Why 50-year-old ‘The Devils’ still shocks more than today’s films

The Devils returns to theaters in a new 4K restoration that restores footage long suppressed by censors, and the film still lands with a force that most new releases lack. Ken Russell’s 1971 portrait of religious hysteria, political manipulation, and institutional violence arrives at a moment when debates over faith, authority, and media boundaries feel newly urgent. Audiences leaving recent sold-out screenings describe the same stunned silence that greeted the picture more than fifty years ago.

Restoration revives suppressed scenes

The Warner Bros. Clockwork label released the uncut version in October 2026 after decades of missing footage sat in studio vaults. The restored print runs 114 minutes and carries an NC-17 rating, the first such designation the studio has ever given one of its own titles. Viewers now see the notorious “Rape of Christ” sequence and the bone masturbation scene that British and American censors removed in 1971.

Mark Kermode, who helped assemble the new cut from Russell’s own 2004 reference edit, calls the film the director’s strongest work. Cannes Classics audiences gave the premiere a standing ovation, and U.S. theaters reported per-screen averages above four thousand dollars during the opening weeks. Social media filled with clips of walkouts and stunned reactions, echoing the original controversy.

The restoration also places the film on Letterboxd’s Top 250 for the first time, introducing it to younger viewers who encounter the material without the old myths that it was merely exploitative. The picture’s political core remains intact, which explains why the shocks feel earned rather than decorative.

Russell framed the story as political

Ken Russell described The Devils as his only political film, focused on state control and the mechanics of brainwashing. He set the action in 17th-century Loudun but dressed the sets with anachronistic modern details so audiences would recognize the timeless pattern of power using religion as cover. Oliver Reed’s Father Grandier stands as the last independent voice against Cardinal Richelieu’s centralizing campaign.

Vanessa Redgrave plays Sister Jeanne, whose sexual obsession with Grandier curdles into accusation once she learns he will never return her desire. The hunchbacked nun’s private fantasy becomes public theater when state officials orchestrate exorcisms that turn the town square into a spectacle of torture and confession. Russell treats the sequence as documented history rather than invention.

The director, a practicing Catholic, insisted the film attacked institutional corruption, not faith itself. He fought the cuts demanded by Warner Bros. executives who called the material “the filthiest load of shit” they had ever seen, yet he accepted a compromised X-rated version to keep the project alive.

Historical record supplied the horror

The screenplay draws from Aldous Huxley’s 1952 study and the actual 1634 trial records. Grandier was burned at the stake after politically motivated witchcraft charges; the town’s independence threatened Richelieu’s consolidation of power. Russell repeatedly told interviewers that the bare facts were more horrible than anything staged on camera.

Production designer Derek Jarman built an abstract white city that looks both medieval and clinical, stripping away romantic distance. The sets make the violence feel contemporary, which helps explain why later audiences continue to report stronger reactions than they expect from period material. The design choices keep the focus on systems rather than costumes.

Russell’s decision to film explicit sequences without protective irony or camp distance distinguishes the picture from later historical dramas that soften comparable content. The exorcism scenes run without cutaways or comic relief, forcing viewers to sit with the spectacle of state-sponsored sadism.

Censors targeted political content

The British Board of Film Classification removed roughly 89 seconds plus the entire “Rape of Christ” orgy in which naked nuns defile a statue. American distributors further trimmed pubic hair from nude scenes to secure an R rating. Multiple UK councils banned the film outright, and the Vatican issued a formal condemnation.

Guillermo del Toro later called the suppression “a true act of censorship,” noting that the excised footage contained the film’s clearest statement about the weaponization of religious imagery. The restored version makes that statement visible again, which accounts for the renewed intensity of audience response.

Contemporary comparisons to films such as Benedetta miss the point: those pictures arrive already contextualized within modern debates about representation, while The Devils carries the accumulated weight of fifty years of institutional resistance. The shocks feel earned because the battles over the footage were real.

