According to the production history as documented by multiple sources, the pairing was not immediately simple to negotiate. Both women had large egos, long careers, complex relationships with the studios, and specific ideas about what they needed from a role. Davis was reportedly apprehensive about the genre—she had not made horror films and wasn’t sure the material suited her. Crawford was drawn to the project from an earlier stage. What brought Davis in, by her own subsequent account, was the quality of Lukas Heller’s screenplay and a frank recognition that she needed the work.
Both women took significantly below their usual fees in exchange for profit participation—Davis at ten percent of net profits, Crawford at fifteen. The film’s original budget was set at six hundred thousand dollars, though costs eventually rose to approximately one million. By the standards of early-1960s studio production, this was a modest picture—no elaborate sets, limited locations, a tight schedule. Principal photography began on July 9, 1962, at the Producers Studio in Los Angeles and wrapped September 12, 1962, in sixty-five shooting days.
Crawford played Blanche, the wheelchair-bound former star. Davis played Jane, the grotesque, childlike tormentor. The casting was pointed in ways both actresses understood: Blanche was glamorous and victimized; Jane was monstrous and unhinged. Davis had spent her career playing women of fierce will and uneasy virtue; here she would play a woman of fierce will who had curdled into something genuinely frightening. Crawford had spent her career projecting strength and survivorship; here she would play a woman utterly at the mercy of someone else’s pathology.