[3][4][5] This film was the middle entry in director Tanaka's "Showa Era Trilogy", which includes A Woman Called Sada Abe (1975) and Beauty's Exotic Dance: Torture!

[12] Lead actor Renji Ishibashi had background in the live theater, and made a name for himself in Roman porno for psychologically unbalanced characters.

[9] Jasper Sharp notes that director Tanaka portrays the Taishō period, in which the film is set, as "a pandemonium of styles and colours".

[9] Tanaka emphasizes the mixture of the erotic and the grotesque in Rampo's work, and in popular culture of the period, which led to its description as "ero guro".

Sharp writes that the camera views Minako through Gōda's ceiling peephole, "acknowledging the viewer's powerless and passive spectatorial role as she returns our gaze.

Sharp writes, "Framing the sex scenes from an awkward nozoki point-of-view perspective, through keyholes, gaps in open doors, holes in walls, etc, proved one particularly expedient method of blocking the action.

"[14] Some critics had recognized Tanaka's talents in the early Roman Porno, Secret Chronicles: She Beast Market (1974), but it was Watcher in the Attic which brought him mainstream success.

[5] Peer Cinema Club Annual, a conservative, mainstream publication, wrote that the film was "a perfect marriage of decadence and art.