Tourist Trap

• Chuck Connors — best known as the wholesome hero of 'The Rifleman' — actually plays a dual role: Mr. Slausen and his killer alter-ego 'Davey.' To protect the twist, the Davey performance is credited to a fake name, 'Shailar Coby,' in the film's credits.
• Despite the strangulations, impalings, and mannequin-horror gore, the MPAA gave Tourist Trap a PG rating on its original release.
• The production budget ran about $800,000, and the whole shoot wrapped in just 24 days across Los Angeles County locations (Calabasas, Malibu, Santa Clarita) — not a genuine desert location.
• Horror novelist Stephen King singled out Tourist Trap as an 'obscure classic' in his 1981 nonfiction book Danse Macabre.
• Composer Pino Donaggio, in Los Angeles scoring Joe Dante's Piranha at the time, was brought on to score Tourist Trap after he and director David Schmoeller found they could communicate in Spanish.
• Chuck Connors was actually the production's third choice for Slausen after Jack Palance and Gig Young both turned the role down; he took it hoping it would relaunch his career as a Karloff-style horror villain.

Mr. Slausen is not merely killing his victims but performing a twisted form of preservation therapy, believing he is saving them from the chaos of the modern world by freezing them in a 'perfect' eternal moment, evident in his tender care for the wax figures.

The entire ordeal represents a purgatorial loop for the protagonist Molly, suggesting she died in the initial car trouble and the museum is her personal hell where she must repeatedly face the trauma of losing her friends.

The wax figures retain some form of sensory awareness, implying the true horror isn't death but an eternal, paralyzed consciousness trapped inside a static shell.

A roadside breakdown turns fatal when a group of young friends stumbles onto Slausen's Lost Oasis, an isolated roadside attraction run by the eccentric Mr. Slausen. The kindly proprietor is hiding a killer alter-ego with telekinetic power, using it to animate the museum's wax mannequins and stalk his guests one by one. As friends vanish, the survivors start to suspect the silent, staring figures crowding the display cases aren't just wax dummies — they're former guests. Running isn't enough to survive; someone has to turn the killer's own violence back on him before his madness claims what's left of her mind.