Stanley Kubrick later denounced this film as amateurish, saying he considered it like a child's drawing on a fridge.
Stanley Kubrick reportedly tried several times to destroy the negative but failed because he had lost the rights to the film.
Stanley Kubrick disowned the film soon after its release and wanted to make sure it was never seen again by not re-releasing the print. What he didn't know was that Kodak, when making a print for a film, had a policy of making an extra print for its archives. It is this one that survives and where the DVD-R and VHS bootleg prints come from.
Originally shot silent with a budget of $13,000. The budget went up an additional $20,000 when the actors dubbed their lines in a studio. A March 1994 retrospective on the film in "Film Comment" fixes the total budget at $40,000.
After Stanley Kubrick's assistant, Leon Vitali, discovered a 35mm print of Furcht und Begierde (1952) in Stanley's private screening room, Kubrick made him promise that he would never watch it. To this day, Vitali still has not seen the movie and reassures that "Stanley really, really hated that movie. He absolutely loathed it."