According to the 9 September 1916 Motion Picture News, director Rex Ingram would be starring Cleo Madison in The Crystal, which entailed the telling of a story within a story, "in which a coquette brings ruin to herself, and death to practically all of her friends." The name of the picture's internal story was "The Black Orchids."
       Two months later, the 17 November 1916 Variety reported that the film, retitled Flowers of Doom, would be Bluebird's Christmas week movie, although the studio was considering a name change to Black Orchids. Three weeks later, the 9 December 1917 Moving Picture World updated the schedule, noting that Black Orchids would be playing "New Year's week." This was the second straight film on which Ingram and cameraman Duke Hayward worked with Cleo Madison and Wedgewood Nowell, following The Chalice of Sorrow (see entry). Madison portrayed two characters in Black Orchids.
       Although contemporary reviews said that the film was based on an old French story or novel, no evidence of a source other than Rex Ingram's scenario has been found. Perhaps one of Edgar Allan Poe's buried alive stories was an inspiration. Modern sources give Ingram sole credit for the story. Modern sources also list Jean Hersholt in a small, unnamed role.
       The 29 December 1916 Variety accused the film of violating "literary ethics" when the wounded marquis "locks the woman in a dungeon, then kills the lover and drags his body to the cell to keep her company. Here are presented a series of scenes that for fine, artistic horror have seldom been outdone, in which the woman is shown gradually going mad." However, Variety reviewed the film a second time in the 10 January 1917 edition, and this time no mention was made of "Zoraida" being sealed in a vault with her lover's soon-to-be -ripening corpse. Since another early review also mentioned this macabre ending, it appears that Bluebird modified the ending so that Zoraida and "Ivan" were trapped together, because that's how other reviews presented it. Wid's also noted, "The introduction of a hunchback and a chimpanzee employed by the vampire in her plotting, gave an added touch of gruesome distinction to this offering."
       Ingram remade Black Orchids five years later for Metro Pictures under the title Trifling Women (1922, see entry), starring Barbara LaMarr and Ramon Navarro. He purchased the rights to Black Orchids because he wanted to produce it the way it "should have been made in the first place." The only returning performers in this remake were John George, whose Arab character had a different name, and Joe Martin, an organutan that often portrayed chimpanzees, who retained his character's name of Hatim-Tai.
       The National Film Preservation Board (NFPB) included this film on its list of Lost U.S. Silent Feature Films as of February 2021.