The original short story by Robert Bloch was one of four Bloch stories adapted for the 1972 British horror movie "Asylum".
Robert Bloch adapted his own short story but had to add material not in the story to be able to turn it into an hour of television. He adapted his story again for the film Asylum later on but that time it took up less screen time and is more faithful to the content of the short story.
The book "De Vermis Mysteriis" also appears in Stephen King's short-story ode to H. P. Lovecraft, titled "Jerusalem's Lot", to be found in King's short-story collection "Night Shift".
Writer Robert Bloch mentions his fictional grimoire Die Vermis Mysteriis (Latin for Mysteries of the Worm) in this episode. The book was an invention of Bloch's, and was introduced in in his early short story "The Shambler from the Stars" (1935) as a forbidden tome containing spells and enchantments, particularly those that can summon strange entities. A then teen-aged Bloch corresponded with H.P. Lovecraft on his creation, and Lovecraft subsequently mentions the book repeatedly in several of his stories, including "The Haunter of the Dark" (written as a sequel to Bloch's "The Shambler from the Stars") as a "hellish" book found with other forbidden texts in the Starry Wisdom Church in Providence, Rhode Island. In "The Diary of Alonzo Typer", it is likewise part of an occult library in the van der Heyl house in Attica, New York. And in Lovecraft's "The Shadow Out of Time" the possessed protagonist reads a copy of the book possessed by the fictional Miskatonic University library. Bloch later embellished the fictional book, and incorporated it into the expanding "Cthulhu Mythos", a shared fictional universe based upon the Lovecraft short story "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926). In a 1936 letter to fellow Mythos writer Henry Kuttner, Lovecraft mentioned De Vermis Mysteriis as one of the books that "repeat the most hellish secrets learnt by early man".