'la Chiesa' aka 'The Church' (1989) – Michele Soavi.

Visually astute, fascinatingly inventive, multi-talented Italian Film-maker/actor Michele Soavi was already a cult figure of quite some considerable repute by acting in iconic genre films by maestro Lucio Fulci, Lamberto Bava, and the supremely proficient DP turned legendary director Joe D'Amato. He later, and rather emphatically established himself as a gruesomely gifted genre director of enormous promise with the exhilarating Giallo classic 'Stage Fright'. The more black-hearted horror fans prayers were resolutely answered in Soavi's forbiddingly Cathedral-set, sensationally Satanic, bloodily blaspheming, soul-slashingly sinister shocker 'The Church'. 

While the narrative foundations prove solid, this vastly imposing Gothic Cathedral is built upon the restless remains of perceived heretics, cruelly slaughtered by the insanely irreligious Templar Knights. On one especially fateful day, the increasingly curious librarian (Tomas Arana) all too foolishly attempts to unlock the storied cathedral's myriad eldritch mysteries. The guileless scholar inadvertently unleashes a tumult of torrid torment, lurid lusts, and savagely sin-drenched, sanguinary slaughter in master film fabulist Soavi's ground-breakingly ghoulish, deliriously demonic, hell-spawned 80s horror classic 'La Chiesa'. With its menacing, darkly operatic score, monolithically morbid medieval mysteries, and calamitously creepy climax, that quite demonstratively brings the whole edifice down upon our unworthy heads, The Church manifestly merits our continued worship!