Ah, the many duties of the English priest: administering communion, counseling parishioners, taking confession, recording those confessions, using the recordings to blackmail attractive young women for sexual favors... At least, that's the picture painted in the grisly 1975 thriller The Confessional, which sends Susan Penhaligon into a confession booth with gargoyle-like priest Anthony Sharp, for a session that leaves her fearing for her life. After Penhaligon admits that she had an abortion, Sharp tells her she'll have to start joining him for some after-hours special-dispensation sessions if she wants to keep her secret safe. "That's a breach of basic Catholic ethics," she says, to which Sharp pithily replies, "Only if someone else hears it." Undeterred by her refusal, he later turns up at the apartment she shares with sister Stephanie Beacham and throws scalding water in the face of the man he mistakenly believes to be Penhaligon's suitor. Meanwhile, younger, less-creepy priest Norman Eshley takes a liking to Beacham that causes him to question his vows, while Sharp's one-eyed, live-in nursemaid grows increasingly brazen about torturing his mother when he's not around. ("You don't expect to have breakfast every day, do you?" goes a typical greeting.) Tension mounts as Sharp tries to hide the evidence of his misdeeds while continuing his violent courtship, spending his days slipping poisoned communion wafers to nosy congregants and his nights pining away for the woman he can't have. Though no one believes Penhaligon's complaints at first, Beacham eventually gets wise and confronts Sharp on the same night that Eshley plans to leave the priesthood and propose. Beacham's visit doesn't go well, and the bloodshed leaves two priests standing: one resigned to a life of celibacy after losing the love of his life, the other finally free to molest at will, having gotten rid of the amateur snoops standing in his way.
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