Ken Russell's The Devils — Why Bans Outlasted Moral Panic

Ken Russell's The Devils arrived in 1971 as a baroque formal argument disguised as scandal. The film depicts the real 1634 case of the Loudun nuns, possessed or pretending, whose hysteria became a weapon against a local priest condemned for witchcraft. Russell chose to show the nuns' bodies convulsing with institutional sickness, not narrate it safely.

This distinction matters more than it sounds. A film could have handled this story as tragic corruption — the Church's machinery grinding an innocent man and vulnerable women. Instead, Russell rendered the Church's pathology as visual spectacle: nuns writhing in obscene possession, their flesh made the text itself, reliquaries containing stone phalluses, sexuality and authority fused into something visceral that abstraction could not contain.

The film was suppressed in Britain until 1994, effectively banned in the United States for decades, forbidden in Vatican territories. Each suppression invoked the same language: obscenity, blasphemy, sexual depravity. But the actual transgression was formal. Russell understood that once you show a thing visually — not discuss it, not allegorize it. Render it as bodies in space. It becomes impossible to recuperate as metaphor. The viewer cannot distance themselves. They must witness.

That refusal to let the audience off through abstraction is what institutions protect against. A sermon about corruption is manageable. A nun's mouth opening in ecstatic violation is not. The controversy persisted not from prudishness but from the film's insistence that some institutional truths are too obscene to discuss safely. They must be shown until the viewer feels the nausea directly. Feminist and queer critics eventually reclaimed the film by naming precisely this: Russell was not exploiting the women, he was diagnosing how institutions use female bodies as the stage for their own pathology.

This matters now because the same mechanism still operates. Institutions remain willing to discuss their own failures as long as the discussion stays theoretical, bounded, safe. What they cannot permit is the form that makes failure impossible to abstract away. The Devils teaches us nothing about the seventeenth century. It teaches us that power requires the right distance. Artists who remove that distance are the ones who get banned.