General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Audrey Rose

Audrey Rose is a 1977 American supernatural horror film directed by Robert Wise, in which a stranger tries to convince a happily married New York couple that their eleven-year-old daughter is the reincarnation of his own daughter, who died in a car crash eleven years earlier.¹ It was adapted by Frank De Felitta from his 1975 novel of the same name, stars Anthony Hopkins, Marsha Mason, John Beck, and Susan Swift, and was released by United Artists.²

Key fact	Detail
Director / writer	Robert Wise; screenplay by Frank De Felitta from his 1975 novel²
Producers	Joe Wizan and Frank De Felitta; a Robert Wise production for United Artists²
Principal cast	Marsha Mason (Janice Templeton), Anthony Hopkins (Elliot Hoover), John Beck (Bill Templeton), Susan Swift (Ivy Templeton), Norman Lloyd (Dr. Steven Lipscomb)³
Release	United States April 6, 1977, after a March 21 USA Film Festival screening; United Kingdom May 26, 1977⁴
Technical	113 minutes (112m 59s), 35mm Panavision color at 1.85:1, rated PG²
Source novel	Published 1975; sold over 3.5 million copies worldwide⁵
Reception	57% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 21 reviews; 43% audience score⁶

Spoilers

Plot

Bill and Janice Templeton, a New York advertising executive and his wife, live comfortably with their eleven-year-old daughter Ivy. Janice notices a bearded stranger watching Ivy, and the man, Elliot Hoover, eventually contacts the couple. He explains that his wife and five-year-old daughter, Audrey Rose, died in a fiery automobile crash eleven years earlier, and that after studying in India and consulting clairvoyants he has become convinced that Ivy is his daughter reborn; he holds that Ivy was born two minutes after Audrey burned to death, and that her soul is in torment because it returned to life too soon.²^•⁷

The Templetons dismiss Hoover as unstable, and Bill asks his lawyer to seek a restraining order. Ivy, however, suffers severe nightmares around her birthday, and only Hoover can calm her by telling her that he is her daddy and that she is Audrey Rose. After Hoover abducts Ivy, the case goes to court, where Hoover seeks to prove that Ivy and Audrey Rose are the same soul.⁸ The climax places the question of reincarnation on trial, includes a trance-like scene in which Ivy crawls toward her Catholic school's bonfire, and ends with a court-ordered hypnosis session in which the soul of Audrey Rose is set free; the film closes with a quotation about endless life from the Bhagavad Gita.⁹

Origin and production

The source. Frank De Felitta, a writer of novels, television, and films, attributed the idea for the story to an experience with his own child: at six years old, his son began playing ragtime tunes on the piano, an instrument he had never learned. Convinced the ability was the result of an "incarnation leak", De Felitta began exploring reincarnation in his writing, and the resulting novel, Audrey Rose, was published in 1975 and sold over 3.5 million copies worldwide.¹⁰^•⁵ He adapted his own novel for the screen and took an active role as producer alongside Joe Wizan.²

The director. Robert Wise was best known for the musicals West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965), but had begun his career with the horror productions The Curse of the Cat People (1944) and The Body Snatcher (1945) and returned to the genre with The Haunting (1963).¹⁰^•¹¹ During filming in 1976 he said, "I don't think we're going to prove reincarnation in this picture, but I'm very open to the whole possibility of the supernatural, the paranormal, the possibility of dimensions out there." Anticipating the difficulty of persuading an audience of these ideas, he built in a full week of rehearsal for the four leads before shooting, the only film in his career for which he did so.¹⁰

Casting. Susan Swift, an inexperienced actor making her film debut in the demanding dual role of Ivy Templeton and Audrey Rose, was given a specialized acting coach by Wise. Hopkins and Mason, both seasoned stage actors, were receptive to the film's experimental atmosphere; Wise recalled them as "very much into other-world thinking."¹⁰ Brooke Shields screen-tested for the role of Ivy and posed for the photograph on the paperback cover of De Felitta's novel, though she did not appear in the film.¹^•¹⁰

The crew included cinematographer Victor J. Kemper, editor Carl Kress, composer Michael Small, production designer Harry Horner, and costume designer Dorothy Jeakins.²

Reception

Audrey Rose was released in the wake of The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976), and reviewers frequently measured it against those possession films, though it deals with reincarnation rather than possession and its child character is neither evil nor demonically possessed.¹¹^•¹² The film was, in the words of Turner Classic Movies, "evenly panned and praised" on release, and critics continued to disagree about whether it was a triumph or a failure for Wise decades later.¹⁰

On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 57% Tomatometer from 21 reviews and a 43% audience score.⁶ IMDb users give it 5.8 out of 10 from about 7,600 ratings.¹ Contemporary and later critics divided along similar lines. Marjorie Bilbow, writing in Screen International in January 1978, praised the cast as "spot on" and the performances as "stalwartly realistic", singling out Swift as "a very talented young actress without noticeable mannerisms", while noting that the story was "not all that eventful" and that playing the situation as "a human problem, not as a horror thriller" traded excitement for audience identification.² Tony Rayns of Time Out called the film overlong and its ending "staggeringly misjudged" but notable for centering on the emotional plight at its heart.⁶ Dennis Schwartz judged it an unconvincing, overlong thriller that degenerates into a courtroom climax, while crediting it with a sobering, at times intelligent look at a belief not accepted by most in Western society.⁹ Recurring points of praise across reviews are the performances of Mason, Hopkins, and Swift, which several critics credit with grounding the supernatural premise in human emotion.⁶

Later availability

The film has remained in circulation on home video and streaming. Arrow Video issued a special-edition Blu-ray in November 2022 from a new 2K restoration of a 4K scan of the original 35mm camera negative, presented at its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio, with a commentary, interviews, and featurettes on the score and the New York locations.¹¹ In the United States it streams on services including Amazon Prime Video, MGM+, and Tubi, and can be rented or bought on Amazon Video, the Apple TV Store, and Fandango at Home.¹³

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Horror films (individual works) › Psychological horror films › Psychological horror films, 1960s to 1980s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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