Lysette Anthony talked about her role during an interview. "I was just meant to be there, with my tits hanging out, looking ridiculously glamorous. And, no, I didn't find it offensive being that sort of sexy foil. Lucky me just to have spent a few months working with Mel, one of the comic greats of our time. Love him or hate him, he's one of the founders of what this generation finds funny now."
The character of the gypsy woman Madame Ouspenskaya, who was portrayed by Mel Brooks' wife actress Anne Bancroft, was named after Maria Ouspenskaya, who played the character of Maleva in both L'uomo lupo (1941) and Frankenstein contro l'uomo lupo (1943).
When Mel Brooks and the rest of the filmmakers gathered together for the first time to discuss the making of the movie, one of the early questions was should the picture be made in black-and-white, mainly because Brooks' earlier film Frankenstein Junior (1974) was made in black and white in order to give the movie the feeling of the old Universal Frankenstein films. This idea was dropped mainly because, as Steve Haberman said in the audio commentary of the film on DVD, a lot of the great Dracula movies were in color, specifically the Hammer pictures starring Christopher Lee and Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula di Bram Stoker (1992).
The basic concept for this movie's male and female characters, as stated on the film's audio-commentary, is that all the men would be idiots and all the women would be beautiful.
The bat transformations of Dracula were inspired by the cartoonish transformations of Bela Lugosi into a bat in Il cervello di Frankenstein (1948).