I saw the most controversial banned film – it’s still just as shocking 50 years later

I will never forget the first time I saw Ken Russell’s The Devils and it changed my life forever.

As a film fan and student, I was, and still am, forever looking for films to shock and challenge my views, boundaries, and how far filmmaking can go.

I came across Ken Russell when learning about cult cinema, specifically, his 1988 erotic horror thriller The Lair of the White Worm, which instantly grabbed me in a chokehold – a bumbling Hugh Grant, Amanda Donohoe in leathers, gigantic worm-like monsters the size of Mini Coopers, what’s not to love?

Examining his back catalogue, The Devils caught my eye, being a horror fan practically since birth and assuming it would be supernaturally leaning.

It was nothing that I expected; instead, taking me on a heady trip into a world of religious fanaticism, governmental manipulation, rampant sex, gratuitous torture, and Oliver Reed’s magnificent moustache. Needless to say, it fast became one of my favourite films of all time.

Little did I know, I’d never actually seen it.

Well, not in the way Russell intended, that is. Before even hitting cinemas in 1971, The Devils was forced to undergo several significant cuts by Warner Bros and the BBFC in the UK because of its graphic scenes of sex and violence.

Even though the film underwent these cuts, The Devils was banned by 17 local councils across the UK and several countries worldwide, and where it was screened, there were mass walkouts, protests, and the film was even condemned by the Vatican.

After being censored for more than 50 years, The Devils will be shown in 4K and in full in select UK and Ireland cinemas on 30 October, thanks to BFI Distribution in partnership with Warner Bros. Clockwork.

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Ahead of the screenings, I was lucky enough to see the full, uncut version of The Devils that Russell always intended film fans to experience – and it remains as shockingly relevant today as it did half a century ago.

The Devils follows enigmatic priest Father Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed) in 17th-century France, who clashes with the power-hungry Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue) over the autonomy of the city of Loudun.

In a bid to bring down the autonomous city they reside in, Richelieu manipulates a repressed and infatuated nun, Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave), to accuse Grandier of witchcraft and a spate of possessions among the church.

At its core, The Devils is a film about politics and the weaponisation of faith and ideology, manipulating the masses and whipping them into a frenzy while dismantling their way of life from underneath them.

The demonic possessions Father Grandier is accused of are entirely manufactured by Cardinal Richlieue in a bid to crush the independence of Loudun, and it works, with the city’s walls being torn down around Grandier’s charred corpse in its final act.

The Devils shines a light on just how easy powerful figures can hide behind morality and religion to manipulate public sentiment, stoking the fires of hatred and fear to push their insidious agenda.

Similarly, it shows the dangers of manufactured mass hysteria and how easily the public can succumb to collective panic.

Sister Jeanne’s private, repressed sexual obsessions balloon into a town-wide frenzy, with every sister in the church suddenly falling to the same depraved behaviour as if infected with a disease.

In a time when modern ‘witch hunts’, internet echo chambers, and algorithmically driven outrage are frighteningly common, The Devils’ depiction of how rational thought can be dissolved by fear and mass hysteria is as sobering today as it was 50 years ago.

Similarly, in a time when conservative, puritanical attitudes towards the media and everyday life are becoming increasingly normalised, a garish, overtly sexual and violent film like The Devils illustrates how forcing humans to suppress their basic nature warps them incomprehensibly.

The behaviour of the nuns, particularly that in the now-restored surreal and eye-boggling ‘Rape of Christ’ scene, stems from severe sexual and psychological repression at the hands of the church.

The film serves as a timeless warning that censorship and forcibly legislating, controlling, and attempting to erase fundamental human instincts do not make them cease to exist; rather, they cause them to morph into something far more destructive and dangerous.

These themes are portrayed by The Devils’ complicated and flawed protagonists, far from the perfect, spotless religious figures you may come to expect.

Father Grandier is a deeply flawed man: vain, arrogant, and a notorious womaniser who treats his lovers incredibly poorly, and yet his fight for Loudun and the people’s autonomy causes the viewer to root for him, not because he is a perfect human being, but because he stands up against a dangerous system.

Beneath its powerhouse performances, grandiose set design, and nerve-shredding score, The Devils remains as relevant and as important today as it was when it was first released. It is a monolithic piece of filmmaking that has stood the test of time and become symbolic in the fight against censorship in the arts, finally available in full for the masses to take warning from.

Ken Russell’s uncensored 4K restoration of The Devils is scheduled for release in UK and Ireland cinemas on October 30 by BFI Distribution in partnership with Warner Bros. Clockwork.

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