Trivia: Dracula never once blinks his eyes, an effect that enhances the undead character's otherworldly aura, abetted by Bela Lugosi's famous, menacing stare.

In the scene where Dracula and Renfield are traveling to London by boat, the footage shown is borrowed from a Universal silent film called The Storm Breaker (1925). Silent films were projected at a different frames-per-second speed from that later adopted for sound films, accounting for the jerky movements and quicker-than-normal action of these shots.

The opening music to this film is from Act 2 of Swan Lake.

When she died on June 12, 2014 at the age of 104, Carla Laemmle was the last surviving cast member of this film. She played the role of the ungainly teenage coach passenger reading the history of Transylvania aloud. She rightly claimed that she was the first woman in talking pictures to have the first line of dialogue in a horror film.

This film was based on the stage play rather than the book. As the actual book included such key characters as a group of wild west cowboys, the original story was far too convoluted for the budget to handle.

Bela Lugosi was so eager to repeat his stage success and play the Count Dracula role for the film version, that he agreed to a contract paying him $500 per week for a seven week shooting schedule, a paltry sum even during the days of the Depression.