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WARNING: I’m not Spoiler or Content Tagging anything in this piece… If you scroll downwards you will see Gore, The Horrors of War, Oddities of Every imaginable thing, descriptions to make your skin scrawl, blasphemies upon blasphemies, Medieval/Early modern medical devices/ conditions/horrors, “Yo Mamma” jokes, graphic depictions of rape (in woodcut, illustration, and film), and Boobies. Lots of Boobies. Untold Boobies.
As will become apparent… You really cannot “Content Restrict” the 17th Century. This is Your warning if you’re at work or otherwise sensitive.
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Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.
-John Stuart Mill
Hell is Empty and All the Devils are Here
What if the 1990s Berserk anime, Warhammer 40k, A Man for All Seasons, The Wickerman (1972), Cromwell, 1984, The Gulag Archipelago, the Rocky Horror Picture Show and the chronically underrated 2012 horror masterpiece Compliance… were all the same horrifying movie?
What if Mel Gibson made a film like Apocalypto, exploring the nightmarish depths of political/religious sacrifice rituals… But about Early-Modern Shakespeare-era Europe?
I’m constantly asked for my “Greatest Film of all Time”… A torturous question for someone who’s seen as many movies as me… And doubly torturous because maybe the best true answer is one its really hard to name:
Ken Russel’s The Devils might be it.
Certainly the best 30 Years War film ever made.
And the Greatest goth movie ever made.
And the Greatest witch hunt movie ever made.
And the Greatest “MeToo” movie ever made.
And the Greatest “insane asylum” movie ever made.
And CERTAINLY the Greatest Exorcist movie ever made.
Yes, I said that. And I mean it. Did I stutter?
And maybe the Greatest “Dark Fantasy” film ever made… Except for the fact that the whole thing is true.
And its being rereleased, the full remastered director’s cut in 4K, this October in Cinemas.
(The strobe effect is only in the trailer)
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Ken Russel’s The Devil, adapted from Aldous Huxley’s book The Devils of Loudon and the play The Devils by Dan Whiting, is one of my top five films of all time. And certainly one of the biggest films of all time in it’s own weird way. It does things as impressive for the spiritual, psychological horrifying, and historical on film as Sergei Bonderchuk’s Waterloo does for warfare or Akira for Scifi and Animation.
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Indeed I think I might be the only one who could give that answer, given I might be one of like 10 people who know 17th Century History/Literature and obscure extreme Horror Cinema well enough to INSIST on its OVERWHELMING historical accuracy.
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Indeed I’d struggle to think of a film which captures the Insane deadly hypersexual kaleidoscopic character of the 17th century better.
I’ve been doing this alot recently… But I feel I need to lay out my qualifications here to talk about this… My two areas of focus in university were 17th and 18th century English Literature (Shakespeare through to Jane Austin), and 17th and 18th century Political theory (specifically the works of Hobbes, Locke, Hugo Grotius and other natural law theorists… Yes, I took the BoomerCons seriously when they said natural law was the basis of our society, I believed them… Like an idiot) I’m by no means an expert, but the broad flavor of this era: Culturally, religiously, politically, historically, militarily, theoretically, theologically, poetically… Was what I immersed myself in during the years when I should have been drinking and partying more and repeating nonsense to people in power, and other things that actually advance your career.
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I need to establish that off the bat because I feel as if a huge part of the reason this film is not regarded as a contender for “Greatest film ever made” is the simply the fact that audiences and critics do not believe it, and certainly do not GET it.
That it is SO Bizarre, and SO weird, and SO horrifyingly violent, and SO hypersexual, and SO saturated in it’s colors, and SO religiously discordant… That it has to be a bizarre psychedelic hellscape of Ken Russel’s perverse drug-addled imagination…
They especially had to think this because if they accepted that it was indeed historically accurate, and not a bizarre sexual/psychedelic story of the American 1960s and 70s reading themselves back into history… Suddenly they’d have to accept that the same thing done to Loudon in 1634 was what was being done to America in the middle of the 20th century, and has been done to the west more or less ever since…
That the yo-yo between state-enforced debauchery one the one hand, and moral panic witch-hunts on the other, is not a schizophrenic attribute of mass media or “Moral Progress” or American Culture… But a highly historically precedented and calculated attack meant to destroy and enslave a people without fighting them.
That “Free Love”, “Feminist Criticism”, “Queer Theory”, “No Fault Divorce”, and “Hostile Work Environment lawsuits” rock society between the extremes of sexual license and socio-sexual moral-panic for the same reason one might rapidly rock a boat between it’s port and starboard sides… To capsize it into the devouring abyss.
