Suzuki’s shlock masterpiece Seijû gakuen, aka School of the Holy Beast, has a little bit of everything, including blood, whippings, copious nudity, and lots of tender lesbian love. The beautiful Yumi Takigawa plays a woman who enters a convent in order to learn why her mother died there eighteen years earlier. Surprise surprise, she finds herself trapped in a den of depravity that would make de Sade blanch. When nuns go bad, they go real bad. But blasphemy never looked so gorgeous. And neither have the movie’s posters. The version above is the standard one, hard to find but not impossible. Below is the two panel version, and it’s exceedingly rare. Seijû gakuen opened in Japan today in 1972.
1937—Carothers Patents Nylon
Wallace H. Carothers, an American chemist, inventor and the leader of organic chemistry at DuPont Corporation, receives a patent for a silk substitute fabric called nylon. Carothers was a depressive who for years carried a cyanide capsule on a watch chain in case he wanted to commit suicide, but his genius helped produce other polymers such as neoprene and polyester. He eventually did take cyanide—not in pill form, but dissolved in lemon juice—resulting in his death in late 1937.