Horror so 'depraved' it was banned in multiple countries to be shown legally for first time in 55 years

A horror movie is being shown in cinemas after decades of controversy and even condemnation by the Vatican.

It's not every day a 55-year-old film is green lit to be screened for the first time legally, in the UK.

But this film is an exception – with its 16 October UA release being celebrated by many film fanatics who want to see the restored version ahead of the UK's 30 October screening.

The flick, which is widely considered to be a masterpiece, faced extreme censorship in 1971 when it was released.

At the time, it was handed an X-rating in the UK, but only after it had already been cut.

However, in the half a century since its release, classification laws have relaxed some.

For example, Salò was recently given a rare re-release by the BFI, even though it was completely banned for over two decades.

Salò wasn't even as censored as The Devils, despite being considered the ‘most disturbing movie ever made.'

The Devils was directed by the controversial yet beloved British director Ken Russell and follows a 17th-century French priest with eccentric views on sex and religion who is slandered as a ‘satanist’ by a Cardinal looking to gain control of the country.

The Devils faced severe censorship in order to be released, but the director’s cut was never allowed to be shown

The Devils is a heavily religious film that includes graphic sex and violence. Who could be offended by that? (Warner Bros)

The film contained extreme sexual content and violence, which when combined with the movie’s extreme religious imagery had an unsurprisingly controversial reception.

This led to the extreme cuts in the UK to achieve an X rating, though 17 local councils still banned it, and outright bans in countries such as Ireland, Malaysia, Chile, and Finland, where it remained banned until 2001.

Speaking about the movie’s censorship James Ferman, the secretary of the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) said: “It's a particular moment in censorship history when all the

controversial issues of censorship came together and outraged the public before the film was even seen because of the style and it's a very irreverent style.

“Many members of the board thought it was excessive and thought it was shameful and disreputable and not something that we should support and needed to be to be uh cut very heavily.”

He pointed out however that the BBFC secretary at the time, John Trevelyan, who went to bat for Russell and prevented further cuts from ruining the film, as happened in America where Russell decried the version shown in US cinemas as having ruined his vision due to the editing forced by censorship.

The Devils was finally screened for the first time in full earlier this year, and this version of the film will receive its first UK screening in October

Amongst the most shocking scenes to cause cuts were one called the ‘rape of Jesus Christ’, described by the BBC as ‘a large statue of Christ [being] assaulted by a variety of rampaging naked nuns’, along with an equally controversial in which a nun uses a heavily charred leg bone of an executed character to masturbate.

These scenes, amongst others, were cut from the version aired in cinemas and, despite a long campaign from famous film critic Mark Kermode, the movie has never been aired in full until this year.

Russell died in 2011 (Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images)

After years of campaigning a full director’s cut called Ken Russell’s The Devils was shown at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year.

Now though the BFI have announced that they will be holding a screening later this year on 30 October 2026, with a major BFI Southbank retrospective next year of Ken Russell’s work.

Stuart Brown, the BFI Director of Programme and Distribution said: “Ken Russell’s The Devils is one of the great masterpieces of British cinema: a film of astonishing imagination, searing power and dazzling formal brilliance.”