Death Game (also known as The Seducers) is a 1977 American psychological thriller film directed by Peter S. Traynor, and starring Sondra Locke, Seymour Cassel, and Colleen Camp. The film follows an affluent San Francisco businessman who finds himself at the mercy of two violent, deranged women with a fetish for violence, whom he unwittingly allows into his home during a rainstorm.
Traynor, a former California real-estate financier, entered a career in filmmaking as a producer in the early 1970s, funding his projects through local investors. He purchased the script for Death Game to serve as his directorial debut. The film was shot primarily inside a large Los Angeles home with a small budget in approximately two weeks during 1974 with a projected release the following summer. Production was allegedly plagued with on-set disputes among the first-time director and the cast, and eventually halted due to a federal investigation into Traynor's financing methods. The theatrical release of Death Game was delayed nearly two years.
Critical reception for Death Game has been mixed among critics. While some read into the plot and violence as social commentary, others rejected it as meaningless exploitation. Death Game made unremarkable box office returns during its limited theatrical run, but found a greater audience with its home media releases in the years that followed. The film has been remade twice, first a Spanish production (1980) directed by Manuel Esteba and the second, reimagined and retitled: Knock Knock (2015), directed by Eli Roth and starring Keanu Reeves, Ana de Armas and Lorenza Izzo. Traynor, Locke, and Camp all took part in this film's production.
Plot In October 1975, George Manning, a successful San Francisco Bay Area businessman, is left home alone on his 40th birthday while his wife Karen tends to a family emergency. A thunderstorm begins that evening and George is greeted at the door by two attractive young women, drenched from the rain. The ladies, who introduce themselves as Jackson and Donna, explain to him that they intended to reach an address for a party on the other side of town when their car broke down. He invites them inside to dry off and make a call for a friend to pick them up.
After the three chat pleasantly for a while, Jackson finds her way to a bathroom sauna. Donna eventually joins her, and George, curious about where they had gone, walks in on them bathing in the hot tub. The happily-married man is then seduced and coerced into sex with the two strangers. The following morning George awakes to find his guests cooking breakfast. Surprised that they had not left the night before, George is given a vague excuse as to why they never departed.
It quickly becomes apparent that the girls have no intention of leaving. They become uncooperative, obnoxious, and defiant of George as they begin rummaging through the house's contents, putting on his wife's clothes, and even vandalizing the property. George, increasingly upset over their unwelcome presence, threatens to call the police. He stops when Jackson claims that the two are underage, and if caught he could face charges of statutory rape, a lengthy prison sentence, and the dissolution of his family life and career. After narrowly avoiding the girls being discovered by a visiting maid, George attempts to contact the authorities once again before Jackson agrees that they will leave on the condition that George drive them.
George drops the two off at a city bus stop on the opposite side of the Golden Gate Bridge and makes the trip home that night, glad the ordeal is seemingly over. However, his relief is short-lived, as Jackson and Donna ambush him inside his home and knock him unconscious. The duo ties George up with bedsheets and subject him to physical and emotional abuse while continuing to trash the inside of the house, and painting their faces with his wife's makeup. Their sadistic and often bizarre actions escalate as the night goes on.
After George cries for help to a grocery delivery man, the girls usher the unfortunate courier into the living room, bludgeon him, and drown him in a fish tank. George's few struggles to escape fail. George tries to reason with his captors. At one point Donna reveals to him that her unhinged behavior is due to her own father having sex with her. The girls hold a mock trial amongst themselves to determine if George should face punishment for the supposed sexual crimes he committed the previous evening.
At midnight, Jackson, acting as both a witness and judge, announces his guilty verdict and sentences him to death at dawn. When the six o'clock hour rolls around, Donna holds a now-exhausted George down while Jackson proceeds to carry out his execution using a large cleaver. She spares his life at the last moment and the pair finally take off, laughing maniacally. As the women stroll gleefully through the neighborhood, they stumble into the street and—not paying attention to their surroundings—are struck head-on by a speeding van.
Cast
Themes Literary critic John Kenneth Muir found an underlying feminist theme in Death Game stemming from its depiction of male infidelity and suggested immoral father-daughter relations. Muir explained that the film's narrative consistently points to this motif, including the opening sequence featuring the song "Good Old Dad," the female leads constantly calling George "daddy," and Jackson admitting to being a victim of child sexual abuse at the hands of her father. Muir saw the psychotic Jackson and Donna as the story's true protagonists. He further elaborated that the pair dish out a twisted form of justice against the average family man George, who is not only being punished for his own deeds, but is also serving as a surrogate for the society that made them that way. The film's director himself stated that the film "deals with the truth [...] a reflection of today's society," even implying the physical and mental superiority of women over the opposite sex. "Men often do recognize just how vulnerable they are in the hands of a woman," Traynor said, "and that's why a lot of us put them down."
