Erford Gage, who played the poet Jason Hoag, enlisted in the U.S. Army in August 1943 (around the time this film was released) and was killed in action in the Phillipines in March 1945.
Film debut of Kim Hunter.
The character of Mimi, the dying prostitute, was intended as a macabre joke, a reference to the opera "La Bohème", which features a dying woman named Mimi. Such darkly humorous references are common in Val Lewton's films.
The original story for the film (outlined by DeWitt Bodeen) was to be about an orphaned heroine caught in a web of murder against a background of the Signal Hills oil wells. If she didn't find out the killer's identity in time, she would become his seventh victim. Producer Val Lewton wanted the story to go in a different direction and called in a second writer to help reshape it.
The staircase seen at the beginning of the film is the same one used in Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons.