The script—originally titled Goblins[3]—began as a way for director Claudio Fragasso's wife, Rosella Drudi, to express her frustration with several of her friends becoming vegetarians. Drudi told the makers of the documentary Best Worst Movie that "Some of my friends had recently become vegetarians...and this pissed me off."[4] The film was shot on location in Morgan and Porterville, Utah in the summer of 1989; a large "M" erected in the mountains outlying Morgan is visible in some shots. The production crew was made up almost entirely of non-English-speaking Italians brought to America by Fragasso; the only fluent English speaker on set was costume designer Laura Gemser, who had built a reputation in the 1970s and '80s for her roles in various notorious Italian grindhouse movies and erotic films. Fragasso and his crew largely relied on a broken pidgin English to communicate with the cast, who recalled not being able to understand much of what went on.[5]
The cast had few experienced actors, and was primarily assembled from residents of nearby towns who responded to an open casting call. George Hardy was a dentist with no acting experience who showed up for fun, hoping to be cast as an extra, only to be given one of the film's largest speaking roles. Don Packard, who played the store owner, was actually a resident at a nearby mental hospital, and was cast for—and filmed—his role while on a day trip; after recovering and being released from the hospital, he recalled that he had smoked an enormous amount of marijuana prior to filming, and he had no idea what was happening around him, and that his disturbed "performance" in the film was not acting.[6]
As neither Fragasso nor Drudi spoke fluent English, the shooting script was written in the same broken pidgin dialect in which they both spoke; the cast would later recall that the script was only given to them scene-by-scene, and that they had difficulty understanding their dialogue as written. Some of the cast members offered to correct their lines to sound more grammatically and syntactically correct, but said that Fragasso demanded they deliver their lines verbatim.[7] Despite the majority of the cast ascribing to the same story, Fragasso has vehemently denied their version of events; he angrily interrupted a panel discussion for the filming of a making-of documentary, calling them "dogs" and accusing them of lying about how much of the script the cast had access to.[8]