Horrorx52: 2026
11/52

I was already inclined to give this film five stars, but once I saw that it was publicly condemned by the Vatican upon its release, I knew five stars was the ONLY option.

The Devils tells a fictional account of the very real events which took place in 17th century France, whereby a Catholic priest was tortured and burned at the stake for accusations of witchcraft which arose from a convent of Ursuline nuns, instigated and exacerbated by religious and government officials who wanted said priest, Urbain Grandier, stripped of his power and influence.

This film does a truly exceptional job at exploring the power of an established narrative and religious institutions, how false information can be used to manipulate and bend reality, and the consequences of disregarding truth and reason.

There’s a deeply palpable horror that accompanies conviction devoid of reason, and once an individual can convince others that their beliefs are commonly held, that can quickly spiral into a reality where objective truth no longer matters. A great example of this is when the King offered the hysterical nuns a box allegedly containing the blood of Christ, which had an immediate effect on the mother superior, only for the King to reveal an empty box. But those nuns already gave such credence to their established reality they respond and behave as if it is real. And the King is just there for lols.

Unfortunately, bending reality becomes relatively easy when the masses believe in an all-powerful, all-seeing deity in the sky calling the shots and making moral judgments on everyone. You can do or claim whatever you want under that kind of system because it is upheld by faith, not truth or logic. The priest is possessing the nuns, and you can't prove he's NOT doing that! Because god works in mysterious ways or whatever!!!

Truly, one of the scariest aspects of humanity is the continued prevalence of religious institutions and the havoc they wreak on individuals and the world. Persecution and condemnation of different faiths, the non-white, women, those with disability, those who fall outside heteronormativity or the gender binary, or simply any group that is deemed other. Basically anyone that isn't a white man! And even then, as shown in this film, men can and have used religion as a tool to bring down other white men when they become a political barrier or don't marry your daughter that they got pregnant.

Despite this being a fictitious adaptation, ostensively all the individual events in this film took place throughout history, which is just one reason this film is so effective. The torture methods were real. The witch hunts, the 'exorcisms', the cases of mass hysteria—all encouraged and exacerbated by men, manipulating public opinion at the behest of other powerful men who would leverage such situations for their own political or personal gain.

Quotes that go hard:
• "Communities which ought to be furnaces where souls are forever on fire with the love of god are merely dead with the grey ashes of convenience."
• "Most religions believe that by crying, 'LORD! LORD!' often enough they can contrive to enter the kingdom of heaven. A flock of trained parrots could just as readily cry the same thing with just as little chance of success."
• "Anything found in the desert of a frustrated life can bring hope."
• "Especially invented for this occasion is the work of men who are not concerned with fact, or the law, or with theology; but a political experiment to show how the will of one man can be pushed into destroying not only one man, not only one city, but one nation."

#1: The most popular unseen horror from my watchlist