It was written by Jeffrey Vlaming and directed by Tucker Gates, a and featured guest appearances by BD Wong, Lucy Liu, Michael Yama, and James Hong.

The show centers on FBI special agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), who work on cases linked to the paranormal, called X-Files.

In this episode, Mulder and Scully investigate a murder in San Francisco's Chinatown involving masked intruders, strange Chinese symbols, a lottery, and the clandestine selling of body parts.

The premise of the episode was based on three major ideas: a pyramid scheme involving body parts, a lottery in a small town, and corporate beings assembling the destitute in Chinatown.

Mulder also finds a scrap of burned paper in the ashes, which Chao identifies as "hell money", a symbolic offering to deceased spirits.

To pay for her treatments, Hsin attends an underground lottery in which participants either win money or lose an organ, depending on tiles chosen from a pair of vases.

[3] The premise of the episode evolved from an idea that series creator Chris Carter had about a "pyramid scheme for body parts".

[4] Writer Jeff Vlaming took this concept and combined it with two other ideas: The first involved "a lottery in a small town" and the other concerned a corporate entity controlling the poor in Chinatown.

The scene where a frog pops out of a victim's chest was created by using a live actor pretending to be a corpse, covered with a faux torso.

For a close-up shot, the torso itself, which had a discrete access hole in it, was placed on the autopsy table, and an animal wrangler pushed a real frog up through the slit.

[4] After filming wrapped up, actors Michael Yama and Lucy Liu were asked to re-record their dialogue, this time affecting Cantonese dialects.

[5] Television Without Pity ranked "Hell Money" the eleventh most nightmare-inducing episode of the show noting, "If there’s one thing you don’t want to mess with, it’s the Chinese mafia.

Especially the branch that dresses up like Slipknot and either a) burns you alive, if you’re lucky, or b) forces you to participate in a haunted organ-harvesting raffle only to slowly carve you up and sell your vital organs on the black market, whether you like it or not.

[12] The author praised the conceit of the episode, arguing that by presenting the situation from the Chinese immigrants—members of an alien culture—and Chao's point of view, "Mulder and Scully seem clumsy and arrogant.

Club gave the entry a C+ and wrote that the episode "was also fairly bold for its time, providing a whole subplot that's mostly told through subtitles [but] it feels like a series of shocks that are strung together along a pretty standard story setup.

"[14] Co-producer Paul Rabwin was not a fan of "Hell Money": he believed that the premise was not really an X-File due to the fact that nothing paranormal happened during the episode.