This is director Ingmar Bergman's only big-budget production. It was made at the height of Bergman's worldwide popularity as an arthouse filmmaker and produced by Dino De Laurentiis, who insisted on shooting in the English language and casting an American star to make it more appealing for the American market. Unfortunately, the film got mostly bad reviews and failed to generate any commercial interest in America, but it did respectable business in Europe.
The movie was made by Ingmar Bergman during a period of self-imposed exile for charges of tax evasion. Bergman originally fled to Paris, France but didn't like it there, and went to West Germany, and ended up making a deal to make an English language feature to be shot there.
The film's title is taken from William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Act 2, Scene 1. It is from a line of dialogue said by Brutus. It states: "And since the quarrel Will bear no colour for the thing he is, Fashion it thus: that what he is, augmented, Would run to these and these extremities; And therefore think him as a serpent's egg, Which, hatch'd, would as his kind grow mischievous, And kill him in the shell".
Ingmar Bergman had planned to have a horse killed on camera to show the desperation of the German people during the Weimar Republic's inflation crisis of 1923. David Carradine said he would walk off the film if Bergman went ahead with his plans. Bergman compromised, and the horse was killed off-screen, but the corpse is shown, as an impoverished a woman offers up handfuls of offal to Carradine's character.