Paco Plaza goes back four decades before Verónica to explain how the blind nun the schoolgirls called Sister Death began: as a novice revered for a childhood miracle, sent to teach in a convent that is hiding what happened there during the Spanish Civil War.

Sister Death, released in Spain as Hermana Muerte, is a 2023 Spanish supernatural horror film directed by Paco Plaza and written by Plaza with Jorge Guerricaechevarría. It is a prequel to Verónica, the 2017 film that became one of the most talked-about Spanish horror titles of its year, and it is built around a single question that the earlier film left hanging: who was the old blind nun who knew so much about the dead? Aria Bedmar plays her as a young woman, decades before she would become a legend among the girls of a Madrid school.

The story opens in 1939, at the end of the war, with a young girl who is revered by the people of her town after a reported vision of the Virgin. Ten years later that girl, Narcisa, arrives as a novice at a convent that has been turned into a boarding school for girls. The Mother Superior is delighted to have the famous “holy girl” among her community and hands her the classes once taught by Sister Inés, who left the convent before Narcisa came.

A holy girl in a school full of secrets

Narcisa is not settled in long before the building starts to push back. In her room she finds a cigar box holding letters, a pair of scissors and a funeral photograph of a nun named Sister Socorro. A chair keeps falling over on its own, an unfinished hangman drawing appears on her wall, and one of her pupils is terrified simply because Narcisa writes her name on the blackboard. In confession, the young novice admits that she doubts both her gift and her faith.

The girls have their own explanation. Rosa, a pupil whom Sister Julia has punished for causing trouble, tells Narcisa that the convent is haunted by a presence they call “the girl”, and that anyone whose name the spirit writes on the blackboard is cursed. That, the pupils believe, is why Sister Inés ran away. From there the film turns into an investigation that leads Narcisa towards a crime committed inside those walls during the war, towards the story of Sister Socorro, and towards the solar eclipse the class is preparing to watch. How those threads come together is the core of the third act, and it is best discovered without a guide.

From Verónica to Hermana Muerte

Verónica was set in the working-class Madrid district of Vallecas in June 1991. Plaza, who co-wrote it with Fernando Navarro, took loose inspiration from the real case of Estefanía Gutiérrez Lázaro, a teenager who died in 1991 after a séance with a Ouija board, and staged the film’s séance during that summer’s solar eclipse. Among the characters was an elderly blind nun, played by Consuelo Trujillo, whom the students nicknamed Hermana Muerte. Verónica earned seven Goya nominations, won the award for Best Sound, and found a second, much larger audience when Netflix added it to its catalogue in early 2018, amid online chatter about how frightening it supposedly was.

Sister Death takes that secondary character and makes her the centre of a new story. The two films share more than a nickname: both hang their horror on an eclipse, both unfold inside Catholic schools for girls, and both treat the church institution as a place where adults keep secrets from the children in their care. Maru Valdivielso, who appeared in Verónica as Josefa, returns in a new part as Sister Julia. Sandra Escacena, the original Verónica, is also credited, which makes clear that the prequel is designed to connect directly with the earlier film rather than float beside it.

Paco Plaza and Jorge Guerricaechevarría

Paco Plaza, born in Valencia in 1973, has spent most of his career in horror. He made his feature debut with Second Name in 2002, followed it with the werewolf tale Romasanta in 2004, and in 2007 co-directed REC with Jaume Balagueró, the found-footage film that was remade in Hollywood as Quarantine and spawned a franchise. He co-directed REC 2, directed REC 3: Genesis on his own, and then moved into other territory with the Galician crime thriller Quien a hierro mata in 2019 before returning to horror with La abuela in 2021. Like Verónica and La abuela before it, Sister Death puts a young woman at the centre of a horror story about family, faith and guilt inherited from the past.

Jorge Guerricaechevarría, born in Avilés in 1965, brings a long résumé to the project. He is best known as the regular co-writer of Álex de la Iglesia, with credits on Acción mutante, The Day of the Beast, La comunidad and Witching & Bitching, and he won the Goya for the adapted screenplay of Cell 211, which he wrote with Daniel Monzón. He also co-wrote Live Flesh for Pedro Almodóvar. His pairing with Plaza combines a screenwriter used to dark comedy and thrillers with a director who has built a career out of fear.

The cast

Aria Bedmar, born in the province of Almería in 1994, came to the role from television, where she was known above all for playing Camino Pasamar in the period soap Acacias 38 and for parts in The Cook of Castamar and Heirs to the Land. Sister Death gives her a leading role in a horror feature built almost entirely around her character, a young woman whose public reputation as a miracle child sits uneasily with her private doubts.

Around her, the film assembles a cast of nuns and pupils. Almudena Amor, who had already led Plaza’s La abuela and earned a Goya nomination for Best New Actress for Fernando León de Aranoa’s The Good Boss, plays Sister Socorro. Luisa Merelas is the Mother Superior, Maru Valdivielso is Sister Julia and Chelo Vivares, a veteran performer familiar to Spanish audiences as Espinete in Barrio Sésamo and as a dubbing voice for decades, is Sister Sagrario. Among the schoolgirls, Sara Roch plays Rosa and Olimpia Roch plays Elvirita.

A Valencian monastery and a Netflix release

The film is an El Estudio production, produced by Enrique López Lavigne, who had produced Verónica, together with Pablo Cruz and Diego Suárez Chialvo. Shooting began in the Valencia region in March 2022. The fictional convent school was filmed at the Monastery of Sant Jeroni de Cotalba in Alfauir, a Hieronymite monastery founded in 1388 whose Gothic-Mudéjar cloister dates from the 14th century, a real building with centuries of religious history behind it.

Daniel Fernández Abelló handled the cinematography, Mikel Salas composed the score and Laia Ateca was in charge of art direction, while Martí Roca, who had edited Verónica, shared editing duties with Guillermo de la Cal. The film had its world premiere as the opening title of the 56th Sitges Film Festival on 5 October 2023, Spain’s best-known festival of fantasy and horror cinema, and arrived on Netflix on 27 October 2023, just ahead of Halloween. Its poster, designed by Iñaki Villuendas and José Haro, was nominated at the 2024 Feroz Awards.

Nuns, war and Spanish horror

Sister Death arrived in a crowded autumn for nun horror. The Nun II had opened in cinemas only weeks earlier, and convent settings had become a recognisable commercial formula. Plaza’s film comes at the material from a more local angle. Its convent is not a gothic castle from nowhere but a Spanish school in the first decade of the Franco regime, with the war barely over and the Church at the centre of public life. The film’s backstory connects the haunting to violence suffered by the nuns themselves during the conflict, and to the way the community chose to bury what followed.

That approach places it within a long Spanish tradition of using the ghost story to talk about the Civil War and its aftermath, a line that runs through Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone, set in an orphanage during the war, and Pan’s Labyrinth, set in 1944. In Sister Death the ghosts are less a metaphor than a record: the supernatural events point, one after another, to something the adults in the convent know and refuse to say. The premise also doubles as an origin story, explaining how a young woman famous for seeing the sacred came to be the blind nun who, years later, warns Verónica about what she has let in.

A closing note

Whether Sister Death works best as a stand-alone period horror film or as a companion piece to Verónica will depend largely on how much a viewer cares about the earlier film. Viewers who know Verónica will find the connections that the prequel sets up from its first scenes; those who do not will meet a self-contained story about a novice, a school and a crime from the war. What is clear on paper is the ambition: a horror film that uses the familiar machinery of the haunted convent, falling chairs, cursed names and a coming eclipse, to point at a specific moment of Spanish history, made by a director who has returned to that blend of the supernatural and the historical across most of his recent work.