- Having finished The Raven (1963), Roger Corman shot this film in only four days using the same set and the same two lead actors.
- Filmed in four days with five directors.
- Roger Corman shot the castle scenes with Boris Karloff so quickly that he didn't even bother to use slates to mark the beginnings of shots. Once he just had the actors walk downstairs one after another in succession, figuring he could later cut the single shot into separate shots that he could probably use somewhere.
- Roger Corman decided on a major change for this film. Instead of a fire, the usual finale for a Corman film of the period, he had the castle flooded instead. Corman's crew had come to look forward to "fire day".
- Sets for both The Raven (1963) and The Haunted Palace (1963) were reused in this film. The tree that Sandra Knight rots against at the end was the one to which Vincent Price was tied and burned in "Haunted Palace."
- Sandra Knight was pregnant while filming.
- Jack Nicholson claims to have nearly drowned while filming in the surf of Big Sur.
- Francis Ford Coppola took eleven days to shoot his second unit footage, only ten minutes of which wound up in the finished film.
- Dennis Jakob doubled for Boris Karloff during the climactic castle flood.
- Although Boris Karloff's scenes were captured in two days, the remainder of the film was shot over the course of nine months, making it not the shortest Roger Corman production but one of his longest.
- The original theater poster warned its patrons: "No one will be admitted while the coffin is being opened!"
>>> WARNING: Here Be Spoilers <<<
Trivia items below here contain information that may give away important plot points. You may not want to read any further if you've not already seen this title.
- SPOILER: A shot involving quicksand was directed by Jack Hill in his own backyard. The quicksand was originally planned for the death of Jonathan Haze's character, until it was decided to have him attacked by a falcon.
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