an incinerator and seemingly escapes, while the police outside wonder if the smoke emanating from the incinerator exhaust vent should smell so bad. Cast Production Conception and casting Inspired by Friday the 13th, Stephen Carpenter co-wrote the script with Stacey Giachino while films students at the University of California, Los Angeles. The original title of the film was The Third Night, and later became Death Dorm after the production wrapped. To secure funding for the film, Obrow and Carpenter shot footage for a pre-emptive promotional trailer in order to pitch the film to investors. Casting was done by Obrow and Carpenter independent of a casting director, as they could not afford to hire one. In the film, the casting director is credited as "Wesley Lou David", which is an amalgam of the directors' and producers' middles names. Filming The film was shot primarily on the UCLA campus in and around the film school building, and in the University Cooperative Housing Association The cinematography was completed using the university's equipment, and the film was shot primarily on handheld Eclair cameras on 16 mm film, which had to subsequently be blown up to 35 mm. As it is set, the bulk of the film was shot over Christmas vacation at the university over a period of around three weeks in December 1980 and January 1981, and additional photography was completed over the ensuing six months. Release Censorship To avoid an X rating, the film was cut substantially by the MPAA in the United States, and by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) in the United Kingdom, with portions of the murder scenes truncated or nearly edited out entirely. The murder scene of Debbie's father with the spiked baseball bat was significantly trimmed down to show only one or two blows to the head, and the footage of the maintenance man being drilled through the head with the power drill was excised entirely. Upon the film's release in the United Kingdom (under the title Pranks), it was deemed a video nasty, which Carpenter and Obrow surmise was due to the graphic drill murder sequence, and for the cover artwork which depicted the spiked baseball bat. It was assumed that the BBFC had worries that, because the killing weapon was depicted clearly, it was imitable. However, the film was not successfully prosecuted and was removed from the list. It was eventually re-released on