Production Cast and crew The script for Death Game was principally written by Anthony d'Oberoff (credited as "Anthony Overman") and Michael Ronald Ross, who met in 1970 while working as copywriters for Capitol Records; Overman would receive a nomination for Best Album Notes at the 13th Annual Grammy Awards and later pursued an acting career under the name "Anthony Gordon", while Ross would eventually launch Capitol's reissue program. After initially collaborating on a script dealing with a kidnapping at a girls' school, Ross proposed that they write a psychological thriller in the vein of Roman Polanski's Repulsion during Overman's final two weeks at Capitol before being laid off. The primary inspiration for the story was an incident Ross had experienced in 1969, when he brought a hitchhiking hippie named Donna to the Laurel Canyon home that he was subleasing from Harry Nilsson, where she gradually outstayed her welcome, left candle wax everywhere, called all sorts of strange people, and burned "every" spoon in the household for the purpose of cooking drugs. Ross finally managed to drop her off at a friend's house who was an alleged drug dealer but she called later wanting him to be a character witness for her parole officer. Fortunately, Donna went away with little trouble, but the character's name was subsequently used for one of the characters in the script.
After considering a multitude of working titles, including Daddy's Girls, Little Miss Queen of Darkness and Night Child, the writers elected to name their first draft of the screenplay Freak as a tribute to Tod Browning's film Freaks. To underline the lesbian undertones of the two female characters' relationship, Ross chose to name the more dominant of the two characters "Jackson" after Jackson Browne, whom they had written liner notes for, while Overman devised the scene in which the character reads the Marquis de Sade novel Justine. In contrast to his portrayal in the film, the male protagonist — originally named "Parker" after the protagonist of various novels by Richard Stark — was portrayed as a loner.
Overman presented the screenplay to actor-turned-producer Don Devlin (also the father of future producer Dean Devlin), who advised the writers to make Parker an "everyman" character. After several rewrites, during which Parker was renamed "George Manning", the script went through several title changes, including Weekend Of Terror, Mrs. Manning's Vacation and Mrs. Manning's Holiday, before settling on Mrs. Manning's Weekend, which was the title used during principal photography. After Devlin and Albert S. Ruddy passed on the project to work on The Fortune and The Godfather respectively, Mrs. Manning's Weekend was optioned in 1972 by Bill Duffy, the husband of screenwriter Jo Heims. Having written Clint Eastwood's films Play Misty for Me and Breezy (and associate producing the latter), Heims wrote a new draft of the film, and began developing the project for Eastwood's The Malpaso Company. In Heims' rewrites, the character of Donna fell in love with George; according to Delvin, Eastwood described her take on the story as "more Breezy than Misty". During this time, Eastwood was set to direct the film with Jack Lemmon playing George and Sondra Locke playing Jackson; Locke, who was over 30 but masqueraded about being younger, said she was attracted to the project after being told by her agent about a role for a "bad girl", a part she had not often played. The 1944-born actress was almost twice as old as the character, though she had been lying about her age for years and projected a younger woman's personality in public.
Following the commercial failure of Breezy, Eastwood decided to pass on the script, and with Duffy's option about to expire, Overman and Ross decided to rewrite Mrs. Manning's Weekend as Nigg, with the George Manning character being renamed Parker and written as an African-American. The writers hoped to pitch Nigg as a vehicle for Richard Pryor, with whom Overman was personally connected through his wife, singer Niggy "Nigg" Joyce d'Oberoff, once Malpaso's option on the script ran out. Pryor was interested, and so was Fred Williamson, but Duffy instead sold the option at the last minute to Centuar Films, led by Peter S. Traynor, a California real-estate magnate and former life insurance salesman who had entered the motion picture industry as a producer only a few years earlier. As with Traynor's real-estate developments, Death Game and his two previous movies, Steel Arena and Truck Stop Women, were funded largely using limited partnerships with California physicians as investors. Death Game was one of several Traynor movies in simultaneous production alongside the features Bogard, The Ultimate Thrill, and Dr. Shagetz. Traynor also served as a producer of Death Game with Larry Spiegel.