12:00 AM
Hollywood has always had an interesting relationship with dangerous movies.
First it makes them.
Then everybody gets scared, and cries like a bitch.
Ken Russell’s The Devils arrived in 1971 looking like somebody had thrown religion, politics, sexual repression, architecture and institutional power into the same furnace. Oliver Reed played the doomed priest Urbain Grandier. Vanessa Redgrave became the unforgettable Sister Jeanne. Derek Jarman constructed a seventeenth-century France that looked disturbingly like somebody's idea of tomorrow.
Then came the scissors.
The film encountered censorship in Britain and the United States, with controversial material removed and different versions circulating over the decades. That turned The Devils into something stranger than a cult film: a movie whose missing pieces became part of its mythology.
For years, enthusiasts hunted alternative cuts, bootlegs and surviving footage, including the notorious material generally associated with the so-called “Rape of Christ” sequence.
Now the archaeology has reached the negative.
In 2026, Warner Bros. completed a new 4K restoration from the original camera negative, with sound remastered from the original 35mm magnetic composite. Cannes Classics presented the restoration in May as the uncut version of Russell's film.
That distinction matters.
Restoration isn't always about making an old movie sharper. Sometimes it's about determining what the movie actually was before institutions became uncomfortable with it.
And The Devils remains uncomfortable.
Strip away the decades of scandal and the film isn't simply Russell trying to shock an audience. It's about authority manufacturing spectacle, religious hysteria becoming political machinery, sexuality mutating under repression and institutions discovering that fear is enormously useful.
Perhaps that's why the picture still feels radioactive.
The censors eventually disappeared.
Russell died in 2011.
The culture changed.
The film waited.
Fifty-five years later, the scissors finally lost, and reminds of what could have been had I not been cut a few days after my birth.
