The House on Straw Hill

• The film was released in UK cinemas in 1976 under three different titles — Exposé, House on Straw Hill, and Trauma — while a separate uncut version reached American audiences via the MPAA under the title House on Straw Hill.
• It's the only British-produced film that landed on the original UK 'video nasties' list, seized and prosecuted under the Video Recordings Act 1984.
• Star Udo Kier — who plays blocked novelist Paul Martin — told Empire in 2014 that his voice was dubbed by another actor for the film and that he was never paid for the job, one of several complaints he had about the production.
• It was shot on location in Little Baddow, Essex, including scenes at Hatfield Peverel railway station — a modest British production from director James Kenelm Clarke.
• The BBFC trimmed about three minutes for the film's original 1976 X-certificate cinema release, then cut a further 51 seconds — mostly the rape scene and the shower murder — for its 1995 VHS and 2002 DVD releases; a fully uncut version wasn't available in the UK until Severin Films' 2013 Blu-ray/DVD set.
• Co-star Linda Hayden, who plays secretary Linda Hindstatt, later said it was the only film in her career she regretted making.

Linda's manuscript work for Paul doubles as her own confession: the novel he's paying her to type shadows the violence she's actually committing in his house. The film keeps blurring the line between the fiction Paul can't finish and the story actually unfolding around him.

The film functions as a knife twisted into the British sexploitation tradition it was sold as: Linda weaponizes the exact tools the genre typically uses to objectify women — nudity, seduction, passivity — and turns them into instruments of annihilation. She's not the erotic object; she's the one staging scenes that end in corpses.

Paul's writer's block reads as the real engine of the plot — everyone who orbits his stalled career gets destroyed, as if the story itself is hungry and feeding on whoever stands closest to the book he can't finish.

Linda Hindstatt takes a secretarial job at a secluded English cottage, typing up the new novel from blocked, paranoia-wracked writer Paul Martin. On her first day out in the countryside, she's attacked and raped by two local youths — and answers back with a shotgun. That's just the opening. Once she's settled into Paul's house, Linda starts picking off everyone around him: the suspicious housekeeper gets her throat cut, Paul's girlfriend Suzanne gets seduced and then murdered in the shower, and Paul's own car brakes give out right when he needs them most. Nobody in this house is safe, and the film never quite tells you whether Linda is getting revenge, unraveling completely, or both at once.