Atemlos vor Angst

Besides internal on-set conflicts, William Friedkin said that approximately fifty people "had to leave the film for either injury or gangrene," as well as food poisoning and malaria. In The Friedkin Connection he added that "almost half the crew went into the hospital or had to be sent home." Friedkin himself lost fifty pounds (23 kg) and was stricken with malaria, which was diagnosed after the film's premiere.

During the tree sequence, after the dynamite is lifted out of the wooden crate, it is kicked to the side and (apparently) falls off the tree. Weeping dynamite is leaking out the nitroglycerin as a liquid which will readily soak through untreated materials such as the wooden case, shelves upon which they sit and so on.

As illustrated in this scene, and earlier in the film when the boxes are being inspected, each wooden box has a lining of insulating paper, which the film shows to be watertight. When it is inspected early in the film, the worker places his hand within this paper barrier to get nitroglycerin on his fingers, and at the felled tree, this wrapping is not soaked through and is in fact strong enough to support the weight of the dynamite and liquid inside. Kassem uses a sharp stick to poke a hole in it, whereupon liquid nitroglycerin begins to flow out.

The only opening credits at the beginning of the film are the studios' names followed by the film's graffiti style font title. Although by the late 1990's it was quite common to not have credits at the beginning of a film, in 1977 it was very unusual.

The European version of the film was re-edited and shortened by CIC, the European distributor, without director William Friedkin's permission. The prologue sequences set in New York, Paris, Vera Cruz and Israel that show what happened to the main characters and why they had to flee to South America, were changed to flashbacks running throughout the film.

Featured in Sneak Previews: Take 2: Overlooked Classics: Great Movies of the 70's That Nearly Everybody Missed (1980)