Opinion: ‘The Devils’ Just Proved NC-17 Isn’t Poison. Horror Should Stop Cutting Its Hardest Scenes
A 55-year-old British movie about a priest, a convent and the machinery of religious hysteria went out with an NC-17 from a major studio label this fall. It was booked for one week. Three weeks later, it has taken in $3,803,134 in North America and it is still playing. Ken Russell’s The Devils was not supposed to be a business case for anything. It was supposed to be a repertory curiosity for people who own too many Blu-rays.
Here is my take: that little run should embarrass everyone in horror who still treats NC-17 as an automatic death sentence. The rating’s old curse was mostly about things that no longer govern how people find movies. Horror keeps paying for it anyway, one trimmed kill at a time. The Devils does not prove every slasher should go uncut. It proves studios should stop assuming they already know the answer.
The Numbers Are Small, and That’s the Point
Let’s not oversell it. The film opened October 16 in 350 North American locations to $1.725 million, a $4,925 per-screen average. That was enough to kill the one-week plan. By October 29, label Warner Bros. Clockwork said the run would continue with no end date and bookings left to individual theaters. Halloween weekend added $275,452 from 217 theaters, which works out to roughly $1,270 a screen. Nobody is buying a yacht.
But look at what it was up against. Fangoria’s opening-weekend report had it sharing the market with Street Fighter at $31 million, and a repertory title has no new story to sell. Before it even opened, 35mm previews at 10 locations sold out more than six weeks early, and the official trailer pulled more than 21 million organic views. Those are not the signs of an audience scared off by two letters. If anything, the rating was the marketing.
Now compare it to the history. The Numbers’ top NC-17 chart runs Showgirls at $20.35 million, Bad Education at $5.2 million, Lust, Caution at $4.6 million and Shame at $4 million. By my count, a re-release from 1971 is already knocking on the door of the top four, with its run still going. World of Reel also reports this is the first NC-17 release in Warner Bros.’ 103 years, which makes the result stranger and more useful.
The Curse Was Built for a World That’s Gone
Why did studios fear this rating so much? The Ringer’s history of it lays out the practical reasons. When the MPAA introduced NC-17 in 1990, some newspapers refused to run ads for those films and Blockbuster banned them outright. Then MGM’s Showgirls arrived in 1995, earned about $20 million and became the cautionary tale everyone cited for decades. That year, per The Numbers, NC-17 titles took 0.38% of the domestic market. In most years since, the figure has rounded to nearly nothing.
Those were real commercial threats in 1995, when a movie’s fate depended on print ads and rental shelves. In 2026, Blockbuster is a nostalgia punchline and newspaper ad policy decides nothing. A horror audience finds out about a film from a trailer, a clip or somebody online yelling that it’s the most disturbing thing they’ve ever seen. The trailer for The Devils got its 21 million views without any of the old gatekeepers signing off. The distribution chokepoints that gave the rating its teeth have mostly disappeared. What’s left is habit.
Photo: Oliver Reed, who plays Father Urbain Grandier in The Devils, via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license), cropped.
Warner Spent 55 Years Proving My Point
The film’s own history is the best argument here. The 1971 U.S. release carried an X and was trimmed beyond the British version, and an R didn’t come until 1979. Warner and British censors both wanted a two-and-a-half-minute sequence known as “The Rape of Christ” gone entirely. In an interview with Inverse, critic Mark Kermode, who tracked the lost footage down through Warner UK shipping logs around 2000 or 2001, explains that the studio was alarmed by the material and doubted the film could earn much. After a 2004 screening of the reconstruction, nothing happened. Russell died in 2011 without seeing a proper release.
What finally changed it? Not new technology. Two people at Clockwork, Spencer Collantes and Christian Parkes, approached the studio in 2025, and the 4K restoration from the original camera negative became Clockwork’s first repertory title, premiering at Cannes. “They didn’t even wear them down. They woke them up,” Kermode told Inverse. That’s the whole story of NC-17 fear in one line. It was never tested. It was just never questioned.
Horror Keeps Paying the Tax
Horror gets hit by this constantly. As The Ringer notes, plenty of horror movies draw an NC-17 on the way to a multiplex-ready cut. SlashFilm’s rundown has Scream losing stabs in its opening and kitchen scenes, and Saw losing about eight seconds of its hacksaw scene. Saw III reportedly drew an NC-17 six separate times before it got its R. Ari Aster has said Midsommar carried the tag for six weeks of back-and-forth.
