A US substitute teacher who screened a sexually explicit horror film to teenage students has been jailed for 30 days.

Sheila Kearns, of Columbus, Ohio, showed The ABCs of Death to children as young as 14 in five Spanish classes, despite its graphic content. The horror film is a collection of 26 chapters from different directors (including Kill List’s Ben Wheatley) that show a series of gory deaths, from A for Apocalypse to Z for Zetsumetsu, the latter featuring Japanese Nazis, ultraviolence and a woman with a bayonet-enhanced phallus.

The film features scenes in Spanish, as well as English, Japanese and Thai, and was screened as “an act of glorified babysitting” according to Kearns’s lawyer, who claimed she showed the film out of desperation at being unable to teach Spanish. She said that she faced away from the screen throughout all the screenings of the film and was unaware of its content, a claim described by Judge Charles A Schneider as “unconscionable. There’s no way you’ll persuade me that’s what happened.”

She was convicted of “disseminating matter harmful to juveniles”, and sentenced to three years probation as well as her jail time. As reported by the Columbus Dispatch, Kearns apologised during the hearing, saying: “I do love children. I am sorry. I should have watched the movie.” Outside the courtroom, rather than making a statement she handed a note to reporters that read: “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

Like Kearns’s lawyer, Schneider criticised the Columbus schools board for hiring a woman who couldn’t speak Spanish. “This is what happens when you put a teacher in a class that she cannot teach,” she said. “Here we are, with the Columbus public schools telling us what wonderful things [they] are doing.”