The House by the Lake

The House by the Lake (1976)

Death Weekend

They were going to rape her one by one. She was going to kill them....one by one.

Harry is a rich dentist who often brings women up to his rural lakehouse. One weekend, he invites Diane, a former fashion model. On their way to the house, Diane runs a gang of thugs off the road. Humiliated, the thugs track down the couple for revenge.

Date of release
1976-09-17
TMDB
5.8 / 10 (47)
Runtime
1h 27m
Genres
Horror, Thriller
Director
William Fruet

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Budget: CA$500K
  • Awards: 2 · Nominations: 0. Including: Sitges Film Festival Best Actress award; Sitges Film Festival Best Screenplay award

Death Weekend is a 1976 horror film written and directed by William Fruet, and starring Brenda Vaccaro, Don Stroud, and Chuck Shamata. Set in rural Ontario, the film follows a model and her boyfriend who are terrorized by four violent criminals at a remote lakeside home following a road rage incident.

Production

Death Weekend was loosely based on a real-life home invasion in Canada involving a dentist after he was involved in a traffic altercation, as well as Fruet's own experience of being harassed by a group of men while on a road trip in rural Alberta.

The film was originally titled Thanksgiving and Do Or Die during production before being titled Death Weekend. It was shot from October 27, 1975 to December 1, 1975, on a budget of $500,000, with $250,000 coming from the Canadian Film Development Corporation. The film was an international co-production between Canada, Italy, and Panama. It marked filmmaker Ivan Reitman's second production credit, after David Cronenberg's Shivers (1975).

Principal photography occurred at Seneca College and in Maple, Ontario, as well as at the Toronto International Film Studios in Kleinburg.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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