Read the Empire Movie review of The Devils. Whatever the moral perspective, it keeps you gripped right to the...

Ken Russell's infamous, blasphemous, sexy religious horror reaches new audiences just in time to take on new meaning in the Trump era.

Ken Russell was at his audacious best in this landmark 70s film, writes Philip French

R • 1 hour 51 min • 1971

Madhouse Notes The drowning of a young couple in Women in Love and the Swiss idyll corrupted by an epicene aristocrat. The aborted honeymoon in the swaying railway car in The Music Lovers and...

Working from John Whiting's play of the same title, and Aldous Huxley's book, The Devils of Loudun, Ken Russell has taken some historical liberties in fashioning the story of Father Grandier (Oliver Reed), sensually liberated priest in 17th-century France whose ethics brought him into conflict with the political ambitions of Cardinal Richelieu and the Catholic Church, and whose virile presence and backstairs reputation cued the erotic fantasies of a humpbacked nun, Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave).

A burning at the stake, an afternoon in the rack, headscrews, a douche with boiling water, nails into hands, induced vomiting, ripped tongues, dead babies,