August 13, 2026
The marketing and aesthetics of A24 films are often lauded without giving proper due to their true inspiration: the gritty, hyperrealistic cinema of the 1970s. From the logotypes to the color palettes, popular A24 films like Backrooms, Heretic, and Midsommar all evoke the classic vivid hues and vérité-style cinematography of classics like Serpico, Taxi Driver, Network, and Straw Dogs. This approach has entranced many Gen Z audiences who are weary of the glossy, digitally enhanced, and now AI-ascendant confines of modern Marvel superhero and Fast & Furious car-crash-blockbuster-dominated films so slick they might as well be TV commercials.
Now a new studio, backed by Warner Bros., is aiming to focus on that retro-loving young audience even more with the launch of a shingle called Clockwork. Headed by former Neon executives Christian Parkes (who left Neon in December 2025), Jason Wald, and Spencer Collantes, the new effort, formally announced at CinemaCon in April, is specifically targeting this audience with low-budget, high-quality films that tread the line between arthouse cinema and cult hits.
One of the first films to bear the Clockwork logo will actually be a throwback supernatural horror film from 1971 called The Devils, directed by Ken Russell, who died in 2011. If you’re unfamiliar with Russell’s work, you might have heard of 1980’s Altered States (a science fiction, isolation tank, and hallucinogenic drugs-fueled trip into genetic memory), 1967’s Billion Dollar Brain (a spy drama centered around a supercomputer), or 1988’s The Lair of the White Worm (a gothic horror tale of a cult that worships an ancient monster). You can see the theme here—Russell liked to explore unusual territory.
The same is true of The Devils, which is based on a real case of a priest (Father Urbain Grandier) in France who was accused of being in league with Satan and facilitating the demonic possession of a group of nuns. History says he was railroaded over local politics, but he was nevertheless burned at the stake for his supposed witchcraft crimes in 1634 in Loudun, France, not long before the Salem witch trials began in colonial Massachusetts.
For decades, Warner Bros. has kept this film in the relative shadows. For anyone wondering why, this savage 1971 New York Times review from Vincent Canby may help to explain.
“The Devils, in fact, is of so little substance, obscene or otherwise, that I can only believe that the men and women of the Motion Picture Association, who rated the film ‘X,’ must be in league with Beelzebub, or with Warner Brothers, the self-described ‘Kinney leisure company’ that financed the film,” wrote Canby. “It just may be that there’s still enough mystery in an X rating to make The Devils more popular than it has any right to be.”
Despite that scathing review, the film, which had a budget of around $2 million, was actually profitable, pulling in roughly $11 million (an indie success for the time), with most of that profit coming from overseas markets. Clockwork is now releasing a remastered director’s cut of the film that will debut in theaters on October 16 (perfect for the Halloween season). However, this isn’t a money play, since the film will only be in theaters for one week. What it is is brilliant marketing. Russell’s once-dangerous film that only cinema nerds even knew about will finally get the modern respect it deserves.
And in the process, this will help to brand Clockwork as a place where filmmakers with fresh, authentic voices that hew toward the golden age of 1970s film can make and distribute their films. Bolstered by the knowledge that the label’s founders actually appreciate weird films like The Devils, Clockwork is signaling that it’s open for strange business, something Gen Z and younger Millennials seem to be rewarding at the box office.
Cover image: scenes from ‘The Devils’ via Warner Bros./Clockwork
