In the sequence critics dubbed the “rape of Christ,” possessed nuns defile a life-sized effigy of Christ amid a frenzied orgy, and it’s what kept The Devils off screens for decades. Ken Russell’s 1971 film reaches theaters worldwide on October 16 in a restored director’s cut carrying that footage and other long-censored material.
The film dramatizes the alleged demonic possessions that gripped a convent of Ursuline nuns in 17th-century Loudun, in western France. At its center is Urbain Grandier, the Catholic priest charged with witchcraft and burned at the stake. Grandier, played by Oliver Reed, is the one man who stands up to the church’s hypocrisy and pays for it.
Russell packed the movie with spiritual ecstasies, torture, violence and sexual content. Boards in the United Kingdom and United States wouldn’t even classify it until the most extreme imagery came out, from close-ups of graphic torture and nudity to a nun pleasuring herself with a charred human femur bone.
Russell had converted to Roman Catholicism in his late 20s, and his disillusion with corruption in the church and state drove him to make it. In a 2011 interview he called it a Christian film about “the degradation of religious principles” and “about a sinner who becomes a saint.”
The real Loudun possessions began on September 22, 1632, when three nuns reported a nighttime apparition in priestly garb. Exorcisms soon became public spectacles drawing large crowds.
Mother Superior Jeanne des Anges led the accusations, later writing she had been consumed with erotic desire during her possession. Grandier was convicted of sorcery on August 18, 1634, tortured and executed, though the torments in Loudun continued until 1638.
Reaction split hard. The film won Best Foreign Film at the 1971 Venice Film Festival, and the US National Board of Review named Russell best director. The Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano called it “an insult to cinema.”
Much of the cut footage was thought lost until 2002, when film critic Mark Kermode found it in the Warner Brothers archives. Russell assembled a director’s cut in 2004 and screened it for small audiences. Warner Brothers waited another 22 years to release the restored version.
