Death Weekend

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Death Weekend Trivia

Actress Brenda Vaccaro was apprehensive about taking the role of Diane. She had just been offered a role in a TV series before this film and worried that appearing in a violent movie might ruin her image. She went ahead and took the risk.
William Fruet actually wrote the film several years earlier, but didn't pursue shooting it at the time because Straw Dogs had just came out and he feared Death Weekend would be viewed as an imitator of that film.
William Fruet said the inspiration for the road-attack opening of the movie was based off of an actual event he was involved in. Fruet and a friend were once driving the back roads of Alberta, Canada when they were harassed by a car load of drunken thugs that tried to wreck them. The event inspired Fruet to write Death Weekend.
Despite being described as an "appalling orgy of destruction" by the 1976 August Bulletin the film was passed relatively intact by the BBFC after a personal visit by Brenda Vaccaro to chief censor James Ferman to plead for a certificate. Some of the female examiners on the board described the film's violence as "acceptable, even justifiable" and the only UK cut made to the movie was the removal of the word "cunt".
Writer/director William Fruet actually based the film off of a true story that took place in Canada. The crime that inspired it involved a dentist whose home was invaded by thugs he had angered, just like the plot of the film.
The film was released by AIP in America under the title 'The House by the Lake'. The distributors felt under that particular title it would be more marketable as Wes Craven's similarly-themed film _Last House on the Left (1972)_ had been such a hit.