The film's imagery was inspired by Georges Franju's Blood of the Beasts, Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Although it was largely ignored by mainstream critics, and the few contemporary reviews were mixed to positive, it has since attained cult film status and influenced several avant-garde film-makers, visual artists and musicians.

Members of Merhige's theater company Theatreofmaterial – which included Adolpho Vargas, Arthur Streeter, Daniel Harkins, Erik Slavin, James Gandia, Michael Phillips, and Terry Andersen – are credited as the Nomads and Robed Figures.

[11] Merhige founded Theatreofmaterial, a small experimental theatre production company based in New York City, with the intention of creating a similar group dynamic.

[9] Merhige, a former painter and visual artist, was heavily influenced by the fine arts, with paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, Edvard Munch, and Francisco Goya having a significant impact upon him in the film's early developmental stages.

[6][14][28] Scenes involving time-lapses of sunrises and sunsets were shot by the director,[6] who spent two days in the mountains near Santa Fe or Albuquerque, while additional sequences of plants sprouting from the earth were filmed from inside a large terrarium Merhige had constructed.

[16] Prior to Begotten, Merhige had worked as a special effects designer for various companies, including a brief job for a Disney television series that involved the animation technique of rotoscoping.

"[32][33]Filmic influences for Begotten's visual style identified by Merhige include The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Blood of the Beasts (1949), Seven Samurai (1954), and The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (1971).

[4] Other possible influences identified by critics include David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977),[35] Dimitri Kirsanoff's Ménilmontant (1926), and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), as well as tribal art, ethnographic studies, and the paintings of Piero della Francesca.

The author and independent filmmaker John Kenneth Muir described these depictions of suffering, death, and rebirth as something imbued within the Son of Earth character and his journey.

Muir argues that the character's mistreatment can be seen as a parallel to mankind's "painful" toil of the earth for the planting of crops, and as an allegory to the bringing forth of life through great suffering.

[49][59][60] Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton have argued that the film "makes perhaps the most serious attempt to visualize elements of Dionysian orgiastic cultism in combination with Gnostic and pagan myths".

[62] On the film's narrative structure, Scott MacDonald states the allegorical plot represented many of the popular attitudes towards the origins of life and religion at the time of its release,[6] and told in the transgressive style of Viennese Actionism.

[44][73][74] It was exhibited at the Stadtkino Theater in Vienna in 1992, as a part of a retrospective of American independent cinema titled "Unknown Territories",[77] and at the Berlin International Film Festival in the early to mid – 1990s.

[iii] It was given a limited DVD release by World Artists on February 20, 2001,[93] and included a souvenir booklet, the original theatrical trailer, rare and never-before-seen movie stills, and production photos.

[44] Newsday's Jon Anderson awarded it his highest score of four stars, lauding what he felt was its deconstruction of the barriers of dream and reality, bestowing additional acclaim towards its exploration of the human condition through its unconventional style.

[56] In their annual publication of The Video Movie Guide, the authors Mick Martin and Marsha Porter rated Begotten their highest score of four stars, praising its uniqueness, while commenting that viewers would either 'love or hate it'.

[107] Jonathan Rosenbaum at the Chicago Reader called it a "remarkable if extremely upsetting" film, applauding the originality of its visuals, but cautioned that its graphic violence was not for the squeamish or the faint of heart.

[109] Awarding it two and a half out of a possible four stars, John Kenneth Muir felt its narrative was better suited as a short subject rather than a feature film, despite its admittedly powerful imagery and originality.

[109] Echoing this sentiment, the Polish journalist Bartłomiej Paszylk [pl] thought the first half was compelling and genuinely frightening, but further commented that its narrative could have been accomplished at a much shorter length.

[114] In his 2014 book Disorders of Magnitude: A Survey of Dark Fantasy, the author Jason V. Brock wrote that Begotten was his seventh favorite work of radio, film, or television production.

[iv] Merhige was later hired by the singer Marilyn Manson to direct music videos for his songs "Antichrist Superstar" and "Cryptorchid", the latter utilizing imagery incorporated from Begotten.

[1][136][137] It was subsequently barred from release by Interscope Records, whom Manson claimed were "appalled by it" due to its fascist iconography, namely the Nuremberg rallies and images of a Ku Klux Klan lynching.

[146] In the promotional video for their 2001 song "Sterile Nails and Thunderbowels", the Swedish black metal band Silencer used clips from Begotten interspersed with their own original footage.

at the 2018 Rochester Fringe Festival, the performers Dave Esposito and G. E. Schwartz mixed portions of Begotten with the 1910 film Frankenstein, accompanied by live guitar music, electronic soundscapes, spoken narration, and with poetry added as text to the movie's image.

[149] The heavy metal magazine Decibel compared the music video for the Texas gothic rock band Sword Collector's single "Inherit the Scepter" to Begotten and Ari Aster's 2019 folk horror film Midsommar.

[101][157] The film is a collaborative effort between Merhige, fellow director David Wexler and the musician Gavin Gamboa,[158] through the production companies Century Guild Creative, Strangeloop Studios, and The Teaching Machine.

Inspiration for the film came from the short-lived transgressive art movement Viennese Actionism, in addition to philosopher Eugene Thacker's notions of supernatural horror and dissolution known as "[a] world-without-us".

[160] Described as "a gnostic creation myth" in promotional material for its premiere screening, the film incorporates several different genres, including fantasy and science fiction in the series' typically grainy, black-and-white visual style.

[152][165] On November 4th, Polia & Blastema made its official premiere in the United Kingdom at the Leeds International Film Festival, where it was screened alongside the entire trilogy followed by a Q & A with Merhige.