Hammer bares it all in their last stab at moving into the 1970s with TO THE DEVIL… A DAUGHTER, on Blu-ray from Scream Factory.

John Verney (Richard Widmark, KISS OF DEATH), an American writer on the occult living in England, is approached at a gallery opening by Henry Beddows (Denholm Elliot, THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD) who promises him a winning story involving his daughter Catherine (Nastassja Kinski, CAT PEOPLE), a nun in the church of The Children of Our Lord, a heretic order founded by excommunicated Father Michael Raynor (Christopher Lee, HORROR OF DRACULA). The girl has been living at the church's Bavaria convent and her father only sees her once a year. On the eve of her eighteenth birthday, however, Catherine has been brought to England in the care of Kollde (Constantine Gregory, DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER). John gets Catherine away from him and hides her at his apartment, only then realizing that she and her father may be mixed up with the two percent of Satanists who are not "pathetic sex freaks" and that Catherine's All Hallows' Eve eighteenth birthday will find her newly baptized in the blood of Astaroth, creating a human personification for the Devil.

The third of Hammer's Dennis Wheatley adaptations, following the successful THE DEVIL RIDES OUT and the bizarre THE LOST CONTINENT, TO THE DEVIL… A DAUGHTER found the company dusting off an old property while trying to compete with the likes of THE EXORCIST and THE OMEN. Without a major American distributor co-funding the film, Hammer and EMI had to get half of their financing from Germany's Terra Filmkunst, bringing with it Kinski and some lovely German location shooting along with touristy shots of London that were perhaps a concession to the Germans whose fascination with the city went back to the Edgar Wallace krimis. While the film has a very atypically un-Gothic look for a Hammer film with wide-angle photography by David Watkin (OUT OF AFRICA) and a very avant-garde electronically processed score by Paul Glass (BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING), the film for all of its grisly touches, a truly menacing performance from Lee, and taboo nudity from fourteen year old Kinski feels more like a precursor to the more occult episodes of THE HAMMER HOUSE OF HORROR throwing in the grue like SCARS OF DRACULA but still having one foot stuck in the past as exemplified by the genteel subplot characters of Verney's publisher Anna (Honor Blackman, GOLDFINGER) and her boyfriend David (Anthony Valentine, TOWER OF EVIL) who intensely demands answers from Verney and then is all too easily mollified when asked to babysit the girl while Verney goes off to do research (in a manner that feels more like padding than Lee's trips to the British Museum in THE DEVIL RIDES OUT). The climax includes a Les Bowie demon baby prop that looks more like something Nick and Gloria Maley would have been prepping for INSEMINOID, and the ending was patched together from existing footage after a major part of it was lopped out due to its resemblance to Dracula's denouement in SCARS OF DRACULA.

Released theatrically by small distributor Cine Artists Pictures, TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER was then released to VHS in the United States in a small box by Planet Video and a big box edition by Continental Video. The EMI titles eventually became part of the Lumiere library whereupon Republic Pictures issued the film on an LP-mode edition in the nineties. The Lumiere library then became part of Studio Canal who licensed the film to Anchor Bay for DVD. The film has always looked good in the digital realm, and in high definition – debuting in the UK from Studio Canal and Germany from Anolis (the title having been left out of Studio Canal's own German box set of the Hammer/EMI titles) – it looks quite stunning from the opening shot of stained glass painted across a carpeted floor to the landscape shots and close-ups, with a nice sense of depth in the extreme wide angle lensing of some disorienting sequences. The DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track is also extremely clean and quiet, calling attention to the film's first truly aggressive usages of music as the supernatural element of the film makes itself known as more than the forceful personality of its chief occultist. Optional English SDH subtitles are provided.

While the Anchor Bay DVD had only a featurette and the Studio Canal Blu-ray a newer featurette, both of those have been ported over to Scream's Blu-ray along with a brand new audio commentary by author/film historian Steve Haberman and filmmaker/film historian Constantine Nasr who had previously recorded a track for Scream Factory's THE DEVIL RIDES OUT. They discuss the differences between the film and the novel, noting screenwriter Christopher Wicking's penchant for delaying exposition and noting that most of the confusion where there should have been suspense is the result of Wicking's screenplay (already a rewrite of a draft by STRAIGHT ON TILL MORNING's John Peacock) having been rewritten piecemeal during production by Gerald Vaughan-Hughes (THE DUELLISTS). They make their opinions known about the film's lapses into poor taste, from Kinski's nude scene to the "nightmare" sequence which was apparently the idea of producer Roy Skeggs, and discuss the other endings shot for and written for but not shot (including a battle between Lee and DEMONS OF THE MIND's Shane Briant as Astaroth on another astral plane).

“Dark Arts: Inside TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER” (18:59) is the Studio Canal Blu-ray featurette in which Hammer experts Alan Barnes, Kevin Lyons, John Johnston, and Jonathan Rigby discuss the production, noting Lee's friendship with Wheatley who gave him the rights to adapt his Satanic novels, EMI's Nat Cohen having been sold on the project after seeing THE EXORCIST, the German co-production, and the search for a director that included Ken Russell, Nicolas Roeg, Mike Hodges, and Peter Collinson before Sykes. In addition to discussing the deviations from the novel and the controversial ending, as well as how it ended up being Hammer's last theatrical production (although it had originated as an episode of the planned Wheatley television anthology THE DEVIL AND ALL HIS WORKS), they make the case that the difficult Widmark does carry the film and that Blackman and Valentine do provided the film with some much needed human warmth and even some humor.