The Hand of Peril was the first film released by the new Paragon Films, Inc. studio at Fort Lee, NJ.
       The 8 April 1916 Moving Picture World reported that director Maurice Turneur was given the scenario for The Hand of Peril on 23 January 1916, and he turned in the final negative to World Film's office on New York on 19 March 1916; the film was announced ready for release on 27 March 1916. (Director John Ince's schedule for Equitable's The Struggle [see entry] was exactly the same.) The Hand of Peril "called for the construction of a complete nine-room house with the surface removed so that the action could be shown in the nine rooms, simultaneously. It called for the construction of special mechanical devices such as stereopticon X-rays, panel houses, secret passages, through which a camera might trail the action, and lastly the reconstruction complete of an abandoned pier in South Brooklyn." Tourneur lost several days getting permission from Treasury Department officials in Washington "to secure permission to photograph several counterfeit plates which he had borrowed from his friend, W. J. Burns." The final film contained 307 individual scenes.
       Elsewhere in that same issue of Moving Picture World, reviewer Lynde Denig further described the staging of nine rooms, in which "the director, to all appearances, removes the front wall of the house and allows the audience to follow the happenings in the hallways and rooms just as they occur. While one man enters the front door, something else is transpiring on the two upper floors, altogether a strange effect, which contributes materially to an understanding of events during a critical fifteen minutes in the careers of the government agent and the counterfeiters." This method of staging, said Denig, was "used in early French pictures, but new to American productions." A half-page photograph in the June 1916 Film Fun and a slightly smaller photo in the 1 April 1916 Motion Picture News illustrated this nine-room, three-story set, showing how characters could move from room to room and floor to floor at the same time, in different parts of the house. An item in the 18 March 1916 Moving Picture World revealed how Tourneur was able to film the different stories at the same time from a large bridge spanning the inside of the Fort Lee studio.
       A review in the 24 March 1916 Variety identified the location of the exteriors of the counterfeit operation as Palisades Park, NJ, not far from the Paragon studio in Fort Lee.
       According to modern sources, Ben Carré was the art director of this film.
       The National Film Preservation Board (NFPB) included this film on its list of Lost U.S. Silent Feature Films as of January 2021.