In the annals of cinema history, few films have endured a purgatory as prolonged and unjust as Ken Russell’s 1971 masterpiece, The Devils . Based on Aldous Huxley’s non-fiction book The Devils of Loudun , the film is a blistering, hallucinatory assault on religious hypocrisy, political corruption, and mass hysteria. For over five decades, it has been treated like a contagion—censored, banned, buried, and chopped into pieces by its own distributor, Warner Bros.