A photo of Boris Karloff as character Dr. Henryk Savaard was used 2 years later as background image for a lobby card for The Devil Commands (1941).
Shooting lasted from June 27-July 12, 1939, released Aug. 17.
On the witness stand Dr. Savaard claims that one day it will be possible to take a heart from a person, such as someone killed in an automobile accident, and place it into the body of a person in need of a new heart, while skeptics in the courtroom scoff. Twenty-three years later, on December 3, 1967, the first successful heart transplant indeed occurred at Groote Shuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa. The patient, Lewis Washkansky, received the heart of a young woman indeed killed in an automobile accident.
Part of the Son of Shock package of 20 titles released to television in 1958, which followed the original Shock Theater release of 52 features one year earlier. This was also one of the 11 Columbia titles, the other 61 all being Universals.
The film was produced and released in 1939, the same year in which Agatha Christie's novel, And Then There Were None, was published. Like this film, Christie's story concerns a group of people invited for a visit to a location where they become trapped and where it is announced to them that they will be systematically killed, one by one; as in this film, the deaths indeed begin occurring.