Trivia

According to the featurette on the DVD, Jack Palance had been offered the role of Dracula several more times after his first performance, but he turned them all down.

The romantic subplot of Dracula attempting to recapture the reincarnation of a long-lost lover who died/committed suicide/is murdered, etc., has been used in so many movie versions of the Dracula story (including Francis Ford Coppola's famed version, Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)), that many who have not read the book actually believe it is part of the original novel; it is not. It appears here, in this version, for the first time and was actually cribbed from director/producer Dan Curtis' own hit daytime soap opera on ABC, "Dark Shadows (1966)." The first daytime program to feature supernaturally-themed plots, "Dark Shadows" became a raging hit and international sensation when, for four years, it introduced and featured a 175-year-old vampire attempting to use his powers to be rejoined with his 18th century fiancée who had committed suicide. Stoker's vampire is a decidedly amoral & evil character who entraps Mina Harker in the novel into drinking his blood so that he may possess her & thereby, gain access to the "investigation" in which Van Helsing & the others are engaged; he already has three "wives" back at the castle. "Long lost love" is furthest from his mind in pursuing Mina.

Just a few years earlier (1968) Jack Palance starred in what many consider the best version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which was also a Dan Curtis production, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1968).

Jack Palance admitted to being glad once the film was completed. As a method actor, he felt that he was "becoming" Dracula more than he wanted to.

The entire run of the horror comic, "The Tomb of Dracula," was penciled by Gene Colan, with Tom Palmer inking virtually all since its premier in 1972 (although Gil Kane drew many of the covers for the first few years, as he did for many other "Marvel" titles). Colan based the visual appearance of "Marvel's" Dracula not on Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, or any other actor who had played the vampire on film, but rather on actor Jack Palance. Palance would play Dracula in this television production of Stoker's novel the year after "The Tomb of Dracula" debuted.