Steven Spielberg has stated in various interviews that he never felt comfortable in directing this movie.CBS had cut his budget for the production and they did not give him creative or aesthetic freedom to direct the movie.
Spielberg created Something Evil immediately after his television movie Duel (1971), and it aired in January 1972.
Despite Steven Spielberg's name and reputation, this has never been released on home video in the US.
The party scene shows some of Steven Spielberg's nascent trademarks in which we drift in from one conversation to another, picking up snippets as we go along. Spielberg would use a similar technique in his later films, Jaws (1975) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).
This is the second television film directed by Steven Spielberg.
Steven Spielberg: makes an appearance as one of the Worden's party guests, along with Carl Gottlieb and Michael Macready.