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 The Wolf Man (1941) and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943).
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."
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 Young Frankenstein (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 Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992).
Much of the dialogue from the original classic Dracula (1931) picture is repeated here and spoofed. This includes the film's star Leslie Nielsen doing a spoof-impersonation of the famed Bela Lugosi.
During the staking scene, when Jonathan Harker asks if there is an alternative for driving a stake through Lucys heart, Van Helsing suggests: "We could cut off her head, stuff her mouth with garlic and tear off her ears!" This is a direct reference to the same scene from the original book. There Van Helsing actually cut off Lucy's head, filled her mouth with garlic, and drove a wooden stake through her body.