“The Devils is a harsh film but it’s a harsh subject. I wish the people who were horrified and appalled by it would have read the book, because the bare facts are far more horrible than anything in the film.” – Ken Russell from An Appalling Talent: Ken Russell by John Baxter
The Film That Never Found Me
In the 1998 era of VCU Photo/Film Department, attending film classes in the Pollak building, there was a mysterious poster of a funeral pyre with the text Ken Russell’s The Devils under the image and another poster for Savage Messiah.
Several years taking and teaching classes in that classroom, looking at that particular poster, I always knew I would need to see that film. Five and a half decades of being banned, censored, out of print, not in print, not published, not screened, not shown, and not watched except in legendary VHS bootlegged copies, I never found it or it never found me.
Periodically, in film textbooks, you’d see still frames of key images or come across the name on a list on IMDb and other sites for controversial films.
In this moment of insane Warner Brothers studio history unfolding; the sale, the consolidation, the conglomerations, the IP in vaults, the remixing of reboots of long-winded properties, at some point the value of the X-rated taboo work restored outweighs doing nothing with it.
Also, with the work of estates and the ongoing legacy of the surviving family of the filmmaker, those efforts to get the art seen as intended are also a great, honorable fight.
The repertory and cinema arthouse outlet Clockwork made its first screening of the restored director’s vision from the original camera negatives at Cannes in May 2026, in a now NC-17 form that is in a window of a week’s release this October 2026.
When Cinema Challenges Power
Seeing this film, finally appreciating the performance of Oliver Reed in a sort of weird Orson Wellesian force of nature, the true-ish-to-life character Urbain Grandier, and watching the repressed, twisted sister Mother Superior Jeanne des Anges by legendary and relevant activist actress Vanessa Redgrave, seeing actors “go there.”
Wherever it is we say actors used to go to, to turn in memorable performances that shock and awe in the depths of dramatic depiction of history, layered on the present questions of political philosophy, psychological depth, and theological debate in deep and dangerous art that challenges while also exposing mechanisms of corruption, avarice, greed, and manipulation of power of monarchy, ultra-wealth in cahoots with church, for systemic land theft and extinguishing of freedom through psychological and physical torment.
Out-of-this-world weird filmmaking. To see it in close proximity with Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger was an outstanding reminder of how important the films Warner Brothers produced and distributed had been, and what we may have lost forever here on out.
After a quick follow-up screening of Biutiful, I now see so much of how Iñárritu’s work is in the grounded, bleak, street-level scenes, what has transpired in the world that is shaped by the real-life Digger-class that would have unfolded and constricted, leading towards the society of Level 4. And in depicted mergers of State and Church power in The Devils, the story we are in is a very old script and seemingly as perverse, if not worse, than extreme cinema debauchery.
Both films echo The Battle Over Citizen Kane Welles faced and the lane filmmakers can find themselves in if the work comes too close to exposing the reality of operating systems in dramatic cinema language that questions surrounding actions of reality.
Watching these films in proximity to each other, both strategically throttled, decried, and panned but brilliant, was a revelation.
Who Controls What We See?
The gleeful articles talking about the “box office bomb” of Digger make sense for news media companies owned by people in leagues with other executives across other industries. It highlights the continued focus only on money earned and hiding what a movie says, saying it didn’t say it well. Smearing the film lines up people to tread away from something as much as towards something else that is less burdensome in thoughtfulness.
Hollywood has always jostled between awards and money after the blockbusters take off or an art film crashes at the box office. Only those that are in the trap of media analysis really write or read the books about the meaning, or it gets distilled into some micro-content vertical video about an under-seen film on an app.
There is less funding for movies at large and certainly fewer executives green-lighting challenging cinema. There is a narrow group of current directors that get the riches to make the weird, and they often get swatted in reviews if they are not complimentary to the ruling class.
The future of books, film, and cinema is uncertain and terrifying in that these mergers and libraries of legacies have been collapsed into narrow control and ripped off by AI machine training that denigrates the act of human-generated creative storytelling for the programmers’ wet dream of what the “church” wanted to do in The Devils, tearing down an autonomous, self-regulating city, killing and threatening dissenters.
The levels of media and film literacy it takes to want to be present and be rewarded as an audience for these types of films takes years of watching and reading about art, enduring the weirdness of the observations of the artists and disturbing depictions of what happened or is happening.
The want to read and watch old stuff, being left out of current binge-watching conversations and discourse on a current series or release, is its own sort of isolated void. Or a niche aisle of media consumption that all filters into privilege to watch long-winded critiques of systems in political satire and tragedy dramatics that then become branches of media science cults manufactured for sorting people into ruts while what is shown happens to people somewhere still.
Sometimes groups of folks meet and attend a screening together, too, and talk about the implications or are amazed at the craft.
Not an easy ask in a population weaned on professional sports, popularity pageants, gossip shows, game shows, horror of politics, live-feed views of environmental collapse, riots, genocides, faux luxury reality TV, targeted ads, and now microscopic attention spans and addictions to scrolls fed by algorithms and the dirt behind all the screens.
It also stands that the reality of now is super relevant to so much of Aldous Huxley’s writings, that I am looking for a copy of The Devils of Loudun.
What Will Cinema Tell Us About Ourselves?
There is a need for these passion plays/films. Filmmakers will not lead a thought revolution, but they are part of feeding it intellectually. As is often talked about, is it pacifying or is it torch-passing? Is it distraction or is it revelatory?
In 25 to 50 years from now, when Digger is reevaluated and re-shared, will we talk about the corrupt demolition of democracy by the bipartisan efforts to enslave people through technological means and AI subjugation while the environment totally collapses? Or maybe a few will be wandering the countryside in a daze, talking about what a movie was while getting back to cave and sand paintings to tell stories?
Or maybe we will have moved forward with green energy, found ways to establish matriarchy-minded governance, have a culture around education and elder care, where we steward the world to a new age that un-warps minds away from abusive fits of resource control, gobbling land, where private profit ceases, and we look back at high-concept political satire or dark history surfaced in extreme shock cinema as an old way of telling stories about power and corruption, and we have new media that shows humanity and the planet in different ways, the ways we want to live with each other.
As everything unravels and reveals, the art will persist, and in watching, its teachings pass on.
What does it all mean? I think now, I know less than I thought I did when looking at that poster.
Watching The Devils Friday, my heart did leap when I saw the single wide shot that was used in the poster image, and at least I got to complete that cinema quest before whatever Skydance’s plans for WB’s vault unfold forward and if Clockwork continues to release work for and of the ages.
The Devils is out in limited release in Richmond and is rated NC-17 by the MPAA for sexual content and graphic nudity. Buy tickets HERE
Digger is still in select screenings in Richmond, rated R by the MPAA for “pervasive language.” Buy tickets HERE
Main image: scene from Ken Russell’s The Devils
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