Mark Kermode On The Miraculous Resurrection Of Ken Russell’s The Devils

The Devils has finally been redeemed. After heavy censorship, director Ken Russell’s baroque drama, based on a real witchcraft trial that took place in Loudun, France, in 1634, was met with disgusted reviews and mediocre box office when it was first released in theaters in 1971. But it lived on as a cult movie, which is how Mark Kermode first saw it on a double bill with The Exorcist at a late-night double feature back in 1979. That night would change the young critic’s life, leading him down a multi-decade rabbit hole that culminated last weekend with the theatrical release of a definitive new 4K restoration, Ken Russell’s The Devils.

Released by a new sub-label called Warner Bros. Clockwork, headed by former NEON executives Spencer Collantes and Christian Parkes, Ken Russell’s The Devils restores two key scenes that were excised from the film back in 1971: the infamous “Rape of Christ” sequence, in which a group of nuns strip nude and attack a statue of Jesus — that one was cut in its entirety — and a scene where Sister Jeanne of the Angels (Vanessa Redgrave) is gifted the suggestively phallic charred femur of Urban Grandier (Oliver Reed). Earlier in the film, the frustrated Sister Jeanne accused Grandier of witchcraft, claiming that he possessed her and her sisters with unholy lust. These charges led directly to Grandier’s execution, and Russell makes the argument that she is a pawn of political forces who want Grandier gone so the walls of Loudun can come down, taking the city’s independence with them.

“It wasn’t just that the censors wanted this stuff out, the studio wanted it out as well.”

Clockwork’s new 4K also restores the visual grandeur of Russell’s film, highlighting the work of production designer Derek Jarman (also a distinguished director in his own right) and editor Michael Bradsell, who re-added the footage he himself cut from the film for a special screening back in 2004. Russell died in 2011, leading his widow Elize Tribble Russell and Kermode — who eventually became a personal friend to the late director — as the keepers of his legacy. Due in large part to Kermode’s work, the reputation of The Devils has only grown over the years. And public interest in the film has never been higher: Although it premiered in limited release, Ken Russell’s The Devils made an impressive $1.74 million at the box office last weekend, outperforming both Primetime and Digger.

Since the world premiere of Ken Russell’s The Devils at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, Kermode has been serving as a spokesperson for the restored version of this misunderstood masterpiece. He sat down with Inverse before the film’s screening at the New York Film Festival, speaking on his own journey with the film as well as Russell’s intentions for it.

What was your first encounter with The Devils, and in what form?

The first time I saw it was [around 1979] on a late-night double bill at the Phoenix in East Finchley in North London, which is where I saw pretty much everything. It was The Devils and The Exorcist, it was the first time I saw both of them, and it was absolutely one of the significant evenings of my life.

Then, many years later, I was sent by Sight and Sound to interview Ken Russell. They were doing a censorship issue, and I was sent to interview him about The Devils because I had seen it a number of times on the late-night circuit. It was always the same print…

Pretty beat-up?

Yeah, I mean, it was knackered, but that was the late-night circuit.

But anyway, Sight and Sound gave me a bunch of images [from The Devils] to show to Ken. And then he started talking about the “Rape of Christ” sequence. He said that when he made the film, John Trevelyan, who was the secretary of the British Board of Film Censors, as they were known then, had seen an early version of [The Devils] before it was submitted and had told him, “[That scene] has got to come out in its entirety.” Some of the examiners actually thought that the film should just be rejected, but Trevelyan [said], “No, it’s a serious piece of work, but we’re going to have to [cut] it to get it through.”

At the same time, the studio was also really unhappy about elements of [the movie]. So it wasn’t just that the censors wanted this stuff out, the studio wanted it out as well. [That process] of whittling it down led to what was released as the British X-rated version, which was the version that Ken settled on. They cut it even further for the American release, because Americans are much more worried about nudity in a way that, I confess, doesn’t really make sense to a British audience.

So my first encounter with [the censored sequences] was Ken describing the film to me. He said there was this central scene that came out in its entirety because both the studio and the sensors said, “You can’t have that.”

Yeah, that doesn’t give a filmmaker a lot of bargaining power.

It’s a really interesting case where the film is being cut from both sides. And to cut a very long story short, what happened was that I, being young and foolish, said, “Ken, we will find that missing sequence,” and he said, “No, you won’t.”

[A few years later] I wanted to make a documentary about The Devils, because I was becoming really passionate about it. I’m not an archivist. All I ever do is ask people to go looking for things.

And I was talking to Warners in the U.K., saying, “We’re going to make this doc, and we know that there are these missing scenes. Could you look for them?” [I asked] a guy at Warner Bros. in the U.K. where the reels [of footage from the movie] were, and he gave me the shipping logs. So we started looking through the shipping logs, and there’s a tin labeled “C cut 89.” And I look at this, and I know that in the BBFC official report, the film was cut by 89 seconds.

“I called Ken, who I knew very well at that point, and I said, ‘Ken, are you sitting down? We found the Rape of Christ.’”

