The Devil Rides Out

Separating The Wheatley 
From The Chaff

The Devil Rides Out
UK 1967
Directed by Terence Fisher
Hammer/Shout Factory Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Retire comfortably to a chalk circle if you don’t want to be attacked by spoilers.

It’s been a while since I last revisited the jewel in Terence Fisher’s directorial crown, The Devil Rides Out and, probably even longer since I read Dennis Wheatley’s best selling 1934 novel of the same name. And when I say best selling... I mean best selling. I remember as a kid, growing up in the 1970s, long before Stephen King became a name on bookshop shelves. If you were looking for fiction (of pretty much any kind, horror or not) you would find the shelves of book sellers and newsagents stacked high with large quantities of Wheatley’s tomes (and this one and The Haunting Of Toby Jugg were in pretty much every shop in the country that dealt with popular reading material, if memory serves). Bizarrely, they seem all but extinct these days but certainly, back in the 1930s through to, maybe the very early 1980s, these were wherever you looked. 

The Devil Rides Out was actually the second of 11 books that Wheatley wrote about the central character The Duke de Richleau (yes, fictional ancestor of that other famous Richleau). It was also the second film adaptation to feature him although, in the first one back in the 1930s, his character and name were changed somewhat. Only three of that series, this one included, had a basis in the occult as Wheatley was more known, at one time, for his pulpy adventure stories rather than his ‘few and far between’ occult adventures.

In this movie adaptation, which was pushed for by Christopher Lee (a friend of Wheatley’s) who plays The Duke de Richleau, he is joined by his three companions from those novels (making up the four modern musketeers in spirit, as I think they were originally pitched)... Rex (played by Leon Greene but dubbed by Patrick Allen), Simon (played by Patrick Mower) and Richard (played by Paul Eddington... best known, perhaps, for his stints on The Good Life and Yes, Minister). Other characters of interest are Nike Arrighi as Tanith, Sarah Lawson as Richard’s wife Marie and Charles Gray as devil worshipping satanist Mocata (obviously based on Aleister Crowley although, I very much suspect from an anecdote I read once by Wheatley about his meeting the man in question, that it’s based more on the sensationalist idea of Crowley than, perhaps, the personality of the man himself). 

And it’s a pretty good film. There are lots of elements missing such as the part of the plot dealing with the mummified penis talisman being sought to start a Second World War and using the Swastika, referring back to the days before it became a Nazi symbol, to deflect evil (it’s replaced by a common or garden variety Christian cross in the movie) but it’s actually a pretty good adaptation by another writing legend, Richard Matheson, who manages to extract and translate into film terms what was useful and yet still remain true to the spirit of the novel. 

Director Fisher does some nice things with vertical uprights and interior features, not to mention lighting to make very clean shot compositions to carry the action across. I especially like what he does with Patrick Mower’s shadow in one sequence, where it’s lit in such a way that it towers above him but, when his sense of power is taken from him by Mocata and he joins him once more as a complicit victim, he is suddenly lit from above and his shadow diminishes in size to something much smaller than him. 

Also, there’s a nice prominent colour palette of rich blues and pastel mauves in much of the picture, especially when something dark and devil worshippy comes up, later added to with some deep reds to warm everything up even more. 

Now, about those colours... I deliberately bought the US Shout Factory restoration of the film (the title of the film on the print is The Devil’s Bride, the original US title chosen for fear of people thinking this might be a Western) because I wanted one where the original special effects hadn’t been that tampered with (there was some revisionist style upgrading with CGI in various modern/recent versions of the film) and I was right to do so. However, the ‘other’ restoration by Studio Canal (a company name I’ve come to hate over the years for various reasons) is also included in the extras on this disc and, when I put it on to compare some scenes, I was horrified with the difference in the restoration. Some of the night scenes did not look very dark at all and, in terms of those beautiful rich colours I’d noticed... well... all I’m saying is the Studio Canal version (which I think is the only one available on Blu Ray over here in the UK, where the film was actually made) looks pretty washed out and mediocre in comparison to the main one featured here on the Shout Factory disc. I’m so glad I trusted my gut on this. 

Rounding out the extras on the Shout Factory edition are a ‘making of’ section, a talk about the movie by the always watchable Kim Newman and another one by the similarly worthwhile Jonathan Rigby (plus a couple of trailers where, on one of them, Leon Green’s voice isn’t completely dubbed out). 

And, yeah, The Devil Rides Out is, much like the novel on which it’s based, a fine romp of an entertainment and it even features a less than subtle but quite wonderful score by Hammer alumnus James Bernard... one of the few Hammer film scores which actually got a CD release for a short while (I put it on for a spin every now and again). If you are into films which take traditional (rather than strictly true life) devil rituals and weave them into fantastic tales of supernatural dread as a metaphor for good verus evil, with an absolutely top notch performance by Christopher Lee (playing the hero rather than the villain role he was often landed with) then this one should go right to the top of your list. It’s one of those films I come back to every 15 years or so and, yeah, I’m hoping this won’t be the last time I give it some play.