Some films, such as the
X-rated The Devils, based on a book by
Aldous Huxley and directed by
Ken Russell, have some basis in fact. Huxley based his original historical account,
The Devils of Loudun, on a reported case of mass hysteria and demonic possession that allegedly took place at a French convent in the seventeenth century. Given that the genre was the product of the sixties and seventies, with an occasional contemporary example like the recent
Sacred Flesh (1999), there has been little further resort to possible historical source material, like
Aelred of Hexham (1110–1167) and his account of the
Nun of Watton, for example. Another example might be the life of
sister Benedetta Carlini, a 17th-century Italian
lesbian nun. Circa 1986, Graciela Daichman collected stories about aberrant medieval religious women, but since that time, there have been few other serious historical attempts to explore what factual basis might exist for the literary depictions that often served as the basis for nunsploitation cinema. In 2010, Craig Monson wrote
Nuns Behaving Badly, which dealt with the social and sexual lives of religious women in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, but such work remains rare. However, recent work on the dramaturgy of demonic possession in medieval Europe may be useful to comprehend the social, psychological and behavioural context of such acts. ==In Japan==