James H. Nicholson had come up with a tremendous ad and title and pre-sold the movie to exhibitors. Then they made the movie. When the distributors viewed the finished film, they were disappointed because the ads were so much more interesting.

According to American International Pictures head Samuel Z. Arkoff, Roger Corman's contract called for four films at a budget of $100,000 each. By the time it came to "The Beast with a Million Eyes," the fourth film in the series, there was only $29,000 to $30,000 left, so Arkoff signed off on shooting the picture non-union in Palm Springs.

Because of budgetary considerations, the "monster" ended up being a teakettle with a lot of holes in it.

Producer Roger Corman was unsatisfied with the way the film was progressing and took over from director David Kramarsky, without credit.

The giant motorized spiders were used again by director Bernds in "Queen of Outer Space" and "Valley of the Dragons."

The tiny budget meant music, credited to "John Bickford", is actually a collection of public-domain record library cues by classical composers Richard Wagner, Dimitri Shostakovich, Giuseppe Verdi, Sergei Prokofiev, and others, used to defray the cost of an original score or copyrighted cues.

When Samuel Z. Arkoff of ARC received The Beast with a Million Eyes he was unhappy that it did not even feature "the beast" that was implicit in the title. Paul Blaisdell, responsible for the film's special effects, was hired to create a three-foot-tall spaceship (with "beast" alien) for a meager $200. Notably, the Art Director was Albert S. Ruddy, who would later win two "Best Picture" Academy Awards for The Godfather (1972) and Million Dollar Baby (2004).

Filming took place in Indio and the Coachella Valley, California. Corman shot 48 pages of interiors in just two days at a studio on La Cienega Blvd. in Los Angeles. The Beast with a Million Eyes was a non-union film originally titled The Unseen, with Lou Place set to direct. After one day's filming, the union threatened to shut down the production unless everyone signed with the Guild. Roger Corman, who was producing, took over the film's directing chores and replaced the cinematographer with Floyd Crosby; however Corman took no official screen credit. Another version of this story has Corman allocating directing duties to Dave Kramarsky, his associate director on Five Guns West.

In 2007 Metro-Goldwyn Mayer distributed The Beast with a Million Eyes as part of its Midnight Movies catalog on a double-feature DVD shared with The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues (1955).