Hell Will Have No Surprises For You: The Devils

In the seventeenth century, the priest Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed) dared to seduce every woman who caught his fancy while also rebuking the efforts of Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue) to pull apart his walled city’s fortifications and therefore make the city subservient to his own mad whims. Richelieu sought a way to bring Grandier down, and that came in the form of the crippled abbess Jeanne des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave) who desired the good Father from afar. Outraged when her beloved dared to marry Madeline (Gemma Jones) instead of wooing her, Sister Jeanne accused him of coming to her room as an incubus and seducing her. So, Richelieu assembles his allies: the ambitious Baron De Laubardemont (Dudley Sutton), a chemist (Brian Murphy), a doctor (Max Adrian), the zealot witch hunter Barre (Michael Gothard), the new father confessor for Jeanne’s Ursaline Sisters, Father Mignon (Murray Melvin). The power struggle hitches on an honest appraisal of possession and bedevilment. The interrogations and investigations are a farce, of course, but the “evidence” amounts to enough to bring Grandier on trial for his life. Ken Russell explores religious zealotry, sexual repression, and power abuses in his 1971 adaptation of a Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun: The Devils.

Confession time: I am a fan of nunsploitation genre flicks. There are not a terrific number of the things (compared to, say, nazisploitation features), but there are a few and they are often wonderfully blasphemous and shocking. There is something about a sexually repressed cloister of women discovering their own desires and thereafter freeing themselves as well as they can that appeals to the iconoclastic side of my nature. Also, sexy nuns are sexy, so there’s that.

The Devils is the granddaddy of all nunsploitation flicks, a feature I’d been meaning to see for years but which has been deucedly difficult to do. So, when it finally aired on Shudder in March/April of this year, I finally made time for the opportunity to finally do so. The movie is a nunsploitation fever dream, and yet it is so much more. It’s a dramatization of insanity, of mounting chaos, and of a perversion of Biblical teachings to empower one cruel man’s ideals while suppressing the freedoms enjoyed (and taken for granted) by the townsfolk of Loudun. It’s a movie about the ease with which one whispering motherfucker can ruin the party for all the good people, so long as that whispering motherfucker has the ear of the most powerful man in the world. It’s a film about how easily religion can be perverted from its fundamentals in order to become a weapon targeting one power mad man’s enemies. It’s a piece that questions repressing the essential sinful nature of humankind, an embrace of the carnal, the divine, and the infernal qualities of our own natures, and a joking erasure of the concept of a benevolent godhead who intervenes on the behalf of us poor, foolish sinners. The Devils is a film about pride in all its rotten shapes. Sure it goeth before a fall, but here the question is who will be the first to plummet? There are a dizzying number of possibilities.

The film’s look is bizarre and memorable. Everything is modernist, white tiled with dark grout to emulate a kind of prison cells. The costuming is dramatic and colorful. The images are striking and shocking, even fifty years later. The movie melds the campy, the gut wrenching, and the over the top into a kind of mad surreal experience. There are several scenes that make a murderous party atmosphere of the Ursuline convent and the King’s court, overflowing with debauchery and sin, that are difficult to encapsulate in mere words—they are cavorting, cackling sequences that fill the screen with action and laughter and disquiet. The movie is off-putting, upsetting, and intoxicating in all the finest ways.

Ken Russell made a career out of flamboyance and provocative subject matter. With The Devils he embraces his subject while interweaving bizarre anachronisms and styles into a period horror film. The flick is not quite horror in the way that, say, a slasher flick is. Instead, it peers into a rather grisly event in history and explores it from a contemporary 1970s perspective. It’s as much a shaking of the head at the excesses of puritanical mindsets prior to (and following) the sexual revolution as it is a faithful recounting of Loudun’s terrible trials. It’s a piece that explores the concept of personal freedom, political ambition, and sexuality with a dizzying kind of freedom.

It’s also offers one of Oliver Reed’s finest performances and a terrific turn from Vanessa Redgrave. The latter embraces her role completely, delivering real heart and daring in her portrayal of a sexually obsessed nun who cannot handle the unrequited emotions she has for a man she’s never met. When her character sees the object of her affections as a man who can walk across water or climb down off the cross to fall into her arms, we can get her utter infatuation with him. We also see the challenges of a cloistered life for her.

Russel’s screenplay adapts not only Huxley’s book, but a play titled The Devils from John Whiting. The script is a wild one, something that must have raised some eyebrows and left producers scratching their heads about how anyone would be able to film such a thing. When it found its way to American producers at Warner Brothers, the film lost several scenes before being released to American audiences. The screen story is a visually witty one, overflowing with sex, violence, charm, and horror.

The images captured by cinematographer David Watkin are extraordinary. Mostly in color throughout, though a few of Sister Jeanne’s more fantastic moments are captured in gorgeous black and white. The lighting is often stark, revelatory. There are nighttime scenes, one in particular follows Grandier through the streets of Loudun, which are home to dead collectors (uttering lines that would be made far more comic in 1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail) that then lever bodies onto fires (sometimes complaining about ones that leak), and then leads the priest up into the room of a woman who is dying from plague despite the quackery of a surgeon and chemist. The sequences are lit just right, giving us plenty of shadows and mystery, but never leaving us scratching our heads or squinting as though we might somehow penetrate impossible gloom.

In addition to costuming, the makeup is often unusual and occasionally memorable for its sheer bizarre quality. One of the characters, Grandier’s mistress, cakes her face and throat with a white paint that gives her a cadaverous yet clownish appearance. She first appears in the stuff, stripped to the waist and reciting Latin and eventually its translations while draped over her lover’s chest. Soon enough, she confesses not only her love but her pregnancy, and that’s the point that Grandier leaves her. The scene is there to show us plenty, not only about the priest’s character but about the woman who would become one of his persecutors. However, the sequence ends up on the more memorable side at least partially because of the way she looks. She returns numerous times throughout the piece, her makeup still meticulously applied. It’s a weird element to an already weird movie. I don’t know what it’s supposed to represent, but it certainly lodges in the mind. There are numerous choices for costuming and makeup that just stick right out there in front of you daring you to look away. We might chuckle, we might shudder, but we cannot easily turn aside no matter how absurd or surreal a choice might seem.

That interplay of the ludicrous and the grave might not work for viewers looking for a more uniform tone. However, uniformity is not something to be sought from a Ken Russell movie. He shifts gears sometimes in mid scene, bringing us in with laughs and leaving us with a numbing hatred for all the pomposity and horror human kind is capable of doing. The ending of the film is an inspired series of misanthropic moments that culminates in an emotional climax which is the epitome of the simultaneously heroic yet tragic death that Mel Gibson tried to deliver with his conclusion of Braveheart (1995). Instead of a man riding on horseback, delivering an affecting speech about “freedom!” who winds up eviscerated, we end with a man put to the stake pleading with people to look away from himself to the symbols of their individuality, their pride, and their freedom. Whereas the darkest entries of heroic fantasy fiction can often deliver a sneering shake of the head at the excesses and foolishness of civilization, Russell’s film shakes its head at the foolishness of the human race, just as capable of barbaric deeds while wearing fancy dress as they are without it.

And always, the threat of the plague lingers behind everything. After the film opens with a dramatization of Venus’s birth and Cardinal Richelieu’s sinister seduction of the king, we turn to Loudun proper, where Grandier is offering a morale boosting sermon at the funeral of the town’s now dead magistrate. Part of that involves a proud chest thump about how strong the walls have been at keeping the plague out of the city. Soon after, the plague sweeps right in and devastates the town. Corpse fires burn bright into the night, tended by grumbling body collectors and “physicians” perform their grim tasks while behaving like macabre jesters. With this lunacy on display, it’s a little too easy to see how the locals could view the plague as some kind of judgement from Providence. It certainly fills the role here, though one could argue it’s something less divine and rather infernal that has seeped into the city. Mankind has both the divine and the rotten in its nature, classically portrayed as angels and devils on the shoulders of the conflicted. However, it is our own decision which side of the conflict to align ourselves with. The plague is another tool that the crueler folks use to their own advantage, either to test out crackpot theories or drive their enemies under their own bootheels. The argument here is that though all might be well in God’s house, nothing is right in the world, and despite this (or perhaps because of it), a clever, calculating mind can take full advantage of almost any calamity it encounters. This is the real shuddery concept of the film, a state of mind that could lead toward all manner of depravity both on a personal and a larger, systemic level.

The Devils is certainly a provocative movie, but it is an intensely intelligent one too. It asks a lot of coherent questions while offering a smorgasbord of Fellini-esque images of depravity and strangeness. The movie pairs quite well with Fellini’s Satyricon (1969), in fact, for those looking for another movie to pair this with. More than a nunsploitation movie, it is a powerful examination of mankind’s failings presented through a period-piece, horror film lens. Quality stuff. Such a Hell on earth as we play witness to would leave no surprises for the damned and the bastards who rule it to find when they venture into the real place.

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The Devils is available in an imported DVD and sometimes available in a streaming edition.

Next, we explore Twins of Evil (1971), a horror film from the Hammer Productions Karnstein cycle, which manages to blur gothic horror, vampires, and religious/folk horrors as well. That film is available in a DVD/Blu-ray combo edition as well as a streaming edition.

Writing for “Hell Will Have No Surprises For You: The Devils” is copyright © 2021 by Daniel R. Robichaud.

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