‘The Devils’: Why the Catholic Church tried to bury it
The Devils returns to theaters this fall in a restored director’s cut, and the 55-year-old scandal still feels fresh. Ken Russell’s 1971 film about a French priest framed for witchcraft by Cardinal Richelieu has long been remembered less for its period setting than for the coordinated effort by Catholic authorities and allied pressure groups to keep it off screens. That campaign, which began at the Venice Film Festival and spread through Britain’s local councils, now looks like a case study in institutional panic over a movie that mixed sex, faith, and political power.
Church-state collusion as core theme
The plot follows the 1630s Loudun possessions, in which Urbain Grandier is accused of demonic influence over the local Ursuline convent. Russell frames the hysteria as a cover for Richelieu’s plan to seize the town’s fortifications. The script, adapted from Aldous Huxley’s nonfiction account, treats the supernatural accusations as tools of statecraft rather than matters of belief.
Russell, who converted to Catholicism in the late 1950s, insisted the film was not an attack on faith itself. He described it as his “one political film,” aimed at showing how religion can be weaponized for control. That framing put him at odds with the very institution he had joined, and it shaped the response that followed.
By locating the scandal in seventeenth-century France, Russell also drew a line to twentieth-century anxieties about clerical authority and state power. The same questions about who defines heresy and who benefits from the label remained live issues in 1971, and they still surface whenever religious institutions weigh in on cultural works.
Vatican observers at Venice
At the 1971 Venice Film Festival, Vatican representatives called for The Devils to be withdrawn. They labeled the film blasphemous and described its imagery as “obscenity such as had never been seen before on the screen.” The Holy See later characterized the project as a “crude lynching of the Church.”
The intervention was unusual for a secular festival, and it triggered immediate headlines. Festival staff resisted the pressure, yet the publicity framed the film as a direct confrontation with Catholic teaching rather than a historical drama about political manipulation.
The Vatican’s stance set the tone for subsequent campaigns. Once the highest authority had spoken, local distributors and councils found it easier to justify restrictions without appearing to act on their own initiative.
BBFC demands and studio cuts
The British Board of Film Censors required the removal of roughly 89 seconds before granting an X certificate. Examiners singled out the “Rape of Christ” sequence, in which nuns desecrate a crucifix during a mass exorcism. Russell fought to keep the scene, arguing that it showed the logical endpoint of religious hysteria rather than gratuitous shock.
Warner Bros. made additional trims for the American release, trimming further for an R rating that still proved difficult to obtain. Studio memos described the film as “the filthiest load of shit,” and the U.S. version reached theaters in a form even more abbreviated than the British cut.
Even the truncated prints faced bans by seventeen UK local councils and outright prohibitions in Ireland, Italy, and Finland. The pattern showed how formal certification could be overridden by regional authorities once religious pressure groups mobilized.
Festival of Light and local bans
The Nationwide Festival of Light, linked to morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse, organized pickets outside cinemas and lobbied councils to withhold screening licenses. Many protesters had not seen the film; their objections rested on the Vatican’s description and press accounts of the excised footage.
The campaign produced results. Towns that rarely exercised their power to block films did so in this case, citing concerns over public decency. The decentralized nature of UK exhibition made the strategy effective: national certification meant little when individual venues could be targeted.
Russell later recalled speaking with picketers who admitted they had not viewed the picture. The exchange underscored a recurring feature of such controversies: once the label “blasphemous” attaches, actual content becomes secondary to the act of condemnation itself.
Russell’s defense of the material
Throughout the censorship process, Russell maintained that the historical record was more disturbing than anything he had filmed. He pointed to documented accounts of torture and public execution that formed the basis for the Loudun story, arguing that softening the imagery would falsify the events.
He also noted that the film had received early support from Jesuit reviewers who saw it as a critique of institutional abuse rather than of belief. That endorsement, later cited in academic settings, including Loyola University Chicago, complicated the narrative that the project was simply anti-Catholic.
Russell’s public clashes with critics added to the film’s notoriety. After one television reviewer called the film obscene, Russell struck him with a rolled newspaper on live air, an incident that cemented his image as an unapologetic provocateur willing to defend his work in unconventional ways.
Discovery of lost footage
In 2002, film historian Mark Kermode and producer Paul Joyce located excised material that had survived in private collections. The find allowed a 2004 reconstruction that restored several sequences cut by the BBFC and Warner Bros.
The reconstruction clarified the film’s structure and restored connective tissue between political maneuvering and religious spectacle. It also demonstrated that the most controversial scenes were integral to the argument rather than detachable set pieces.
Access remained limited to festival screenings and specialized home video editions, keeping the full version out of wide circulation for another two decades. The missing footage became part of the film’s legend, discussed more often than it was seen.
2026 4K restoration and release
Warner Bros. Clockwork prepared a 4K restoration from the original negative, incorporating the previously excised material and remixing the audio track. The version premiered at Cannes Classics before opening in limited U.S. release on October 16, 2026.
The NC-17 rating for the restored cut drew attention, yet the film posted strong per-screen averages and extended its run after reaching roughly $3.3 million. Industry observers noted that a 55-year-old title with such restrictive classification rarely performs at those levels without sustained audience interest.
Mark Kermode, who had championed the reconstruction for years, described the release as returning the film to its intended state. The commercial response suggested that earlier suppression had not erased demand so much as deferred it until wider access became possible.
Current cultural resonance
The re-release arrives amid renewed attention to institutional accountability within religious organizations. Viewers encountering the film for the first time often note parallels between the Loudun events and contemporary cases in which accusations serve institutional ends.
Social media discussion has focused less on the explicit imagery than on the mechanics of suppression: how a single institutional statement can trigger local bans, and how those bans can persist long after the original controversy fades from headlines.
The film’s survival in altered form, followed by the recovery of its missing sections, also feeds conversations about archival preservation and the role of historians in reversing earlier acts of censorship.
Why the suppression failed
The coordinated effort to limit The Devils succeeded in the short term by restricting distribution and shaping public perception. Over decades, however, the campaign could not prevent the gradual recovery of suppressed footage or the eventual theatrical return of the complete work.
Russell’s insistence that the film addressed political manipulation rather than faith itself complicated attempts to dismiss it as simple blasphemy. That framing has gained traction as audiences revisit the picture without the overlay of 1971 press coverage.
The 2026 release demonstrates that institutional attempts to bury controversial works can delay but rarely eliminate access. Once the material circulates again, the original arguments for suppression often appear more revealing about the institutions involved than about the work itself.
