The Desecration And Restoration Of Ken Russell’s “The Devils”

How did a 55-year-old film become one of the year’s hottest tickets at festivals and in theaters?

Few would have guessed, in the early months of 2026, that a film originally released five and a half decades earlier would become one of the year’s most talked-about events. Then again, not all films are Ken Russell’s “The Devils,” with the possessive credit becoming part of the movie’s title in marketing materials, akin to “Zack Snyder’s Justice League“ in 2021. Except, unlike the aforementioned superhero epic, “The Devils“ was always very much Ken Russell’s film. We just didn’t get to see exactly all of it. 

It all began in 1969, when United Artists set out to produce a film based on John Whiting’s 1961 play “The Devils,” itself inspired by Aldous Huxley’s non-fiction book “The Devils of Loudun“ (1952), which recounted the alleged demonic possessions that took place in a French town in the 17th century, and the witchcraft trial that ensued. Also in 1969, the studio released Russell’s D.H. Lawrence adaptation “Women in Love,” which proved successful enough to warrant offering him the directorial job on “The Devils.”

Russell, no stranger to provocative material (“Women in Love“ was one of the first mainstream English-language films to contain male frontal nudity), accepted, having already developed an interest in the subject after seeing the play in London. Drawn to the themes of brainwashing and the contradictions of the Church (the male protagonist, Urbain Grandier, is a priest with a voracious sexual appetite), he adapted a combination of Whiting and Huxley’s texts for the screen. But it proved too much for United Artists, which passed on the project after reading the screenplay. 

At this stage, Warner Bros. took over, and Russell shot the film largely undisturbed, primarily at Pinewood Studios in London, where the city of Loudun was recreated by Derek Jarman, who made his debut as a production designer for the cinema (and later became a celebrated director in his own right). Post-production was also, by all accounts, a relatively smooth affair. And then came the time to submit the film to the censors, both in the UK (the BBFC) and the US (the MPAA). Needless to say, the studio also felt the need to weigh in. And weigh in they did. 

In fact, by the time Russell started butting heads with the BBFC, Warner Bros. had already made two of the more significant cuts by excising two complete sequences, both involving over-the-top sexual imagery that would certainly have run afoul of the censors in the 1970s (amusingly, one of those two scenes is now referenced in the re-release’s marketing campaign). On the British end, in order to receive an X certificate (the equivalent of the present-day 18 rating in the UK), some instances of nudity and violence had to be trimmed, resulting in a version that ran approximately 111 minutes. Ironically, although it had been approved for exhibition in British cinemas, it was still banned in some parts of the country. 

The MPAA was even more on the fence about the content and demanded an additional three minutesminutes’ of cuts to grant an X rating for the US market. They also submitted an even more cut-down version two years later, hoping to secure an R rating for a double bill with “The Exorcist“ (they succeeded). Russell was famously and vocally displeased with the edits made for the American release, as he felt they affected the film’s narrative clarity, not just the intensity of select scenes, which, even in their truncated UK form, still retained their ability to shock. 

Most memorably, on the shock front, the late Alexander Walker, who at the time was the film critic for The Evening Standard, wrote a review that Russell objected to on the basis of factual errors (Walker’s description of a torture scene didn’t match what actually occurs in the movie). The BBC decided to host a live televised debate between the two, which remains one of the great pieces of lost media in UK TV history (no footage survives), not least because the encounter ended with Russell smacking Walker over the head with a copy of the newspaper the review had been published in.

The dual censorship was the status quo for about three decades, until English film critic Mark Kermode, a huge admirer of Russell’s filmography in general and “The Devils“ in particular (he included it among his ten all-time favorites in the 2002 and 2012 editions of the poll conducted by Sight & Sound), set out to track down the missing footage, including the sequence colloquially known as the Rape of Christ, where naked nuns defile a statue of Jesus. He managed to locate it in the British Warner archives, and thus the complete version, approximately four minutes longer than the UK theatrical edit, was screened for the first time, with Russell in attendance, in 2004. 

Select event screenings followed for a few years thereafter (Russell passed away in 2011), but a commercial release was never on the table. Kermode periodically addressed the issue in his now defunct BBC video blog series “Kermode Uncut,” clarifying that while the British branch of Warner Bros. was perfectly willing to release the uncut version of the film on DVD and Blu-ray, the parent company in the US was against it. When the British Film Institute released “The Devils“ on DVD in 2012, it was still the UK theatrical cut, the longest one legally available at that point. Stateside, streamers like Shudder and the Criterion Channel would carry the American edit, the one Russell had famously dismissed as ‘incoherent.’

It was a peculiar situation, one Kermode and other fans of the film, such as Guillermo del Toro, frequently called out. This was not a scenario like that of “Metropolis“ or Abel Gance’s “Napoléon,” where material previously thought to be lost resurfaces in unexpected places (a common occurrence for works from the silent era); nor was it comparable to “Justice League,” whose director needed additional funds to complete the picture he had, for all intents and purposes, been removed from. The studio was holding Russell’s preferred version hostage, ostensibly out of spite. 

Which is why, when the Cannes Film Festival announced “The Devils“ would be part of the Classics lineup for 2026, people were skeptical until a follow-up statement by Warner Bros. Clockwork (the studio’s new specialty division, which has projects in the works with Sean Baker and Noah Baumbach) clarified this 4K upgrade would indeed be the uncensored version. The whole enchilada. The resurrection of Russell’s masterpiece, with Kermode making a rare Cannes appearance – he notoriously dislikes the festival – to accompany the world premiere of the new restoration. And just like that, a 55-year-old movie became the hottest ticket of Cannes 2026, with many – including the Next Best Picture writers on Croisette duty – failing to secure a seat. 

That was the beginning of a fruitful journey on the festival circuit (I saw the film a month after the Cannes screening, on 35mm, at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna), leading up to a theatrical re-release in multiple markets. And in an amusing twist of fate, the US proved very receptive to Russell’s full-blown extravaganza: originally planned for a one-week run starting October 16, the film was granted an additional seven days due to high attendance. And a week after that, Warner Bros. announced that, by popular demand, the run in North American cinemas has been extended indefinitely, turning a film the studio once buried into the best possible calling card for the Clockwork umbrella, one that also wears the NC-17 rating – an inevitable consequence of the Rape of Christ being put back in – as a badge of honor. Five decades on, “The Devils“ is finally getting its due, burning brighter than the people of Loudun.