The name of the character Adrian Marcato is borrowed from Rosemary's Baby (1968). The title "Manhattan Baby" was also derived from the title of the Polanski film, despite Director Lucio Fulci hating the title, and Screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti preferring his title "The Evil Eye". That version of the title was reworked in the US to " Eye of the Evil Dead", deriving from Sam Raimi's classic "The Evil Dead". Raimi was at first irritated, but learned Fulci's background with having no leverage over distribution decisions, and more or less felt bad for him and took no legal action.
Was originally planned to have a larger budget than any of the films that Lucio Fulci had previously directed for producer Fabrizio De Angelis. Fulci wanted to experiment and create a film more ethereal than his previous entries in the horror genre, by using special effects that were optical in post production rather than the gory puppetry and onset make-up effects of Zombi 2 and The Beyond. Screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti stated that the film's budget was drastically cut from 800 million to 400 million lire. Sacchetti collaborated with his wife Elisa Briganti on a script originally titled Il malocchio (The Evil Eye), which he described as "an attempt to do a technological piece. I was attempting to approach themes that were no longer classic or traditionally Gothic. I was trying to bring horror in a different direction."
In Spain, the film had a re-release in 2016 only in Madrid at the Artistic Metropol for 1 day, showing the subtitled version.
Brigitta Boccoli's debut.