A Candle for the Devil

• Eugenio Martín's director's cut ran roughly 120 minutes when it screened at the Cannes film market in 1973. Franco-era Spanish censors then hacked it down, approving it at 83 minutes 31 seconds, and foreign buyers who'd circled the longer cut walked away once the gutted version was all that was left to sell.
• The most mangled release is the US Cheezy Flicks DVD retitled 'It Happened at Nightmare Inn,' which runs roughly 67 minutes. It strips out every shot of nudity, every stabbing, the dead bodies, and the entire Verónica/Luis affair, leaving a near-incoherent edit despite a box that claims a 90-minute runtime.
• It was a Spanish production from Mercofilms, Verga Films and Azor Films, distributed by Paramount Pictures, shot in the Andalusian village of Grazalema with the murders set in 1960s rural Spain at a village inn called Las Dos Hermanas (The Two Sisters).
• Judy Geeson, the British lead, walked onto this straight from Hammer's 'Fear in the Night' (1972), where she played Peggy Heller opposite Peter Cushing and Joan Collins, one of several Brits who anchored these Spanish-British genre co-productions of the era.
• Aurora Bautista, who plays the colder, fanatical Marta, was a celebrated Spanish prestige actress, the star of Franco-era historical epics like 'Locura de amor' (1948) and 'Agustina de Aragón,' so casting her as a religious killer was a real jolt for audiences who knew her from respectable period pictures.
• Director Eugenio Martín made it the year after his train-set creature hit 'Horror Express' (1972). The film was finally restored in 4K from its original 35mm camera negative for the first time and issued on 4K UHD by Bizarro Releasing on December 30, 2025, with the Vinegar Syndrome edition following on January 27, 2026.

The wine cellar is the real confession the sisters never make. Marta and Verónica preach against the flesh while feeding the guests' butchered bodies into the wine vats the village drinks from, the decapitated head bobbing among the casks. The film's nastiest joke is sacramental: the holy women are quite literally serving up the bodies of sinners to be consumed. The repression doesn't get purged, it gets bottled and passed around.

Marta isn't punishing sin, she's policing her own desire. Every victim is a woman whose freedom with men Marta can't have, and the film keeps pairing her killings with her own stifled urges. The staircase death she reads as 'divine will' is the moment she gives herself permission, after which murder becomes the only release her theology allows. Verónica, who actually has a lover in Luis, kills with guilt; Marta kills with relief.

Laura functions less as a detective than as the mirror the sisters can't smash. She's the modern, sexually autonomous outsider the old order was built to crush, and her presence in the house forces the rot into the open. Read against Franco's dying Spain, the inn is the nation in miniature: a pious facade kept clean by hidden slaughter, finally exposed by the foreigner who won't leave.

Two spinster sisters run a guesthouse in a sun-baked Spanish village, and they have decided that God appointed them to punish the loose women who pass through. When a topless English tourist tumbles down the stairs through a pane of glass, pious Marta calls it divine sentence, and from there the killings become a calling. Verónica wavers; Marta does not. The wine cellar fills with what's left of the guests while Laura, who's come looking for her sister May after the girl vanished at the inn, starts asking the wrong questions in the wrong house. Repression curdles into butchery, and the holy ones bleed too.