The Devils: Ken Russell's Blasphemous Masterwork

There is a small, dishonourable club of films that their own studios have decided the public should not see in full, and Ken Russell’s The Devils has been its president for over fifty years. Warner Bros. financed the picture in 1971, released a version it had already hacked at, and has spent the half-century since sitting on the footage it cut. No complete, uncut edition has ever received a proper commercial release. The film you can watch is a survivor of its own distributor.

That fact tends to swallow the conversation, and it deserves to, because the suppression is part of the work’s meaning now. But underneath the scandal is one of the most furious and formally controlled films the British cinema of that decade produced — a period horror picture that is also a lacerating essay on the machinery of state power, sexual repression, and the theatre of a witch trial.

Loudun, 1634

The story is not invented. In the French town of Loudun in 1634, a charismatic and sexually incontinent priest named Urbain Grandier was accused of bewitching a convent of Ursuline nuns into demonic possession, tried, tortured and burned at the stake. Russell drew his script from Aldous Huxley’s coolly analytical history The Devils of Loudun and from John Whiting’s stage adaptation, and he kept the essential historical argument intact: Grandier was destroyed not because anyone in power believed he was a sorcerer, but because he stood in the way of Cardinal Richelieu’s plan to pull down the self-governing walls of France’s fortified towns and centralise the crown.

Oliver Reed plays Grandier, and it is the performance of his career — vain, lustful, politically stubborn, and, as the machine closes on him, transfigured into something close to a saint. Reed could be a blunt actor. Here he is precise, and the arc from arrogant seducer to man of principle dying for a town that despises him is the film’s spine. Vanessa Redgrave plays Sister Jeanne des Anges, the hunchbacked, sexually tormented mother superior whose fantasies about Grandier — a man she has barely met — become the accusation that lights the pyre. Redgrave gives Jeanne no dignity and enormous pathos; her hysteria is the sound of a woman who has been walled up alive with her own body and told it is a sin.

The look of it

The single most important collaborator on The Devils never appears on screen. Derek Jarman, years before his own directing career, designed the sets, and his Loudun is one of the great production-design feats in horror. He built the town as a vast expanse of gleaming white ceramic tile — a place scrubbed clean, clinical, more like a laboratory or an asylum than a medieval city. The whiteness is the joke and the horror both: this is a society that believes itself pure and is engineered for atrocity. When the blood and filth arrive, they land on those spotless tiles like evidence.

Russell shoots the possession scenes as full-blown theatre, because in the historical record they were exactly that — public spectacles, staged exorcisms performed for crowds, with the church-appointed exorcist Father Barré whipping the nuns into ecstatic frenzy for an audience. The film understands that the “possession” was a performance the authorities directed, and it stages the frenzy as choreography, which is far more damning than any documentary sobriety could be. The nuns are not victims of the Devil. They are extras in a state production, and they have been told which way to writhe.

The maker and the sound

It helps to know who was holding the camera. Ken Russell had come up through documentary at the BBC, making his name with lush, unruly films about composers before graduating to features with Women in Love and The Music Lovers, and he would go on to the pop-opera delirium of Tommy and the hallucinatory science of Altered States. He was, above all, a director obsessed with artists destroyed by their own appetites, and Grandier fits that gallery exactly — a man of enormous gifts who cannot govern himself and is torn apart for it. The Devils is the point where Russell’s fascination with genius-in-ruins met a historical subject savage enough to carry it without flinching.

The soundtrack is the film’s secret weapon. Russell commissioned a score from the modernist composer Peter Maxwell Davies, who supplied jagged, dissonant orchestral writing that refuses to comfort the ear, and paired it with early-music arrangements played on period instruments. The effect is queasy and precise: the plainchant and viols promise sanctity while Davies’s clusters tear at them from underneath, so that the ear is told, at every moment, that the holy surface is rotten. Few horror scores commit so completely to making the audience uneasy about the very piety the images are desecrating.

Why it works, and why it was buried

The film’s power comes from the collision of its two registers. Russell was capable of pure vulgar excess, and The Devils has plenty. But the excess is welded to a genuinely rigorous historical thesis, so the delirium always means something. When the exorcisms tip into orgy, the point is not titillation; it is that a repressive order manufactures the very obscenity it claims to be purging, then punishes a scapegoat for it. That is a serious argument about how moral panics work, delivered in the most inflammatory imagery available.

The most notorious sequence — the one the censors could not tolerate and the studio has kept locked away — pushes the possessed nuns into blasphemy against a life-sized figure of Christ. It was excised almost everywhere on release. For decades it was believed lost entirely, until the critic Mark Kermode located surviving footage in the Warner vaults and helped assemble a fuller cut for a British Film Institute screening, a reconstruction that has circulated in film-culture circles while remaining absent from any official home release. To watch The Devils is therefore to watch a film with a known hole in it, and to feel the weight of what a distributor decided you were not permitted to see.

Russell earned an X certificate, cuts in Britain, outright bans in several countries, and a permanent reputation as a provocateur, which slightly obscured how classically he had constructed the thing. The film is descended, in its bones, from the tradition of religious horror that treats faith itself as the haunted house — the same lineage that runs through Rosemary’s Baby, where the terror is a woman’s institutions closing ranks against her, and through the sunlit Spanish nightmare of Who Can Kill a Child?, which shares Russell’s willingness to make the daylight world do the frightening. For a vision of the hell all this pageantry is supposedly warding off, the Japanese fever dream of Jigoku filmed the pit itself a decade earlier, with a comparable disregard for good taste.

Where to watch, and in what state

Here the ordinary advice fails, because the version you can legally obtain is compromised by design. Seek out the British release cut, which restores more than the American one, and treat any circulating reconstruction that includes the excised material as the closest thing to Russell’s intention that exists. Watch it knowing the frame is incomplete. The absence is not a technicality; it is the last chapter of the story the film is telling, about who gets to decide what a society is allowed to look at.

More than any other film in this desk’s horror shelf, The Devils is an argument that the censor and the inquisitor are the same office under different letterheads. Russell made a film about a town that burned a man to keep itself pure, and a studio responded by burning the film to keep itself respectable. The rhyme is too perfect to be accidental, and it is the reason the picture keeps its terrible, unfinished power.

Spoilers below

The trial is the film’s centre of gravity, and Russell refuses to grant it any suspense about guilt, because there was none in Loudun. Grandier is condemned before he is charged. The extraordinary thing is what Reed does with a doomed man: stripped, shaved of every hair, his legs shattered by the boot, he is carried to the stake having become, in extremity, exactly the holy figure the church pretended to be defending. The film gives its most devout image to the man it is burning as a heretic.

The cruellest turn belongs to Sister Jeanne. Once Grandier is dead, the machine has no further use for her, and the exorcists and the political operators simply pack up and leave. The possession was theatre; the run has ended; the star is discarded. Russell’s final image of Jeanne, alone in the ruined convent with a charred relic of the man whose destruction she caused, is the film’s real horror — worse than the burning. She was used, believed her own performance, and is abandoned to a lifetime of understanding what she did and why nobody who directed her ever cared. The Devil never appears in The Devils. The film’s argument is that he was never needed, because Richelieu’s clerks and a repressed woman’s shame between them could manufacture hell without any supernatural assistance at all.