That we are indeed living through Loudon at scale.
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So in this piece I’m going to go through, summarize what I think is needed and provide the relevant historical context to the early bits so you can see that NO, none of this is a stretch or out of Character for the 17th century (or at least for one of the most extreme moments of that age)… Indeed it is a work of pure genius.
The Most Protestant Film ever made.
WTF Am I Looking At!?
This film has maybe the most aggressive cold opens of any film in history. And possibly the greatest Villain introduction.
I’ve seen films open on torture, rapes, and the executions of pregnant women that are not as hard on audiences as the opening shot of The Devils.
It starts with a play.
A man dressed in a thong and clamshell bra is lifted from a sparkling surf… It is a staged production of the birth of Aphrodite, entirely in drag.
This is king Louis XIII (13) of France (1601-1643). Playing Aphrodite.
He gives this entire long performance before a Catholic Cardinal! Who is in attendance and watching this depravity with an approving smile.
This is the Famous/infamous Cardinal Richelieu, the Religious/Government minister most responsible for the destruction and killing of thousands throughout the French Religious Wars and destroying the various independent principalities and city polities that would become part of the modern centralized French State.
Yes not only are the degenerate French Royal court involved in this, but A Catholic Cardinal and even nuns assisting him are in attendance to witness this degenerate performance from a gay king performing a Grecian Pagan theatrical number… In drag.
The Play ends with the Crowned “Aphrodite”, Louis XIII, kissing Cardinal Richelieu's ring after agreeing that they must violate their treaties of peace and destroy the remaining Huguenot Protestants who’ve recently rebelled against the crown, but had agreed to return under terms of toleration and religious protection. Louis and Richelieu agree they’re going to violate those agreements and destroy them… Committing the violence in peace that they could not accomplish in war.
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And the important thing to understand is… the Scene is NOT improbable. Indeed many MANY people alive at the time would have described exactly this if you asked them to describe the French Court or the king’s relationship to Richelieu.
Everything related to the Historical Possessions of Loudon and the political struggles around Cardinal Richelieu’s consolidation of the French state, and especially the Sexual politics of French courtly life… while that’s all open to endless historical debate… We DO have what was written down… And we do have all the various rumors and accusations of Louis XIII’s homosexuality and pederasty as repeated by people alive at the time
Allegedly he’d forced an adolescent Marquis de Cinq-Mars to bed dressed as bride… Only for the Marquis to be less affectionate than he liked, and the Marquis to subsequently involve himself in the conspiracies to assassinate cardinal Richelieu… He was then caught and Louis had the Marquis behead at age 22, his last words were, “Ah ! Mon Dieu, qu’est-ce de ce monde?” (’My God! What is this world?’).
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Remember: This is all going on during the 30 Years War in Germany and all the related wars that poured out of it. Maybe the bloodiest most horrifying war cycle to hit Europe in the past 1000 years, with maybe the worst and most horrifying abuses of any war in Human history.
That’s not me saying that. That’s Albert Speer saying that in 1945:
In his radio broadcast on 4 May 1945, Hitler’s architect and armaments minister, Albert Speer, announced “the destruction that has been inflicted on Germany can only be compared to that of the Thirty Years War. The decimation of our people through hunger and deprivation must not be allowed to reach the proportion of that epoch.’ For this reason, he went on, Hitler’s successor, Admiral Donitz, had given the order to lay down arms. Public opinion surveys carried out in the 1960s revealed that Germans placed the Thirty Years War as their country’s greatest disaster ahead of both world wars, the Holocaust and the Black Death.
-Peter H. Wilson, “Europe’s Tragedy” (pg 6)
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In World War 2 Germany lost 8% of its prewar population. The USSR 13%. Poland 17%. And in especially hard hit Belarus they lost 25% of their prewar population.
In the 30 Years War the German Areas of the Holy Roman Empire lost FORTY PERCENT of their pre-war population. In Pomerania and other hard hit areas this rose to 50 or even 80%.
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“OK…” You might say. “So Louis XIII was a rumored and nearly confirmed Gay-Pedophile and the Protestants would certainly say he was a tyrant and murderous maniac, and Cardinal Richelieu was certainly a powerful religiously genocidal figure if not completely controlling the throne… AND this was at the height of religious warfare beyond even anything seen in 20th century ideological warfare. But SURELY this Drag performance of the Birth of Aphrodite BY THE KING would not have been done, even to a courtly private audience!? Surely THIS is an absurd stretch.”
You’d think so. But no.