Modern shocks often stay cosmetic

Today’s extreme cinema frequently relies on digital effects or ironic framing that signals the material is not meant to be taken literally. The Devils offers no such safety net. Its violence emerges from documented political maneuvering, and its sexual content serves the story’s argument about repressed desire turned into public accusation.

Streaming platforms and awards-season campaigns tend to reward films that contain difficult material within palatable structures. The Devils refuses that containment. Its 114-minute runtime moves without respite through accusation, torture, and execution, leaving little room for the distance many viewers now expect from provocative content.

The film’s recent theatrical numbers suggest audiences still respond to work that withholds easy exits. Per-screen averages remained high even after the initial curiosity bump, indicating repeat viewings driven by the material itself rather than marketing.

Reed and Redgrave anchor the excess

Oliver Reed brings a physical charisma that makes Grandier’s defiance legible even when the character’s rhetoric grows abstract. His refusal to sign away Loudun’s autonomy reads as personal rather than ideological, which keeps the political argument grounded in one man’s body and voice.

Vanessa Redgrave’s performance as Sister Jeanne avoids simple villainy. The actress conveys both genuine religious torment and calculated manipulation, showing how individual grievance can be absorbed into state machinery. Her scenes with the exorcists remain among the most difficult to watch because the hysteria never tips into parody.

Supporting players, many of them drawn from British theater rather than film, deliver stylized line readings that match the production design’s deliberate remove from naturalism. The ensemble approach prevents any single performance from softening the institutional critique.

Timing aligns with current debates

The 2026 re-release coincides with renewed arguments over religious authority in public life and the limits of acceptable imagery in art. Social media discussion of the restored footage often circles back to questions of who controls historical narrative and which images remain too dangerous to circulate.

Younger viewers encountering the film for the first time through festival reports and Letterboxd lists arrive without the 1970s context of Mary Whitehouse’s Festival of Light protests. Their reactions focus on the film’s formal control rather than its reputation as a scandal, which suggests the material travels beyond its original moment.

The NC-17 rating itself becomes part of the story. Warner Bros. accepted the classification without appeal, signaling that the studio views the restored version as definitive rather than a liability. That decision keeps the film in theaters instead of routing it directly to home video.

Style serves argument, not decoration

Russell’s use of anachronistic props and lighting keeps the action from settling into costume drama. The white sets and modern sound design force viewers to confront the mechanisms of accusation and punishment without the protective distance of period romance.

The director’s background in music-driven biography informs the picture’s rhythmic structure. Scenes build through repetition and escalation rather than conventional suspense, producing a cumulative effect that lingers after the final image of Grandier’s burning.

Critics at the time accused Russell of excess, yet the restored cut demonstrates how each explicit sequence advances the political thesis. The shocks are not additive; they are the argument rendered visible.

Legacy now includes vindication

The film’s journey from banned object to canonical restoration tracks changing standards for what political cinema can depict. Russell died in 2011 without seeing the complete version reach theaters, yet the current reception suggests his defense of the material has been absorbed into the historical record.

Future restorations of other suppressed titles will likely cite The Devils as precedent. The precedent lies less in the specific imagery than in the demonstration that institutional resistance can be documented and reversed through archival persistence.

The Devils remains difficult because it refuses to separate religious ecstasy from political theater or private desire from public violence. That refusal continues to unsettle audiences who expect contemporary cinema to provide clearer boundaries between critique and sensation.

What the re-release signals next

The sustained theatrical run and strong per-screen numbers indicate that audiences will continue to seek work that withholds easy framing. Distributors may now consider similar restorations of other titles once deemed too volatile for wide release, provided the political context remains legible.

For viewers, the restored Devils offers a reminder that shocks rooted in documented power struggles age differently than shocks manufactured for effect. The film’s return supplies both a historical document and a live provocation, and the two functions reinforce each other rather than compete.