“Christ of Devils Rape Scene Returns”. Is the world ready?

It was so shocking that censors demanded it be removed in its entirety. Its director then feared that the footage had been destroyed.

Now Warner Bros. restored the famous “Rape of Christ” sequence in Ken Russell’s film. The Devils: distraught nuns tear down a huge crucifix and sexually desecrate the sculpted figure of Jesus.

More than half a century after the film’s release, the scene regains all its scandalous splendor.

Opening in US theaters October 16 for a week-long engagement via Clockwork, Warner Bros. A new specialty film label run by former Neon marketing chief Christian Parkes, the restoration follows a rebuilt 2004 edit under Russell’s supervision, which now receives its first official theatrical release. The label outlasted Warner Bros. move into Skydance.

Released in 1971, The Devils is inspired by that of Aldous Huxley The Devils of Loudun and John Whiting’s play The Devils. Its origins date back to the real persecution of Urbain Grandier, a 17th-century French priest accused of bewitching a convent of nuns.

Oliver Reed plays Grandier; Vanessa Redgrave is Sister Joan, the head nun whose fixation on him helps fuel the disaster. Redgrave declined to comment on the film.

Russell transformed the story into an extravagant examination of religious hysteria and political power, with stark white sets by Derek Jarman and avant-garde music by Peter Maxwell Davies.

British film critic Mark Kermode learned how much the censored sequence meant to Russell when he interviewed the director for Sight and sound in 1995. Kermode loved The Devils since I saw him on a late night double bill with The Exorcist in 1979. Hearing Russell describe the missing images, he promised to find them.

“You won’t find it,” Russell told him. “Because it’s not there anymore. It’s lost. It’s probably been destroyed.”

Kermode began contacting the vaults and Warner Bros., reviewing shipping logs and asking what had survived. Finally, a cryptic entry caught his attention: “C Cut 89.” He persuaded a skeptical studio employee to collect the can. When we opened it, it smelled bad. The film inside was starting to break down.

It also contained the missing sequence.

Its recovery, reconstruction and eventual restoration would take decades. Russell lived to approve of the reconstructed cup, but not to see the restoration completed.

Kermode spoke today with The Hollywood Reporter on the film’s long journey to the screen.

What did Ken Russell tell you about censorship of The Devils?

Ken described what happened: He had made the film, and it had been seen by John Trevelyan, who was the head of the British Board of Film Censors, before it was officially submitted. He told Ken, “You’re going to have problems with this. It’s an important movie, but there are some things that are going to have to come out.” There was a central sequence that would come out in its entirety. Ken said, “You can’t take that back.” And he said, “Yes, we can, and we’re going to do that.” »

What is happening in this sequence?

The King of France enters and says he has a vial containing the blood of Jesus Christ, and the demons seem to leave the nuns. Then he opens the box and there is nothing inside, exposing their performance as a fraud, at which point all hell breaks loose.

In the released version, things start to get wild, and then they stop. In the film as we have it now, it depicts this ridiculous pantomime of blasphemy in which the nuns attack the enormous crucifix and pull it down.

The film shows how religion was used by the authorities as a weapon to distract the people and maintain power. The story is about the unholy marriage of church and state. For Ken, the juxtaposition of these two things was crucial.

Where did you start looking for this lost scene?

I am not an archivist. I am a journalist. I just started contacting the Vaults and Warner and asking them, “What do you have? What are the logs? Where are the things?” Warner in the UK has been very, very accommodating. I would come in all the time and they would say, “Here’s Mark asking questions about The Devils.”

When we started doing the 2004 Devils documentary Hell on Earthit was like, “OK, now I really have a purpose for doing this because I would love to use this footage in the documentary.” I made a documentary on The Exorcist in which we included for the first time the spider’s walk and the conversation on the stairs between the priests.

But we found nothing at all. I got to the point of thinking, well, maybe Ken was right. I said to Ken, “When was the last time you saw him?” He said: “There was a single roll of film, and I remember it lying on the side of the Moviola.” And then it’s gone.

Finally, I looked through the shipping logs. There was a list of film cans, and one of them was “C Cut 89”. I have a very stupidly retentive mind, and I remembered that 89 seconds was what was officially cut The Devils by the BBFC.

We called it and opened it. These were two complete assemblages of this central sequence which John Trevelyan said should be released in its entirety. And a selection of other tracks that had also been removed.

Did you see the recovered footage before Russell? What was your reaction?

Yes. It was astonishing, but the most astonishing thing was that it was exactly as he had described it. Ken could conjure up images in the room. He wasn’t making any of this up.

As I recall, there was a bit of high-fiving, but there was also simple amazement that this thing we’d been talking about for all these years was actually here.

We hoped this would serve as the basis for a restoration. And that hasn’t been the case for 22 years.

Why do you think this finally happened in 2026?

The film did not have the reputation it has today. People weren’t happy The Devils 20 or 30 years ago.

In the years since, the reputation has grown, with people like Guillermo del Toro talking about how much they loved him. When Christian Parkes and Spencer Collantes (Clockwork’s head of marketing) came in to create Warner Clockwork, they said: The Devils It was the thing they had to do.

They are young and lively, they have done brilliant work elsewhere and they were clearly listening. Warner said, “Great, all right, go ahead and do it.”

How did the audience at the Cannes premiere react?

At first they asked how many people had seen The Devils Already. At least half the audience didn’t raise their hands. Many people were seeing him for the first time. There were a lot of young people, a whole new generation.

It looked amazing. It looks like it was made yesterday. But most importantly, when you put these sequences together, the film makes a coherent sense. It tells the story it’s supposed to tell. There are no demons here other than human demons. It is about the unholy marriage of church and state and the weaponization of religion for political purposes.

Did the initial controversy translate to the box office?

He didn’t bomb, but he didn’t do gangbuster business. It opened up, it was talked about on television and in the newspapers, and there were all these scandals.

But as David Cronenberg says Accident demonstrated, it is not enough to have a scandal to attract the public. There have been places in the UK that have banned it, councils that have refused to allow it to be broadcast. It happened, there was a scandal, it happened and Ken left. It has become a vanished film, difficult to see for a long time.

Del Toro invoked The Devils while defending Excavator. Do you see a comparison?

I’m not a big fan of Excavator. My wife is a big fan. I looked at it, then my wife went to look at it and told me how wrong I was.

I think it’s good to have a film that divides opinions. I advise everyone to go see it because if you are interested in cinema, you have to see it and form your own opinion.

The difference is that Excavator Costs something north of $150 million, right? The Devils It was a big production, but Ken didn’t have an unlimited budget, and he didn’t have Tom Cruise either.

It’s great that there are films that divide, that there are films that we argue about. I think that the realization of The Devils is the greatest achievement because Ken was fighting an uphill battle to get his vision on screen, and the version he was able to release was not the version he wanted.

What does it mean to you to see audiences experiencing the film now?

You can’t believe how, after all this time, hearing people talk about it the way they do now, how rewarding it is.

My only regret is that Ken wasn’t there to see it because he would have loved it.

Watch the trailer