My favorite part about 1931 Dracula is that there are armadillos running around Dracula’s castle.
Look at this it’s like they couldn’t find any rats so they just were like “eh close enough no one will notice”. But I noticed. I noticed.
“WE NAILED IT BOYS”
Apparently in the 20s and 30s, armadillos weren’t very commonly known, so moviemakers would use them wherever they needed some creepy, ‘demonic’ animal running around. So there were a lot of armadillos in early filmmaking, and it was often people’s only source of reference for armadillos.
Fast forward twenty years to when the father of the biology professor who told me this is driving out from the east coast to see his son in California. Crossing the southwest at night.
An armadillo runs across the road.
He comes to a screeching halt and the Thing Of Evil, which he never knew was actually a real animal, trots the rest of the way across the road and vanishes into the desert.
