1971 Explicit Film The Devils Is Finally Restored After 55 Years With Deleted Scenes

Ken Russell’s The Devils, which to this day remains a very controversial film, got a 4K version that is uncut, as the director wanted. It premiered at TIFF on the opening day, and the details are shocking.

The film follows Father Urbain Grandier, a popular priest in 17th-century France who becomes the target of powerful political and religious authorities. A nun named Sister Jeanne becomes obsessed with him and accuses him of witchcraft. Grandier is established as sexually active despite being a Catholic priest, and he eventually dies.

We can all go watch the nude scenes from this film right now, but there’s a graphic and explicit scene that was cut back in 1971 and is now being shown at TIFF. It features a group of nuns who get naked, showing their private parts, knocking a statue down, and then sexually riding and grinding on the statue’s genitals. They self-pleasure and lick the statue, and the sequence goes on for more than 3 minutes.

An important thing to note here is that none of it is portrayed as erotic; all the nudity and sexuality are used as a depiction of repression.

There is also a public exorcism scene in which many nuns are stripped of their clothing and behave in a wild way. They also engage in lesbian scenes, which are definitely eye candy but also controversial.

Basically, all the new scenes included in this restored version are highly disturbing, and now I get why they removed all this.

The film will be released in theaters on October 16th in the US.