Paramount first bought the film rights to The War of the Worlds in 1925, with Cecil B. DeMille initially planned as director on an outline by Ray Pomeroy, but the project stalled in turn-around.

In the 1930s Paramount assigned Sergei Eisenstein to direct an adaptation under his studio contract, but he never produced a film; Alfred Hitchcock also discussed an adaptation with H.G. Wells, and Alexander Korda expressed interest as well.

Producer George Pal originally envisioned a more faithful adaptation about a scientist searching for his wife after the invasion, but Paramount production head Don Hartman insisted on adding a romantic subplot, and the setting was moved to 1950s America for budgetary reasons.

Pal originally planned to shoot the final third of the film in 3D to enhance the Martian attack on Los Angeles, but the plan was dropped before production began.

Location shooting took place in Corona, California, standing in for the fictional town of Linda Rosa, while St. Brendan's Catholic Church in Los Angeles was used for the climactic prayer scene, and the hills and streets of El Sereno, Los Angeles also appear in the film.

According to Ann Robinson and Gene Barry on the film's DVD commentary, the cartoon character Woody Woodpecker can be spotted in a treetop when the first Martian meteor-ship crashes; producer George Pal was close friends with Woody's creator Walter Lantz and liked to include Woody in his films for luck.

The three Martian war machine props were built from copper and were reportedly later melted down in a scrap copper recycling drive; the same blueprints were reused a decade later, minus the neck and head, to build the spacecraft in Robinson Crusoe on Mars, also directed by Byron Haskin.

The heat-ray's sinister electronic sound was created entirely from manipulated electric guitar recordings, played backwards and adjusted in pitch, while the Martian's scream was made by mixing a microphone scraping on dry ice with a reversed, sped-up recording of a woman's scream.

The disintegration effect revealing Colonel Heffner's skeleton required 144 separate matte paintings to create, and some of the film's sound effects, preserved in Paramount's sound library, were reportedly reused for Star Trek's photon torpedo and phaser sounds.

Because keeping the invisible legs of the floating war machines visually consistent created a major fire hazard, only the first emerging machine shows sparking traces of its three legs; in later scenes the effect was largely abandoned, and the film's original 3-strip Technicolor quality was fully restored only in a 2018 4K remaster, removing visible suspension wires present in decades of degraded prints.

Composer Leith Stevens, who had previously scored Pal's Destination Moon and When Worlds Collide, used mostly orchestral music but included a Novachord and a vibraphone as his only electronic instruments; his score for the heat-ray attack on the three guards was ultimately replaced by manipulated electric guitar sound effects in the final cut.

The film was rated X by the British Board of Film Classification on release in 1953, restricting it to viewers 16 and over; Paramount's 1961 request to lower the rating was rejected, and the film wasn't reclassified until 1981, eventually becoming rated PG for its 1986 VHS release.

Steven Spielberg's 2005 War of the Worlds pays homage to the 1953 film with cameo appearances by Gene Barry and Ann Robinson, and later included a fallen 1953-style Martian war machine in his 2018 film Ready Player One.

Tomohiro Nishikado, creator of the 1978 video game Space Invaders, said that seeing this film as a child helped inspire the design of the game's aliens.

The Mystery Science Theater 3000 character Dr. Clayton Forrester was named as an homage to the scientist protagonist of this 1953 film.