Mario Bava and Barbara Steele had a difficult working relationship. She sometimes refused to come to set because she did not like her wig or the fact that her cleavage would be shown. One time she refused because she believed Bava would force her to appear nude. She admits that she was difficult due to her inexperience and inability to understand Italian.
Mario Bava was a big fan of Nikolay Gogol's short story, "Viy," on which this film's plot and characters are based. He recounted that he often used to read the story to his children and that the tale scared them so much they insisted on sleeping in bed with their father. He so admired the horror elements of "Viy" that when given the chance to choose the material for a film he was to direct, he immediately selected it in order to make this film.
The sets were designed in monochrome, absent of all color, to add to the dark mood.
A young girl is sent out at night to milk a cow when Javuto (Arturo Dominici) claws his way out of the grave nearby. The young girl is played by Dominici's real-life daughter Germana Dominici.
Good reviews plus word-of-mouth reportedly turned this into American-International's highest-grossing film up to that time, exceeding its grosses for Goliath and the Barbarians (1959) and Roger Corman's House of Usher (1960).