And it’s still happening, this year, on the movies we’re all talking about. Curry Barker has said he had to take out six or seven more hits from the face-smashing sequence in Obsession after swearing he wouldn’t lose any. And before Evil Dead Burn opened, director Sébastien Vaniček said in an interview: “There is a scene that is not R-rated.” He said he had to cut it. We never saw it.
Did the safe version save anything? Evil Dead Burn opened to $13.7 million against tracking of $25 million to $30 million, about 44% under the $24.5 million Evil Dead Rise debut, and finished with $32.2 million domestic. It reached $72.4 million worldwide on a $20 million budget, so it’s no catastrophe, and I can’t tell you an NC-17 would have done better. It probably wouldn’t have opened as wide. But it’s fair to say the cut didn’t buy the box office the cut was supposed to protect. For a franchise whose entire brand is going too far, that’s a bleak trade.
Photo: Damien Leone, writer-director of Terrifier 3, via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license), cropped.
The Terrifier Test
The obvious counterexample to studio caution is Terrifier 3 , which went out with no rating at all, took in $54 million domestic and $98.4 million worldwide, and did it on a $2 million budget. It became the highest-grossing unrated film ever, and Scott Mendelson noted at the time it had already passed the inflation-adjusted Showgirls number.
Damien Leone’s series showed that extremity can be the selling point, and that fans will drive to a multiplex for it. It didn’t need a big studio’s permission. It needed the movie to be exactly as nasty as the people buying tickets wanted.
Here’s What I’d Actually Do
I’m not asking a studio to bet a $100 million tentpole on this. Don’t replace the R cut. Add to it. Take a mid-budget horror movie, release the R wide and put the director’s version out as a limited event a few weeks later, with 200 to 350 theaters, 35mm if you can, and a marketing pitch that writes itself: the version they told you couldn’t play. The Devils just showed roughly what that footprint can do, and it did it with a movie older than most of its audience. Now imagine it with Vaniček’s missing scene and a current fanbase.
That costs relatively little beyond prints and a campaign, and it gives filmmakers something a trim note never does: a reason to believe the hard version will be seen. Warner’s Clockwork is even teasing what comes next, and Dread Central spotted it posting old VHS packaging with the date 11.10.26, which suggests a home release, though nothing’s confirmed. The appetite is there on the home side too.
The Other Side
There’s a strong case against all this, and it deserves a fair hearing. First, The Devils is an outlier. It’s a legendary, long-suppressed film with a built-in cult and a censorship story that doubles as an ad campaign. A new movie has none of that mystique. Second, $3.8 million is tiny, and we don’t know what the restoration and rollout cost. Third, the Halloween-weekend average of about $1,270 shows how fast this audience gets served.
Fourth, and most important: Terrifier 3 wasn’t NC-17. Dexerto reported that major chains generally treated it like an R, letting under-17s in with an adult. An NC-17 locks that crowd out entirely, and teenagers have always been a big part of horror’s business. Some exhibitors may simply refuse to book it. Those are real walls, and a wide NC-17 release of a big franchise film probably stays a bad bet. WBUR’s critic even worried that corporate change could put this film back in the vault. Nothing here is guaranteed to last.
I’d just point out that none of those objections argues against trying a limited second cut. They argue against betting the house, which nobody’s asking for.
Bottom Line
For 36 years, NC-17 has worked less like a rating than a ghost story, passed down from one nervous executive to the next. A restored 1971 film just walked through the haunted house and came out with $3.8 million and an open-ended run. That doesn’t make NC-17 a gold mine. It does make the automatic trim look like superstition, and horror, of all genres, should know better than to obey one of those.
So tell me I’m wrong: would you pay to see the uncut version of Evil Dead Burn or Obsession in a theater, or is the R cut enough? And is NC-17 still poison where you live?
Related on The Horror Feed
Header photo: Ken Russell in 1971 via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license), cropped with text added.
Sources: Dread Central (box office and Nov. 10 tease), Dread Central (extended run), Dread Central (rating), iHorror, World of Reel, Fangoria (The Devils), Inverse, Boxoffice Pro, WBUR, The Numbers (NC-17), The Numbers (Evil Dead Burn), The Numbers (Terrifier 3), The Ringer, SlashFilm, Bloody Disgusting, Epicstream, ComingSoon, Horror Obsessive, Fangoria (Terrifier 3), Scott Mendelson, Dexerto.
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