Did your heart skip a beat?

Well, no, because [my contact at Warner] Tim goes, “That tin has been around for ages, and it’s not what you're looking for.” So I said, “Look, I’ll tell you what, if you call that tin in and it isn’t anything, I will officially give up.” And he went, “Fine,” because he was being so nice to me, but I was also becoming a bit of a nuisance.

So then what happened was, my wife and I had a young child, and I was at Mothercare, which is a baby care store. My phone rang, and it was Tim. He said, “Where are you?” I went, “I’m buying nappies.” And he said, “Well, that tin, it’s not 89 seconds long” — to this date, we don’t know what “C cut 89” meant. It was a mislabeling, probably — “but I did look at the first couple of frames, and all I can tell you is there’s a bunch of nuns and a bloody massive crucifix.” So I called Ken, who I knew very well at that point, and I said, “Ken, are you sitting down? We found the Rape of Christ.”

What year was that?

That would have been 2000 or 2001. So we got called into the Warner U.K. office. And as I remember it, it was me, Paul Joyce, who directed the documentary, and Mike Bradsell, who edited The Devils. They play the footage, and Mike goes, “I recognize those edits.” And what’s on that reel of film is two complete assemblies of the Rape of Christ, and of Sister Jeanne at the end with Grandier’s bone.

Oh, it’s everything.

It’s those two things, but also some other stuff we don’t have sound for. There’s some footage of the nuns in the convent with some nudity. There’s the mummers’ play, which the BBFC reports weirdly objected to. But crucially, there were the two major things that Ken had talked about. We put all the footage into the documentary, and there was some concern about blowback because it was still pretty edgy [at that time].

Then, in 2004, we put on a [screening of The Devils] at the British Film Institute in London. We were going to screen the British X-rated version, and Mike and Ken said, “Can we put the [censored scenes] back in?” We did, but didn’t announce in advance that we were doing it because we didn’t know whether we would be able to [pull it off]. Ken was there, and Mike was there, and just before the screening, we said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the director’s cut of The Devils.” And it went astonishingly well. The BBFC were in the room, and I said to them from the stage, “Do you have any problems with this?” They said no. That was a great moment, and then the trail just went cold. The only reason we were ever given for why a restoration wasn’t going ahead was that the “distasteful totality” of the material had put people off. And then Ken passed away. The BFI DVD came out with the X-rated cut, which was the best version of the film [at the time].

Fast-forward to 2025, I get this mysterious email from Spencer [Collantes] and Christian [Parkes], who had just joined Warner Bros. Clockwork. We met in Berlin, and I sat down and I said, “Right, well, it’s either The Exorcist or The Devils, and I know for a fact that it isn’t The Exorcist, so what are you doing with The Devils?” And they said, “We went to Warner and said we really want to do The Devils.” And since the moment that they said they were doing it, they’ve had nothing but cooperation.

“When The Devils was first made, there is absolutely no question that the studio was alarmed by it.”

What do you think changed internally at Warner Bros.? Was it like with the elements, where you — or Christian and Spencer in this case — just wore them down?

They didn’t even wear them down. They woke them up. Back in 2004, The Devils was still considered to be pretty edgy. Channel 4 were worried about it when we put [the Rape of Christ footage] in the documentary. But once the documentary had been broadcast on television and it was fine, the precedent was set.

When The Devils was first made, there is absolutely no question that the studio was alarmed by it. As Ken always said, he filmed what was in the script, but when they read the script, they didn’t see the movie. They thought, “It’s a historical epic. It’s based on a true story. How bad can it be?” And then they actually saw it, and the phrase Ken used was, “It just doubled them up.” There’s a phrase in the documentary that my colleague Nigel Floyd uses. He says, “The thing about The Devils is, it is a film which is a film.” What he means is it’s not a script. It’s a film. It’s one thing reading it, and it’s one thing thinking about it, and it’s a completely different thing actually seeing it.

The Devils was considered damaged goods until that 2004 screening. But even after that [the studio didn’t think it had the potential] to make a huge amount of money. So it’s like, “Why would we spend time going back to restore this contentious material into a movie that didn’t make any money the first time?” That was why I was so surprised when Christian and Spencer said they were restoring it. I honestly think that it took two young, smart people to go, “We think this is brilliant.” And then Warner Bros. thought, “If you think it’s brilliant and you did really well at NEON, you know something that we don’t.” And then the whole thing happened really fast after that.

The 4K is astonishing. I was struck by Derek Jarman’s production design on the film, and how the frame is always so full of movement. There’s so much going on.

It is a film which is a film.

That really struck me because, like you said, I’ve seen the documentary. I watched the BFI DVD. I knew what I was getting with the Rape of Christ. But the restored visuals are what makes it feel like a new film.

Ken said a really interesting thing to me — I interviewed him a lot about this film over the years, and [at one point] he said, “I’m not a political filmmaker, because if you make a film [about] the politics of the time, those politics will change in five years. But if you take a historical story, something that’s established fact, you can tell a story that has parallels with the modern world. And as the modern world changes, the parallels will change, but the story itself stays the same.”

