Trivia / Dracula's Daughter

• What Could Have Been:
  • The film was intended as an adaptation of Bram Stoker's short story "Dracula's Guest", the so-called "lost chapter" from Stoker's original novel, and the credits still state it to be based on it. However, even after extending the rights to it borrowed from MGM, the script wasn't finished when it was rushed into production, and the final film retains only a few elements of the story, combined with some borrowed from Carmilla.
  • James Whale's script apparently was too ambitious and disturbing for the time it was supposed to be released. His script had a prologue set in the Middle Ages, focused on how Dracula became a vampire as a tyrant in the XIV century. His "daughter" would be a humble peasant girl whom he attacked when he was cursed and turn her into a vampire. After, set in the ending of Dracula, after staking the Count, Van Helsing travels to Transylvania to kill the brides, and in a hidden four coffin the "daughter" but the last one escaped to London with the name of "Countess Szekeley". She would be more of a succubus-like demon with a love of torture who enslaves men, and the final battle would be on a boat in the eye of a storm.
  • The first third of the film was originally going to be a prologue set in the Middle Ages, with Bela Lugosi returning as a pre-undead Count Dracula. This would have ultimately served as an Origin Story, showing that Dracula became a vampire after being cursed by a demon. The script had to be heavily rewritten after the censors objected to the more sexual elements of the flashback scenes (such as Dracula seeking women to join his harem), resulting in Lugosi being paid without even showing up in the movie.
  • Boris Karloff and Cesar Romero were initially planned to appear in the film but dropped out for unknown reasons.
  • Rumors said that the movie got its life as a direct adaptation of Sheridan LeFanu's Carmilla (hence its heavy homoerotic tones) but it's unknown if this is actually true or not.

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