In a promotional Fangoria interview for Exorcist 3 (1990), Brad Douriff mentioned how disappointed he was with final version of Spontaneous Combustion and how what was originally very interesting and promising movie was ruined by studio interference and producers during production;
"You see me playing my heart out in scenes that are not working, and the reason they're not working is that movie doesn't make sense. It's almost funny. As a matter of fact, the better my acting was in some of the later scenes, the funnier film was. I found myself at the mercy of people who didn't know what they were doing. I probably shouldn't be saying this, but my feeling is, the producers destroyed it. Tobe could have made three different movies with material he had, and each one would have worked. But by the time he got it, it had changed from a love story to a suspense thriller about my character's paranoid fantasy, to a "guy goes crazy" film about this insane killer who becomes a destructive force that's going to wipe out mankind. We went back and kind of restructured it as a love story, but it didn't really help. The beginning of the film was great, and a certain portion of my stuff was fine, but then it became stupid when all the flame stuff started happening."
"You see me playing my heart out in scenes that are not working, and the reason they're not working is that movie doesn't make sense. It's almost funny. As a matter of fact, the better my acting was in some of the later scenes, the funnier film was. I found myself at the mercy of people who didn't know what they were doing. I probably shouldn't be saying this, but my feeling is, the producers destroyed it. Tobe could have made three different movies with material he had, and each one would have worked. But by the time he got it, it had changed from a love story to a suspense thriller about my character's paranoid fantasy, to a "guy goes crazy" film about this insane killer who becomes a destructive force that's going to wipe out mankind. We went back and kind of restructured it as a love story, but it didn't really help. The beginning of the film was great, and a certain portion of my stuff was fine, but then it became stupid when all the flame stuff started happening."
The car that Sam drives throughout the film is a 1951 Studebaker Champion Starlight Coupe.
Shot in eight weeks.
The first draft of the script was written in three weeks.
John Landis: has a short role as a radio technician who gets set on fire while he's having a heated conversation with Brad Dourif on the telephone.
Tobe Hooper: man with his back to the camera, lighting a cigar, when Sam enters the rest room at the restaurant.
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