Ten days after its premiere in Milan, the film was seized by the Italian courts and director Ruggero Deodato was arrested and charged with obscenity. He was later charged with murdering several actors on camera and faced life in prison. The cast had signed contracts requiring them to disappear for a year after shooting to maintain the illusion that they had died. Deodato contacted Luca Barbareschi and told him to contact the three other actors who played the missing film team. When the actors appeared in court, alive and well, the murder charges were dropped.
The iconic poster image for the film shows a native girl impaled on a stick. In court, Ruggero Deodato explained that the girl sat on a bicycle seat attached to the pole's base while holding a small pointed piece of balsa wood in her mouth. Fake blood was added afterward. He commented that the girl was unusually calm and remained very still during filming.
After seeing the film, director Sergio Leone wrote a letter to Ruggero Deodato, which stated, "Dear Ruggero, what a movie! The second part is a masterpiece of cinematographic realism, but everything seems so real that I think you will get in trouble with all the world."
When Carl Gabriel Yorke arrived in the Amazon for shooting, he was not given a script or any idea of what the film was about. As soon as he arrived, director Ruggero Deodato shouted, "That's my star! Get him into makeup!" His first scene, shot almost immediately, was the amputation of another character's leg. In a later interview Yorke said that, while in the jungle, he did not know whether the film was a Hollywood production or a snuff film.
Director Ruggero Deodato said he based the film on a film he saw about a documentary crew who died while investigating cannibals in Africa. The documentary, showing incidents he depicted in the film, was destroyed after its discovery. An Italian cable network claimed it had a copy of the film and was going to show it uncut. It never showed the film, but it was confirmed that they did have a copy of the original.