In 1971, the British Board of Film Censors first screened a rough cut of Ken Russell’s The Devils on January 27 and immediately demanded cuts. Fifty-five years later, the film is arriving in US theaters on October 16 with an NC-17 rating. The institutions have different names now. The fight looks the same.
Ken Russell’s The Devils director’s cut, assembled from the original camera negative with sound remastered from the original English Composite 35mm Mag Film at 96kHz, is a 1971 British historical drama starring Oliver Reed as Father Urbain Grandier and Vanessa Redgrave as Sister Jeanne, based on Aldous Huxley’s 1952 novel The Devils of Loudun.
The film dramatizes a 17th-century French witch trial in which a Catholic priest is accused of bewitching a convent of nuns, and Russell turned that story into a sustained assault on the machinery of institutional power. It is being released globally by Warner Bros. Clockwork in partnership with the British Film Institute.
The NC-17 is the endpoint of a multi-decade institutional campaign to keep this film from being seen as Russell made it. According to Stuart Brown, BFI Director of Programme and Distribution:
Ken Russell’s The Devils is one of the great masterpieces of British cinema: a film of astonishing imagination, searing power and dazzling formal brilliance.
It took 55 years to get a complete authorized version in front of American audiences.
What Was Cut, Who Cut It, and Why It Matters to Horror
The BBFC’s demands in 1971 were specific: reduce the explicitness of the nun orgy sequences, the violence during Grandier’s interrogation and burning, and scenes that collapsed religious imagery into sexual content. The legal basis was the Obscene Publications Act of 1857, a law that would not be amended to cover filmed content until 1977. The board was operating in genuine legal gray territory; BBFC Secretary John Trevelyan argued internally that the film had artistic merit and prevented further cuts from being imposed in the UK.
Warner Bros. was not waiting for the BBFC to settle the question. Fearing a boycott from the Roman Catholic Church, the studio pressured additional cuts to the American release, producing a version different from both the British theatrical cut and Russell’s intended film.
The Vatican went on the offensive that September through its official newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, accusing Russell of deploying obscenity to accomplish “a crude lynching of the church,” and then demanded the resignation of the director of the Venice Film Festival over the film’s reception there. Seventeen local UK councils banned the film despite its BBFC X-certificate. Ireland, Malaysia, Chile, and Finland banned it outright (Finland’s ban lasting until 2001).
Joe Dante, director, who first saw The Devils at an early press screening, described what happened next:
It was the incredible shrinking movie. Every time you saw it something else was missing!
James Ferman, BBFC Secretary, framed what the film had walked into:
It’s a particular moment in censorship history when all the controversial issues of censorship came together and outraged the public before the film was even seen because of the style.
The “Rape of Christ” sequence, in which nuns descend on a crucifix during a mass possession scene, was cut before either theatrical release and withheld from most home video releases for 55 years. Russell considered it central to the film’s thesis. When the BFI attempted a definitive restoration in 2012, Warner Bros. declined to authorize the sequence’s inclusion, leaving that version incomplete.
This is worth separating from how horror censorship usually works. The Devils was not suppressed for gore in the conventional sense. It was suppressed because it used the visual and emotional grammar of possession, religious hysteria, and bodily transformation to make a political argument about institutional power, and the institutions it targeted recognized the argument and responded to it directly.
That makes its censorship history categorically different from contemporaneous exploitation battles over I Spit on Your Grave or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Those films were banned for what they showed. The Devils was banned for what it meant.
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The NC-17 in 2026: What Changes, What Doesn’t
The definitive version of The Devils premiered at the 79th Cannes Film Festival as part of the official Cannes Classics selection. It is fully restored in 4K and cut to Ken Russell’s specific direction, the first publicly released version of the film as he intended it. The “Rape of Christ” sequence is in the cut.
The NC-17 rating was introduced in September 1990 to replace the X, but as Hollywood Reporter has documented, the prejudice against the rating continues. NC-17 films face structural barriers in US theatrical distribution, including lease restrictions and chain programming practices that limit mainstream bookings, so the October 16 release is still limited. A film cut to reach mainstream audiences in 1971 is now rated in a category that constrains its mainstream theatrical reach in 2026.
When The Devils originally arrived in American theaters in 1971, it carried an X rating even after Russell had already made extensive cuts; Warner Bros. chose not to appeal, and the American version was trimmed further beyond what had already been removed for the British release. The MPAA quietly reclassified it R in 1979. An edited version became what most American viewers encountered.
Russell died in 2011. He did not live to see a complete authorized restoration of his film reach audiences.
What does it mean that it took 55 years, and that the same film is still receiving an adults-only rating in the country that gutted it in 1971? The institutions have different names. The fight looks the same.