In a 2023 interview with Cinema Daily,
Yoko Okumura spoke about her experience making the episode and what she learned from it: "That was really my first foray into the horror genre, and it made me fall in love with it. That project was something [that came about through] a production company that I had been trying to make projects with, but those projects never came to fruition. So they knew about me and I had a relationship with them. They were like, 'Hey, we're making this
Sam Raimi show. Do you have any crazy ideas that you want to pitch?' The concept that every story was based on a horror story from a different state was very exciting for me. The Ball of Twine is something that really exists in my home state of Minnesota [in Darwin], so I developed that with my writer
Mae Catt, and it was that either they were going to love it or they were going to hate it. They loved it.
It was foundational for me to work with Sam and to see the potential of the horror genre, taking something that's personal to you but then putting it into a fantastical world. Because even 'Ball of Twine', it was a mother-daughter story between Asian American characters in the Midwest. That is something that could conceptually be an indie drama or something. You take those emotional stories that could be in something more grounded and put an evil twine ball into the mix, and it becomes this entertaining spectacle but with heart. So that combination was something I walked away with as a lesson to keep infusing into my movies."