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

For more than 50 years, The Devils has had a complicated relationship with censorship. Ken Russell's 1971 historical horror movie was cut before its British release, cut again for American audiences, and later became difficult to find in its original form. But that's finally changing. A new 4K restoration of the director's cut, created from the original camera negative, will soon be available to everyone.

Clockwork will release the restored film theatrically in North America on Oct. 16, 2026. However, the 4k restoration of The Devils, which premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, has also received an NC-17 rating in the United States for sexual content and graphic nudity. That means the movie's controversial history is still very much part of the story.

Based on Aldous Huxley's 1952 non-fiction novel, The Devils of Loudun, the film tells a heavily dramatized version of the real events surrounding Roman Catholic priest Urbain Grandier and an entire convent of nuns in 17th-century France. Played by Oliver Reed, the priest becomes the target of very serious witchcraft accusations.

Grandier's accuser is Sister Jeanne des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave), who claims that he has possessed her and the other nuns at the convent. His political opposition to Baron de Laubardemont (Dudley Sutton) makes him an increasingly convenient smear campaign target. The allegations are followed by religious hysteria and brutal attempts to prove that Grandier is responsible for the supposed possessions.

‘The Devils‘ Controversy Started Before It Was Even Released

The problems with The Devils began when production company United Artists dropped the project after reading Russell's screenplay, with Warner Bros. eventually taking over distribution. The finished movie combined graphic violence, sexual imagery, and religious themes in a way that was extremely controversial since Russell's intention was to make people uncomfortable.

As a result, Warner Bros. and the British Board of Film Censors had concerns about the finished film. So the distributor and various censorship boards came up with separate lists of material they wanted removed. Some of those requests overlapped, while others did not. The most significant change was the removal of an entire sequence involving naked nuns sexually defiling a statue of Christ.

Russell also had to reduce other material involving nudity, torture, and violence. The resulting version received an X certificate in 1971, but that didn't stop the controversy. In Britain, 17 local councils banned the film despite the BBFC approving it, while the American version was cut further and received an X rating from the Motion Picture Association.

Warner Bros. eventually made additional cuts in 1973 to get the movie an R rating in the United States. So there was never really one definitive version of The Devils available to audiences during its original release. The missing footage was shelved for decades before anyone dared to suggest any type of restored version which left Russell's original vision intact.

The Censored Movie Finally Gets Its Second Chance

Most of the footage removed from The Devils was recovered from the Warner Bros. vaults in the early 2000s and was incorporated into a longer director's cut, which screened in London in 2002. Russell and editor Michael Bradsell later worked on a version that restored the missing material and made other changes to the ending.

The problem was that finding the footage didn't mean Warner Bros. was suddenly willing to release it. The director's cut existed for years in a very limited form because the studio reportedly considered the restored material, particularly the sequence involving the defilement of the Christ statue, distasteful. The company also turned down interest from distributors like Criterion Collection.

In May 2026, Warner Bros. announced that the director's cut would finally receive a proper 4K restoration from the original camera negative through its new Clockwork label. However, the restored version of The Devils will still carry an NC-17 rating for the same general material that caused problems in the first place.

But the difference is that this time, the controversial scenes are not being removed to make the film easier to distribute. Whether audiences in 2026 find the film as shocking as viewers did in 1971 is another question, but at least they can finally see the film much closer to the way Russell wanted it presented all those years ago.