The scene where Dracula lifts Phoebe up and she screams was done in one take. Duncan Regehr wouldn't wear his red contacts or fangs around the five year old Ashley Bank because it scared her too much. For the scene, director Fred Dekker just told Ashley to scream once the platform raised her. When she asked, "When?", Dekker told her, "Oh, you'll know," and proceeded to shoot. The terrified scream you hear when Dracula opens his eyes is Ashley's genuine scream of fright.
According to director Fred Dekker, Shane Black's first draft of the screenplay was so huge that the opening of the film featured Van Helsing accompanied by zeppelins and hundreds of men on horseback storming Dracula's castle. Dekker stated that this sequence would have cost more than the final budget of the film.
Near the start of the movie the plane where Dracula first appears has "Browning" written on the side this a nod to director Tod Browning who directed "Dracula" in 1931.
Due to licensing issues, the crew had to create characters that were suggestive -- but not exact copies -- of Universal's iconic monsters. "The challenge was to suggest those classic creatures, without really copying them," explained Shane Mahan, "because we didn't have permission or the license to use those specific images. So we could do a 'Gillman', for example, but it couldn't look too much like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. It was frustrating for us at first, because, of course, we wanted to do the original designs! But we couldn't. We could only suggest those designs. So the Frankenstein monster looks a bit like the Karloff creature; but instead of bolts in the neck, he has bolts in the forehead. There was a certain percentage of changes we had to make to get away from any legal copyright infringement."
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