The Flesh Eaters used a very William Castle like exploitation gimmick; plastic packets of "instant blood" were given out to each patron as they entered the theatre in case they were attacked by flesh eaters.

While filming on location at Montauk, New York, a real hurricane destroyed the sets and equipment. Production was delayed for a year and the cost rose from $60,000 to $105,000.

According to writer/producer Arnold Drake, Terry Curtis, wife of director Jack Curtis, won $72,000 on the television quiz show "High Low." Some of the money was used to finish this production.

Pay careful attention to the sound that the flesheaters make. It's very similar (if not the same) as the sound the ants make in THEM.

Writer/producer Arnold Drake said he got the inspiration for this story from a incident in the 1950s in which millions of dead fish were washed ashore by red colored tides along the shores of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.

The working title of the 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead was Night of the Flesh Eaters. The title was changed when its distributor, The Walter Reade Organization, expressed concern over confusion with The Flesh Eaters, released five years earlier.

According to Variety, principal photography was completed in the fall of 1961.

The film was scripted by comic book writer Arnold Drake (The Doom Patrol, Marvel's Captain Marvel, et al.). Drake storyboarded the film, so every shot has the careful, formalized composition of a well-drawn comic strip. One shot, for example is a shot in deep focus: the right profile of the hero dominates the left-side foreground of the frame; in a moment, two or three tiny figures at the far-removed shoreline move left to right, from behind the actor's head, and in focus.

The deep focus cinematography was the work of director Jack Curtis (working under a pseudonym, Carson Davidson), who shot most scene outdoors under the sun of Long Island.

The Flesh Eaters was first released in Phoenix, Arizona on March 18, 1964. It later had a re-release in 1968 which removed a flashback sequence showing the original Nazi human experiments with "the flesh eaters".

The film was released on DVD by MPI Home Video on Oct 25, 2005.

Copyrighted in 1962 (MCMLXII).

The film has developed a cult following due to its gruesome, if primitive, special effects, including some memorably bloody death scenes. One character is eaten from the inside out by the titular monsters, resulting in a gushing fountain of intestinal matter. Another victim is stabbed with a wooden stake, then shot twice in the face, with resultant gaping bullet holes.