Not that long ago, there was reason to believe that The Devils might never be seen again. Although it was released in theaters back in 1971 — it did especially well in the U.K., where it was the fifth-highest grossing film of that year — by the turn of the millennium Ken Russell’s hysterically stylized dramatization of a notorious 17th-century French witchcraft trial was practically lost media.
Oddly, the studio that made the film was also responsible for suppressing it: After putting out the film on a censored, pan-and-scan VHS in 1983, Warner Bros. locked The Devils away, declining to release it on any subsequent home-video format and turning down offers from multiple distributors who were interested in licensing it. The reason? According to Russell biographer Mark Kermode, executives at the studio found Russell’s film “distasteful.”
