31 Days of Horror Reviews: The Devils

Day 7: The Devils (1971), dir. Ken Russell

Streaming Availability: N/A (fite me, Zaslav, you coward)

Satan does not appear in The Devils. Importantly though, neither does God. There are only humans, at their most twisted and cruel, yet beautiful and courageous. 

The demonic possessions at the center of The Devils are complete hoaxes. The audience believes in them as little as most characters. The victims are nuns playing out their symptoms under the threat of execution, the witch is a man of great faith, and the church prosecuting this case is operating for flagrantly political ends. Nearly every person in the French city of Loudun in 1634 is utterly cynical about the proceedings, laughing along with the parody of justice. Laugh as the might, the ultimate is joke is also on them. Their cynicism has made them the ultimate sucker.

Even without demons, The Devils is one the most shocking and controversial movies ever made. Various cuts of this film are floating around, including a probably-definitive 117 minute director's cut, which is hard to find. Since this was an Anglo-American production there's two theatrical cuts: a 111 minute British cut, a 108 minute American cut. Each lost minute kept censoring the film more and more to get it approved to be seen in theaters at all. The Devils was rated X in both nations, though a tamer 1973 cut gave the film an R-rating. I'm not 100% sure which version I found. Home video releases of The Devils are rare and there's never been a Blu-Ray. At best the movie shows up on the Criterion Channel or Shudder once every few years. The Devils has become the McRib of classic cinema: it isn't around often, and when it comes back it is always an event for the faithful.

This is a shockingly shabby treatment for one of the greatest movies ever made. The Devils is an extravagant carnival-like nightmare of depravity. Frankly, it is amazing a movie this graphic and this bold was produced for what looks like a very high budget. This was the Seventies, when a film studio could gamble a fortune on up and coming directors creating films about adult topics and come away with a huge hit. Ken Russell's only other big "mainstream" movie is The Who rock opera Tommy, instead spending his career making sexploitation dramas or histories of music or both. Oh he made a kooky snake vampire movie called The Lair of the White Worm, I recommend that one. We live in an upside-down world where White Worm is easily available but The Devils has become this storied artifact of legend.

It is unimaginable that a movie like The Devils could have been made in any other time, at least not this impressively. This movie features enormous sets that are hundreds of feet wide, containing the entire central square of Loudun, or fill massive high-ceiling court rooms with hundreds of extras. As impressive as modern blockbuster technology is, we have lost something. CG can do a lot, but thanks to it, almost nobody builds big monumental sets anymore or gathers a small army to act out on camera. What's great about these sets is how they're too flamboyant to be period accurate. Loudun is a world of stark white neoclassical forms mixed with postmodernist architectural shapes. The building geometry is incredible and unreal, all of it covered in bathroom white tile. Inside these settings we get these wide, frenzied crowd scenes of orgies and mass chaos.

I feel bad for whoever had to foot the bill if they expected a high return, but I'm glad their money went towards this mad baroque project. Sometimes great art needs to be unprofitable.

You can feel the huge-ness of The Devils right from the opening scene. It has nothing to do with Loudun or nuns or demons, but rather it's King Louis XIII (Graham Armitage) dressed androgynously as Botticelli's Birth of Venus on stage for his adoring, manic crowds. It's a bold statement that the world we're seeing is too crazed to ever be real, only a vague exaggerated reflection of the real history. It is also a world where hunger and lust matters above all else at the highest levels of power.

The Devils tempts me to not actually organize my thoughts into a useful argument. I just want to give in and list all the horrible and perverted acts that occur. (Here's a few since you need examples: naked nuns grind on the fingers and crotch of a Christ statue, a "possessed" woman is tortured with oversized enemas, a woman dying of plague is tormented by two crooked fraud alchemists, a priest quietly jerks off while watching the madness, etc. etc.) If this were merely pornography I would happily read off every sin, but Ken Russell does have a greater goal here.

The actual plot involves is truth a battle over Loudun's mighty walls, and thus its power to stand against the centralizing state-building goals of the king and Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue). The 1600s was the golden age of sieges, with warfare spreading all across Europe as kings and their subjects warred over ancient rights and privileges. Nearly every kingdom from England to Poland would see some kind of terrible civil war. (No wonder then that people came to believe anything about their neighbors, this is also the golden age of the witch-hunt.)

Loudun's independence is championed by Father Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed), a great man with a flared mustache full of charisma and lust, in this film irresistible to all women. Unfortunately that very sexual power is Grandier's downfall. A horny deformed nun, Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave) blames Grandier for summoning demons to violate her. This ridiculous claim is then taken up by the various con artists, sadists, and anachronistic rockstar inquisitors under the Cardinal's employ to turn first the convent and the entire city into festivals of madness. Every unspeakable offense becomes more proof of Grandier's guilt. Before long, nobody even remembered the walls, just cheering the show until it is too late.

Ken Russell is not pulling punches when it comes to his criticism of political corruption. Catholicism is only occasionally just a fetish or a punchline in Russell's filmography. He seems to have really struggled with matters of faith. However, despite depicting a world that is rotten top to bottom, The Devils is not necessarily anti-clerical. Grandier is our hero because he recognizes the flaws in himself that make him a philanderer, with at least one bastard baby attending his execution. He is not Christ even if he'll die like him; Grandier is imperfect, full contradictions like any human. However, he is a man capable of great love, deep strength, and faced with oblivion, faith in the almighty. Reed's performance is stirring as his character dies bravely for the sins of others.

But nobody is saved.

The Devils is the biggest movie of a major B-movie trend of this period, nunsploitation. At some point the specifically Catholic orders of faith became noted for their kink potential. You get all the tropes of a 'Women in Prison' porn plot but with better costumes. There's a few precursors like the staggeringly beautiful Black Narcissus from 1947 and one scene in Häxan predicted the entire genre in 1922. Nuns became a kind of untapped harem aching with repression, ripe for lesbianism, BDSM, and of course, demons. A lot of B-movies will follow The Devils, from all over the world. A few examples are School of the Holy Beast (Japan), Alucarda (Mexico), and a title too incredible to not mention, Malabimba – The Malicious Whore (Italy). Paul Verhoeven in 2021 just released his take on the subgenre, Benedetta, which I recommend.

If it was not clear by now, The Devils is possibly the best movie we've covered this month. (Sue me if you feel cheated that it does not actually have Devils despite the title.) Somebody at WarnerBros needs to fix the deplorable availability of this movie. They at least remember it exists, for some reason Space Jam 2 features nuns from this movie. Fifty years should be enough time to relax about the content. More extreme movies with far less artistic merit have come out since that nobody is trying to censor.

Next Time! Weirdly enough we will stay in early modern France, but this time we'll see it through the lens of experimental 1973 anime in Belladonna of Sadness.