The Devil's Daughter (1991 film)

Did You Know?

• Maitland McDonagh of GoreZone found the film 'a welcome change of pace from the minimalist slasher flicks that still dominate the racks at video stores.'
• On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 60% based on 5 reviews, with an average rating of 5.3/10.

Plot

Back in 1970, out in the Southern California desert, a group of hippies and their kids were camping when a drifter named Damon showed up. They fed him and let him stay. That night, with a few other attackers, he murdered every one of them in a series of ritual killings, calling out to Lucifer as he did it. Fast-forward to 1991 in Frankfurt, Germany. A man called Martin Romero chases a woman named Mary Crane through the streets and kills her in her own home. When cops corner him at a U-Bahn station, he says he was forced to do it, then pulls out a gun and shoots himself. Meanwhile, a schoolteacher named Miriam Kreisl is driving near Seligenstadt and almost hits an old man, Moebius Kelly, with her car. She doesn't know he's a high-ranking member of a Satanic cult, so she offers to let him stay at her place. While she's asleep, he puts a beetle on her body, and it crawls into her nose. Miriam wakes up from a bad dream and finds Moebius struggling to breathe. She goes out to get a doctor. Once she's gone, Moebius, who was faking his condition, sneaks into a hidden tunnel under Miriam's house—a place she had no idea existed—and performs a Satanic ritual down in the caverns. Miriam comes back with Dr. Franz Pernath, and they find the open passage. In one chamber, they see Moebius's corpse with a cloth covering his face. The police take the body away, and Miriam is shaken. Later, alone in the house, her pet rabbit hops into the underground chamber, so she has to follow it. There, she finds a woman hiding, who has stolen one of her nylon stockings. They fight, and Miriam demands to know how she got in, but the woman runs out of the house into the night. The next day, Claire Heinz, the mother of one of Miriam's students, goes missing. When Miriam brings Claire's daughter home, she talks to Mr. Heinz. He tells her that Claire, an entomologist, had recently found a species of beetle that went extinct 10,000 years ago. Looking at a drawing of the beetle, Miriam gets overwhelmed for no clear reason and passes out. Later, at Miriam's house, her friend Kathryn is attacked by a Shroud of Turin and runs away in terror. After that, Miriam gets a strange phone call from Moebius.

Production

Mario and Vittorio Cecchi Gori reunited with director Michele Soavi and Dario Argento for this film, following their collaboration on 1989's The Church. Filmed in autumn 1990 under the working title The Sect, the movie draws on ideas from two scripts Soavi had previously developed for the Cecchi Goris: The Well and Catacombs, the latter co-written with Gianni Romoli. Argento contributed the prologue, set in the 1970s. Actress Kelly Curtis, though not a horror fan, accepted the role because she admired the style and psychological depth of Soavi's Stage Fright and Argento's Suspiria, and viewed The Sect as more of an Alice in Wonderland fantasy.