The Devils in the details: The outrageous story behind Space Jam: A New Legacy’s most bizarre cameo

Words by Jim Bradshaw

51 years after its release, The Devils remains Warner Bros.’ dirty little secret, so how did one of its characters end up in a Looney Toons movie?

Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021) is, to put it rather crudely, a dick-measuring contest; more an expensive slide-show of the Warner Bros. (WB) back catalogue than a movie in its own right, and no its climactic basketball match. After all, it wouldn’t be a Space Jam sequel without one.

At multiple moments throughout the game, Don Cheadle’s Al G. Rhythm is accompanied court-side

Pennywise the clown, an agent from The Matrix, the cast of The Wizard of Oz, a few Batman villains, even the droogs from A Clockwork Orange show up for a malenky bit of PGrated ultra-violence. WB sure owns a lot of shit, and boy do they want everyone to know it. But what about the nun who seems to be in every

What if I told you the true story behind this cameo is somehow weirder and more fascinating than

You see, this is no ordinary nun. It just happens to be a character from an infamously unholy occult-classic known simply as The Devils (1971): a that funded it still refuses for it to theatres.

In the late 1960s, divisive British

Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun for WB, which had itself been adapted for the stage a few years prior. The so-called ‘possessions of Loudun’ that occurred in France throughout the 1630s. It’s a mind-boggling story that combines one promiscuous priest, 17 sexually hysterical Ursuline nuns, demonic bewitchments, public exorcisms, archaic torture methods, a holy war, and the plague, all culminating in a witch trial and burning at the stake.

Given Russell’s track record of boundary pushing and the grisly nature of the source material, it’s no surprise that WB were utterly were delivered, prompting extensive edits by both studio executives and censors. Two entire sequences were cut completely, and countless smaller edits were also made. In essence, The Devils was sent out to die; branded with an X-rating in both the U.S. and UK that destined it for

Regardless of the headlines and controversies it caused at the time, it didn’t stay in the mainstream eye for long, and has unfortunately never managed to become much of a household name.

In the years since its initial release, The Devils has seldom been seen, due mostly to how unavailable WB has made it. It appeared on VHS three-times throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s — even more heavily censored than in theatres — and on DVD a grand total of once, by the British Film Institute in 2012. It has been available to stream only twice — once through Shudder and once through Criterion — and available for rental for a mere three days, after which time it disappeared from the iTunes store without explanation. From what I can gather, almost 100% of illegal streams online are of the fan edit that attempted to ‘un-censor’ the the making-of documentary, Hell on Earth (2002).

Perhaps with the exception of Disney’s embarrassingly racist Song of the South (1946), I honestly history that has been suppressed as much as The Devils; not by censors or religious lobbyists, but by the way to watch the movie outside of the British DVD, itself the result of a decade-long attempt to break through WB’s gridlock that still ended up being censored. You can’t stream regardless of whether you have a VPN, and despite a full restoration of the director’s cut being completed 20-years ago, WB have outright refused to release it.

So what made The Devils notorious sequence dubbed ‘The Rape of Christ’, in which a group of of Jesus. Or the scene involving Vanessa Redgrave, a disembodied femur, and a place where the sun provocative, with gruesome depictions of torture, stomachchurning plague-remedies, and a few erotically charged exorcisms thrown in for good measure. There are hornets, crocodiles, giant syringes, boiling liquids, needles, mallets, and not going to claim that The Devils is tame — even by today’s standards it can be a tough sit — but I can’t say it comes close to a lot of what we’re accustomed to in the golden age of arthouse horror. The answer as to why The Devils copped what it did lies solely in one thing: the religious element.

The Devils is by its very nature aggressively iconoclastic. It holds no sanctity towards religious institutions and consistently uses what many would consider blasphemy to get its point across. In a 1973 television interview on Parkinson, Oliver Reed, anybody proper niceties, any proper little entertainments, little asides before tea. We were showing them the bigotry that goes on or that humanity is capable of.”

In a tribute to Russell posted to YouTube following his death in 2011, The Devils marriage between church and state,” one that renders uncomfortable truths about divine power in the hands of men with an unnerving ferocity. Today, its commentary on fear and hysteria being weaponised against a population feels shockingly religious fanaticism in quite as disturbing a way. Indeed, The Devils still feels dangerous, regardless of its camp aesthetics and outdated you happened upon by accident in the middle of the night and probably shouldn’t be watching.

If The Devils were to have been released uncut in 1971, all hell would have broken loose. You can just imagine the types of deranged lobbyists showing up in droves to condemn it, which is all very ironic considering its central themes. But still the question remains: why is it been over half-a-century. It’s hard to imagine anybody batting an eyelid were a company like Criterion to most people wouldn’t even realise, given how niche the market for it is.

The Devils are no rarity. In 2021, Paul Verhoeven directed and co-wrote Benedetta, a during the bubonic plague that received widespread acclaim. The Devils is, simply put, the unfortunate result of a combination of internal politics and being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Perhaps WB’s new merger with Discovery comes with a silver lining; a new team of department heads and executives may result in the next appeal to but I’m not hopeful. WB have taken that backing out now would probably make them look a little silly.

For now, all we can do is embrace the fact that Space Jam: A New Legacy has somehow reignited a conversation on censorship that has stretched on for over half-acentury, which is every bit as absurd as the story behind Ken Russell’s unsanctimonious sleeper classic itself.

As a visual artist, I’ve been working closely with sound

As a visual artist, I’ve been with artist AnSo over the past year. This is a collection of work artist AnSo over the past year. This is a collection

Our collaborative single, ‘Mollah ( )’, intertwines the intertwines the traditional Korean card game ‘go-stop ( traditional Korean )’ that uses that uses ‘hwatu ( )’ cards and translation of Korean names cards and translation of Korean names into Chinese characters ‘It’s Myself that I Crave’ utilises into Chinese characters. ‘It’s that I Crave’ a 16mm Bolex camera, capturing portraits of AnSo. a 16mm Bolex camera, portraits of AnSo. Self portraitures express our creative and romantic Self express our creative and romantic partnership and journey and the way it mingles with our and and the way it with identities as queer and POC couple.

PHOTOGRAPHER

Estelle Yoon

TALENT

AnSo

IT’S MYSELF THAT I CRAVE