Audrey Rose

• Frank De Felitta wrote the source novel after his six-year-old son Raymond sat down and ripped out Fats Waller-style ragtime with zero lessons. De Felitta told People they were 'scared,' consulted an occultist who floated reincarnation, and went down a past-life rabbit hole that became a bestseller.
• United Artists handed Robert Wise a $4 million budget and got roughly $2 million back. After The Sound of Music and The Day the Earth Stood Still, this reincarnation drama was a flat commercial miss and one of Wise's final features.
• Susan Swift, carrying the dual role of Ivy and the dead Audrey Rose, was a complete unknown plucked from a nationwide search. After Wise and De Felitta interviewed every eligible actress in Hollywood — even Brooke Shields — the studio combed acting schools nationwide and found Swift, age 13, through her theater group near Houston, Texas; it was her feature debut.
• Principal photography started July 26, 1976 on sound stages in Los Angeles and Culver City, then moved the production to New York City for exteriors, shooting through November.
• The film carries a PG rating — no gore, the horror runs entirely on a child shrieking and burning her hands on a freezing window while the camera watches from outside through the rain.
• De Felitta wrote a sequel novel, 'For Love of Audrey Rose,' published in 1982. It was never filmed.

The film never actually proves reincarnation — it proves a kid can be terrorized to death by adults arguing over her. Every adult treats Ivy as evidence for their own belief system: Hoover needs her to be Audrey, her father needs her to be normal, the court needs a verdict. The hypnosis that kills her is the logical endpoint of grown-ups using a child as a battleground, supernatural or not.

Read it as a custody war dressed as horror. Hoover's certainty that Ivy 'belongs' to him, the courtroom fight over who controls her, the mother caught between two men insisting they know what's best — strip the past-life angle and it's a brutal portrait of a girl torn apart by adults claiming ownership, with the regression hypnosis standing in for the expert testimony that decides a child's fate.

The cold-window burns are the tell that her body remembers what her mind can't name. Audrey died trapped in a burning car clawing at glass; Ivy reenacts it on a freezing pane and blisters anyway. The injury defies physics on purpose — it's the movie insisting that trauma is carried in the flesh first, and that calling it 'reincarnation' is just the word the adults reach for when a child's pain won't fit their rules.

A Manhattan couple's tidy life cracks when a haunted stranger named Elliot Hoover starts shadowing their eleven-year-old daughter Ivy. His claim is unbearable: the girl carries the soul of Audrey Rose, his own child, burned alive in a car wreck moments before Ivy was born. Ivy's night terrors say he might be right — she claws at cold glass until her palms blister, screaming for a daddy who isn't her father. Robert Wise drags the question into a courtroom, then settles it with a hypnotist's voice and a death nobody can undo.