To the Devil a Daughter (1976) on Netflix
Excommunicated for heresy, Father Michael Rayner runs a Bavarian order where Catherine Beddows grew up. Before her eighteenth birthday, her father asks occult writer John Verney to take her in.
- Netflix2.6/5
- IMDb5.8/105,867 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes45%
Trailer
Plot summary
Father Michael Rayner is expelled from the Catholic Church for heresy. Twenty years on, he leads the Children of the Lord, an order headquartered on a small Bavarian island, and Catherine Beddows has been raised there at her late mother's urging. Days before her eighteenth birthday, Rayner releases her from the convent. In London, the American occult expert John Verney launches a book at an art exhibition, where Catherine's father, Henry, asks him to collect his daughter from Heathrow and keep her with him, saying the order is a Satanic cult. Verney agrees and intercepts her at the airport. His friends Anna and David meet her the following morning, and Verney tells them the order is preparing a rite for her birthday.
Cast
- Izabella Telezynskaas Margaret
- Anna Bentinckas Isabel
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about To the Devil a Daughter (1976)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Richard Widmark, cast as the occult writer John Verney, threatened several times to abandon the shoot and return to the United States, scuffled with cast and crew, and dismissed Hammer as "Mickey Mouse Productions", director Peter Sykes recalled.
- The West German co-financier Terra Filmkunst demanded a German performer be given a leading role, so director Peter Sykes cast Nastassja Kinski as Catherine after seeing her in Wim Wenders's Wrong Move (1975).
- Nastassja Kinski was fourteen when she filmed the role of Catherine and appeared fully nude on screen, something she later regretted.
- Hammer executive Michael Carreras said the film "simply didn't work" and that its makers had forgotten the ending; he asked EMI's Nat Cohen for money for a new ending, and Cohen refused.
- Novelist Dennis Wheatley found the finished film obscene and told Hammer they were never to make another film from his novels.
- Christopher Lee's line "It is not heresy ... and I will not recant!" was sampled by the heavy metal band White Zombie for the song "Super-Charger Heaven", and the band also referenced the film's title in "Black Sunshine".
- To the Devil a Daughter was the last film of the British actor Michael Goodliffe, made shortly before he killed himself while suffering from depression.
