By the late 1950s, director
Brunello Rondi was considered a respected and well-known intellectual in Italy. After the lack of financial success of his previous film,
The Demon, Rondi explained in an interview in with
Dario Argento in 1965 that his next film
Run, Psycho, Run, that he had "no intention of making a mystery, or a horror film, or even a suspense yarn, Hitchcock-style. What really interests me is to grasp with a film set in 1912 the origins of today’s disease within the bourgeoisie, and to portray its degeneration with extreme violence. I read very few crime novels in my life. And I must say that I do not even like them very much. In my film there is indeed a crime, and an investigation. But it’s only a pretext, in a story full of hatred set in the last years of the "Belle Époque," when some kind of false euphoria was decomposing, while one could glimpse the first signs of the impending war, the signs of hatred and the strengthening of class struggle." The film was shot at
Castello della Castelluccia in Rome and at the Argentario in
Tuscany. Italian film historian Roberto Curti suggested that the film may have been a troubled production, noting the lack of an editor in the credits and that film had a sudden pessimistic ending. ==Release==