In 2016, the media website ComingSoon named the film's opening scene one of the greatest in horror film history.
The scene on the foredeck where the captain and the passengers are dancing, and the scene in the ballroom, was a common tradition at the time near the end of a transatlantic voyage. These were usually held near the coast as the ship approached the end of the trip, and these balls were called the "Captain's Ball".
Francesca Rettondini didn't speak English, which required director Steve Beck to get a translator on set so that she could understand his commands. This is also why she's not given much dialogue in the film, and what few lines she does have are in Italian.
The theatrical poster for Ghost Ship was inspired by the poster for Le bateau de la mort (1980), another film about a haunted ocean liner.
On January 12, 2012, Francesca Rettondini boarded the Costa Concordia to film Professione Lookmaker (2011). When the ship began to sink, she was at the dining hall with the show's contestants. Two days after the incident, she said in an interview, "I was frozen, we all pushed towards the exit like a flock of sheep. The more the ship tilted, the harder we tried to brace our feet against the incline, which in itself made no sense. But we were panicking." In a later interview on January 16th, Rettondini said, "I was lucky... I was on the ship to work.. We were the luckiest... because we were in the dining hall when it all happened. And the luckiest because we then went out on deck 3, the one closest to the stern, therefore furthest from the water. While we ate dinner the ship sort of jumped backwards. We all fell, the tables overturned, there was blood almost everywhere because we cut ourselves with the crockery. We went out on deck and they immediately let us down on the lifeboats." Rettondini further claimed no staff were present during the incident and instead were told the situation was under control. When asked about the parallels of the shipwreck with this film, she said, "the film was only fiction. Tonight was a tragic reality." The sinking of the Costa Concordia killed 27 passengers, plus 6 people on shore.