This Infamous Horror Movie Spent Decades Fighting Censorship — Now It’s Finally Back In 4K

Ken Russell’s 1971 movie The Devils, a widely banned and wildly provocative British exploitation classic, is finally coming to theatres in the form the director intended.

The hottest ticket at the Cannes Film Festival this year wasn’t for Hope or Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma; it was for a 55-year-old satirical exploitation movie about immoral priests and horny nuns in a fantastical version of medieval France. It was programmed for an evening screening in a 500-seater theatre, and sold out in less than a minute. It has since become one of the most talked-about horror releases of the year. 

The reasons for this are myriad. The most obvious is the pearl-clutching and censorship — in the half-century or so since The Devils was first released, the original version was chopped and changed so many times that fans and scholars feared a genuine original cut (the one that Russell intended) no longer existed. Now, 15 years after the director’s death, all those missing pieces have been found and put together into a crystal-clear 4K version set for release on October 30.

For horror fans, this is like finding the Rosetta Stone inside the Holy Grail, wrapped in the Golden Fleece. 

Let’s take a look at the story of The Devils and how this miracle of restoration was achieved. 

Who Is Ken Russell, and What Is The Devils?

Ken Russell came to filmmaking from an unusual path: as a young man, he studied photography and spent some time in the RAF before returning to England to work as a photographer. He moved into documentaries in the 1960s with a series of films about writers, musicians and artists for the BBC’s Omnibus program. He then gradually moved into narrative features and, in 1969, earned an Oscar nomination for Best Director for Women in Love  — a boundary-pushing film about two sisters living in post-WWI Britain — and followed that up with The Music Lovers, a queer biopic of Pyotr Tchaikovsky. 

Next came The Devils, and if those two previous films had pushed his producers at Warner Brothers to the edge, this movie tipped them over. The Devils stars Oliver Reed as a morally bankrupt rogue who is also a priest, and who you eventually can’t help but root for, even after seeing him unceremoniously dump his young lover in the opening minutes. You warm to him because he lives in a world far more corrupt than even he is — a world that is French, Catholic and European, to be precise, but getting into the layers of satire and politics in all of that would take a whole other essay, at least. 

Reed also plays the character with an enormous amount of swinging ‘60s swagger, which is why a nun in the local convent soon becomes obsessed with him — to the point that she’s thought to be possessed, leading to a rather gruesome torture scene that’s about two parts Holy Mountain and one part Tommy, with a just a dash of Monty Python (it also predates all of those movies). Despite the Catholics’ best efforts, however, this plague spreads, which leads to a mass trial that turns into a raging orgy. And so forth and so on…

What really makes The Devils worth seeing, and especially in this new 4K restoration, isn't the more scandalous scenes — which are probably a touch tame by today’s standards — but the artistry of the filmmaking and set design, and the strange undercurrent of madness to it all. It’s so ambitious and tactile — there’s a reason why the new trailer looks so modern, and why it caught so many eyeballs when it was released.

The Devils' Censorship and Restoration

Upon initially seeing the film, the producers at Warner Brothers demanded that some scenes, including the orgy, be removed, but it still received an 'X' rating (18) in the UK. When that theatrical run ended, and the prints were sent to America, they got chopped down even more by the far stricter censors at the MPAA. 

Thanks to shrewd marketing, however, the film was still a sensation, topping the UK charts for weeks and quickly making back its budget many times over, despite being banned in many territories. Still, after all that back and forth between snip-happy censors, it was not only becoming unclear what Russell’s original version had been, but also where many of those physical negatives had ended up and, if you could even find them, what kind of condition they would be in. 

Enter Mark Kermode: a critic and scholar of horror cinema who has spent a good portion of his career studying The Devils and Russell’s original intentions — the two even became close in the process, to the point that Kermode was able to show Russell a rough cut that he’d been working on before he died, and even got the filmmaker’s approval.

Then, just last year, Kermode was visited by Clockwork, a new, speciality-focused arm of Warner Brothers that wanted to make its first release a director's cut of The Devils. Working together, they apparently managed to find and restore all the pieces of that cut into a pristine 4K copy — the full, detailed story of this process will apparently be revealed to coincide with the release.  

Trust me when I say that this thing looks absolutely immaculate — and for cinema history nuts who’ve long considered this one of the artform’s mythical lost scrolls, it’s kind of a miracle to see it.

What to Expect From The Devils' Re-Release

I was lucky enough to be in the room for that screening in Cannes, and it was one of the most memorable I’ve been to. Peter Jackson was in the crowd just a row behind me, along with a veritable who’s who of international film critics dotted around the room — including Sean Fennessy, Guy Lodge and Jessica Kiang. Kermode, a man who’d long sworn off attending the festival, showed up to introduce it alongside Russell’s widow, Lisi Tribble, and gave a tremendously impassioned speech. For a movie that was banned for being so depraved and provocative, it was all quite moving.

It might be too much to expect a similar outpouring to happen again, but the film is certainly getting the full red carpet treatment in October as the centrepiece of a Russell retrospective in the BFI Southbank. Expect that first night, deep in the heart of spooky season, to be sold out and for Kermode and Tribble to be in attendance.

If you’re living close enough to London, keep your eyes peeled for tickets.