As far as he was concerned, it was a film about brainwashing. It was a film about using religion for corrupt political ends. The whole point is that there aren’t any [actual] devils here. All the pantomime lunacy that’s going on in the cathedral is meant to be shocking and appalling, but it’s also meant to be ridiculous. It’s literally a performance, a pantomime of blasphemy. Ken said that for him, that story about brainwashing was universal. That was absolutely central to what he thought the film was about.

I was going to say, 1971 was only five years after the “Is God Dead?” cover of Time magazine. Now, 55 years later, we have this resurgent fundamentalism in the U.S.

I think it’s more relevant than ever. But I’m really pleased to hear you say that the work on the image is as important as what we’ve put back in. Ken wanted the film to look modern. Loudun needed to look like a new city, a futuristic city, because that’s how it would have looked to people who were living there at the time. To them, it would have been Metropolis. It would have been Fritz Lang. That’s what he said to Derek Jarman.

He also used the image from [Aldous Huxley’s book The Devils of Loudun] of the exorcism of Sister Jeanne as the equivalent of a rape in a public toilet. That’s where you get the white subway tiles. Peter Maxwell Davies, who composed the score, also said that he wanted the score to sound like it was happening in a tiled bathroom. Too loud. Oppressive. All of that was really important to Ken: This is not a story about the past. This is a modern story. Even now I think it looks really modern.

Before, we were all watching it in these bastardized versions, and we [weren’t really] seeing the film because so much of it is the movement of the camera, the choreography, the way the costumes move, the way the camera follows them. It’s an amazing piece of visual storytelling.

[At the Cannes screening] Ken’s widow Elize Tribble Russell said that, [after the 2004 screening], Ken said to her, “I’ve got my rhythm back.” And it really pierced me to the core because so much of Ken’s filmmaking has a musical shape to it. And for him, the thing about the Rape of Christ sequence was that, yes, it’s outrageous, but the key thing is [juxtaposing] this theatrical pantomime of blasphemy with Grandier breaking the bread and having his spiritual awakening. When I first interviewed Ken, he said there was something damaged about the film. It was tripping itself up, because they’d taken that sequence out. So that 2004 screening gave him his rhythm back, and then the restoration gave us the film back.

“You look at the film now and you go, ‘That is a masterpiece.’”

Has Lise mentioned where Ken Russell was at with this when he died? Because as you said, there was this big moment in 2004 and then nothing happened.

Ken had lived with the trail of The Devils going cold for a long time. It went cold in 1971, and he moved on. He did The Boyfriend, he did Tommy, which revisits a lot of the same themes of false religion, false messiahs. Brainwashing. All of that stuff. He was barreling forward, and [when the 2004 restoration happened] I think that part of him thought, “At least I wasn’t crazy. At least the film actually was as good as I thought it was. But there’s no appetite for it.” And so I think that [his attitude] when we lost him was a kind of resignation.

I do have the feeling that whenever a director like Ken’s work is screened in a public auditorium, they are present in the room. It sounds silly, but I felt his spirit in the room at Cannes. And Lise said the same thing. It was very emotional; I mean, we were in tears about it. But it felt like he was back.

Here’s the thing that’s really astonishing: You look at the film now and you go, “That is a masterpiece.” Imagine you make that film, and all you get for it is grief. You make a masterpiece, and then you just have people cutting it, berating it, banning it. It becomes a sort of a footnote. Now I think people are looking at it and going, “I think it’s his best film.” It’s like the film took 55 years to find its feet.

It’s a curse being ahead of your time sometimes.

That’s exactly what it was. I wish that Ken was here to see it now, not least because it is so prescient in terms of what’s happening, particularly here in your country. It’s a story about a vain, pompous king with a series of ridiculous hairstyles using religion for his own vindictive ends.

I think that it has, at its core, something very powerful, and that’s why it never completely died.

Even in whatever version it was that I saw in 1979, I remember it felt like being hit by a bus. And then you find out that the version that you saw is not even close to what the film should be like.

Ken lived very near to us, and he was a personal friend. He was brilliant company, and for somebody who had had as many knock-backs as he had, he was majestically unencumbered by bitterness. At the end of his career, when he couldn’t get funding anymore, he was making movies in his garage. He just got on with it. He was so vibrant, and he loved cinema. He absolutely lived and breathed film, and The Devils is a spectacular example of that.

Tickets for the Clockwork screenings are selling very well. I imagine you didn’t anticipate that.

No, because of all these decades of people not being very interested in it. It wasn’t a massive hit when it came out, because it was so dogged by controversy. The controversy sometimes clouds the film. The tabloids were full of these scandalous stories [about the film], and that meant that people didn’t really see all the depth, the richness. I mean, there are things in it that are genuinely funny.

Everybody laughed at the crocodile at my screening.

“What fresh hell is this?” It’s a massively quotable film.

The Devils is now playing in select theaters through Warner Bros. Clockwork.