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

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?

Image Credit: Warner Bros.

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 sequence exemplifies this more than 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 by a ragtag bunch of familiar figures: 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 PG-rated 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 second shot? Where is she from? 

What if I told you the true story behind this cameo is somehow weirder and more fascinating than anything else the movie has to offer. 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 film so notorious that the company that funded it still refuses for it to be seen, 51 years after it first hit theatres. 

In the late 1960s, divisive British filmmaker Ken Russell set out to write and direct a film adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun for WB, which had itself been adapted for the stage a few years prior. The book is a nonfiction account of 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 a highly orchestrated political coup, 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 horrified by the final product they 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 financial and critical disappointment. 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 film using bits and pieces shown in the making-of documentary, Hell on Earth (2002). 

Perhaps with the exception of Disney’s embarrassingly racist Song of the South (1946), I honestly can’t think of another studio film in history that has been suppressed as much as The Devils; not by censors or religious lobbyists, but by the studio who funded it in the first place. There is currently no official 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 or rent any official cut of the film, 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 so shocking? Perhaps it was the notorious sequence dubbed ‘The Rape of Christ’, in which a group of manic nuns sexually defile a statue of Jesus. Or the scene involving Vanessa Redgrave, a disembodied femur, and a place where the sun doesn't shine. The film is surely provocative, with gruesome depictions of torture, stomach-churning plague-remedies, and a few erotically charged exorcisms thrown in for good measure. There are hornets, crocodiles, giant syringes, boiling liquids, needles, mallets, and who could forget holy water? I’m 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, the film’s star, said the following: 

“We weren’t trying to afford 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, film critic Mark Kermode describes The Devils as a film about the “unholy 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 relevant, and few films have depicted religious fanaticism in quite as disturbing a way. Indeed, The Devils still feels dangerous, regardless of its camp aesthetics and outdated effects. It has the vibe of something 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 still being suppressed? After all, it’s been over half-a-century. It’s hard to imagine anybody batting an eyelid were a company like Criterion to finally release it uncensored. In fact, most people wouldn’t even realise, given how niche the market for it is. 

These days, films like The Devils are no rarity. In 2021, Paul Verhoeven directed and co-wrote Benedetta, a sexually explicit film set in a convent 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 release the film being successful, but I’m not hopeful. WB have taken such a personal dislike to the film 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-a-century, which is every bit as absurd as the story behind Ken Russell’s unsanctimonious sleeper classic itself.