Culture 3 min read By Mason Emerson
Ken Russell’s The Devils feels more relevant 55 years after its release
Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Devils, long seen as a transgressive shock piece, reads today as a portrait of a society losing its grip on reason and authority.
Ken Russell’s 1971 film “The Devils” has long been remembered as a transgressive novelty, a lush and provocative exercise in blasphemy and horror. A longtime admirer of Russell who once held that view now argues that the film has grown into something larger than its shock value, and that its portrait of a world unraveling feels more pointed with each passing year.
The film came out in 1971 and drew attention for its extreme imagery, its sexual content and its violent set pieces. Those qualities made it a lightning rod at the time, and for many viewers they became the whole story. The reassessment argues that this reading understates what Russell was doing. Beneath the excess, the picture is concerned with political and religious power, the hysteria that power can generate, and the ease with which a community turns against those it has decided are dangerous.
What makes the film feel newly urgent, according to the column, is its depiction of a society in which fear and certainty override evidence and restraint. The story’s churn of accusation, spectacle and collective frenzy is presented not as a relic of the seventeenth century but as a mirror of mechanisms that remain recognizable today. Russell’s refusal to offer comfortable distance is part of what keeps the work unsettling more than half a century later.
The piece also suggests that the film’s reputation has been shaped by how audiences approached it. Viewed primarily as a provocation, it was easy to dismiss. Viewed as a study of a world gone mad, it asks harder questions about who holds authority and how quickly institutions can turn cruelty into a presumed public good. That shift in emphasis, the column contends, is why “The Devils” now feels less like an outlier and more like a warning.
The same reassessment situates the film within the broader pattern of how audiences revisit controversial works. A picture once condemned for its excesses can, over time, be read for the very qualities that first alarmed critics, namely its refusal to flatter the viewer and its insistence that spectacle and moral judgment are intertwined. For a publication that treats cinema as part of public life, the case of “The Devils” offers a reminder that a film’s meaning is not fixed at its release but is renegotiated each time a new generation sits down to watch it.
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