Ken Russell’s most notorious film is finally getting the release its director never lived to see. Warner Bros. Clockwork, the studio’s newly launched arthouse and repertory label, will bring “Ken Russell’s The Devils” to North American theaters October 16 for an exclusive one-week engagement, a full 4K restoration cut to the specifications Russell laid out before his death in 2011, a version IndieWire confirms is the only cut the director ever wanted audiences to see.
The 1971 film, adapted from Aldous Huxley’s “The Devils of Loudun” and John Whiting’s stage play, dramatizes the real 17th-century Loudun possessions, following a politically defiant priest, Father Urbain Grandier, accused of bewitching a convent of nuns after drawing the obsessive fixation of the convent’s Mother Superior. Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave star. On release, the film was cut down so aggressively to avoid censorship that it still earned an X rating in both the U.S. and U.K., and one of its most notorious sequences, known as the “Rape of Christ,” was excised entirely, Dread Central notes in its own history of the film’s censorship battles.
That version has effectively been unavailable in its intended form for 55 years. A cut closer to Russell’s vision briefly played UK theaters in 2002 but was never released on home video, MovieWeb reports, leaving the true cut something closer to legend than an accessible work for most of two decades. A private reconstruction, supervised by Russell himself alongside editor Michael Bradsell and critics Mark Kermode and Paul Joyce, took shape in 2004, but even that version stayed largely out of public reach until now, according to background compiled by the BFI.
This new restoration was built from the original camera negative, with audio remastered from the original English composite 35mm magnetic film, and carries an NC-17 rating from the MPA, the first film with that rating to come from Warner Bros. itself, IndieWire points out. It premiered as an official selection in Cannes Classics at this year’s festival, followed by stops at Il Cinema Ritrovato, TIFF and Sitges, a festival run Box Office Pro tracked from its first announcement in the spring.
BFI Director of Programme and Distribution Stuart Brown called the film “one of the great masterpieces of British cinema” ahead of its UK release, which the BFI will handle in partnership with Warner Bros. Clockwork starting October 30, The People’s Movies writes. The London release ties into a larger celebration: BFI Southbank is planning a full Ken Russell retrospective for summer 2027, drawing on prints preserved in the BFI National Archive alongside television work and newly restored materials.
Behind the camera, the film’s reputation rests as much on its collaborators as its content. Oscar-winning cinematographer David Watkin shot it, future filmmaker Derek Jarman designed its production, Russell’s then-wife Shirley Russell handled costumes, and composer Peter Maxwell Davies supplied the score, a lineup All Hallows Geek lays out in its own coverage of the restoration’s technical credits.
“The Devils” opens October 16 in select North American theaters, including some 35mm screenings, ahead of its October 30 UK and Ireland release. International dates beyond that remain unannounced, though Warner Bros. Clockwork has said further territories are coming.
