Trivia: When the movie was first shown in theaters, the marquee read, "From the director of Animal House...A Different Kind of Animal." This lead many movie patrons to believe that it was another comedy film. People ran out of theaters in terror when they realised it was a horror movie.
Trivia: While giving a lecture at the Hollywood Scriptwriting Institute, director Joe Dante trash talked the novel "The Howling" on which the movie is based. One person in the audience raised his hand and asked, "So, you don't like the book, huh?" with Joe stating, "No, not really." The man responded that he was the one who wrote the novel. To Joe's surprise, the man in the audience was Gray Brandner, the author of "The Howling."
Trivia: When they are preparing and listening to the tape you can see a bit of smoke in the air. There had been an extended scene where they had been smoking pot and joking around. However, they used real pot when filming and much of what was shot ended up being unusable as a result. This is according to Bruce Campbell's Commentary to the DVD.
Trivia: In Greek mythology, the winged stallion Pegasus was actually spawned in the moment when Medusa was killed by Perseus; he sprang out of her severed neck.
Trivia: Throughout the film there are several references to a character named Horseflesh, (such as "Horseflesh would never get us into this mess"). Despite the character being credited at the end of the movie he's never properly shown onscreen. There's a paragraph devoted to him in the published "Time Bandits" screenplay: "The trouble is quite frankly that if Horseflesh had been in it he would have made seven dwarves, and we'd have libel suits from Disney and all sorts of things. But we liked the name, so he remains the mystery dwarf." According to the interview with Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam on the extras DVD (produced in 2002), Terry Gilliam states that Horseflesh is the dwarf seen with Evil, though it isn't mentioned who he is; in the original script he had quite a few lines, but they were cut, eg "The map! Evil one, the very map I promised you, is yours" (from script excerpt shown on DVD).
Trivia: Producer/screenwriter/director John Boorman deliberately chose renowned stage actors Nicol Williamson and Helen Mirren to play the sorcerer Merlin and the sorceress Morgana, knowing very well that Williamson and Mirren hated each other in real life (because of a disastrous stage production of Macbeth they worked on, years earlier). Boorman anticipated real friction, tension and anger between the two actors, which was the effect he wanted onscreen. On the contrary, the experience of working together in "Excalibur" completely changed Nicol Williamson and Helen Mirren into the best of friends.