The Dracs Menagerie
What’s with the zoo in Castle Dracula?
When was the last time you went back and watched the 1931 Dracula? There’s stuff that’s dated, right? That’s to be expected; the Universal Monster films are like Eddie Murphy’s comedy: still well-executed comedy, but some individual jokes are terribly cringe in this day and age.
Then there’s stuff that doesn’t make much sense even by 1930s standards.
For example, the animals that live in Castle Dracula. Do you remember? Because the mix is deeply concerning:
Rats
Spiders
Flies
Wolves
Bats
…Armadillos??
Huh?
A number of creatures appear in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, and their use as metaphor has been analyzed by people smarter than me (here’s a link to some of those people)
But the 1931 film makes the odd addition of the armadillo to the canon. I realize that this is a movie about a supernatural creature that sleeps in dirt and doesn’t appear in mirrors, but still — armadillos are a little much.
I realize that this is a movie about a demonic creature that sleeps in dirt and doesn’t appear in mirrors, but still — armadillos are a little much.
I mean, a creature native to South America is hanging out in a Transylvanian castle. How did it get there? What’s it doing there? Does Dracula know that these tank weasels are crashing?
I have three… I don’t want to call them “explanations” because they aren’t. But they are three Not Totally Unreasonable Ideas about why the filmmakers placed future roadkill in the Sanctum Of The Undead.
First is the lazy explanation. Perhaps director Tod Browning and his crew were a little short on rats/bats and found armadillos just bizarre enough; they hoped that movie goers in 1931 would be a little off-put by the sight of them, absent swarms of vermin. In the first instance, they aren’t wrong: armadillos do look like an anteater fucked a turtle, so points for weirdness. But on the second count they would have guessed wrong — I have yet to turn up a single review from the 1930s that remarks on how freaky it was to see an armadillo on screen.
“I found the sexual overtones with connotations of power and submission along with the stealing of virtue vis a vis bloodletting to be interesting, but those armadillos really fucked my shit up, man!”
-Nonexistent Reviewer
Second is the functional explanation. In the underbelly of a decaying castle, especially one holding several coffins containing soil and undead bodies, not to mention the lifeless corpses of victims left outside the coffins, you’re going to get lots of little pests that feast on rot and decay. Grubs, for example. And hey, guess what eats grubs? Armadillos! So even though Dracula is of the Old World, perhaps with his fat stacks of silver kosons he could import a few grub-eaters from the New World. This explanation kinda works, except there are grub eaters already in Eastern Europe that could have fulfilled that function. It would be like buying a dvd of Bring It On when you already own it on BluRay and vhs. Obviously, we need a multiple copies of Bring It On in the house; but two formats should really do, don’t you think?
Finally — and this is the best I got for ya folks — there’s a thematic explanation. As has been said before, there’s a connection between the vampires of folklore and large epidemics of disease. The filmmakers behind the early films Nosferatu and Vampyr knew this, that’s why those films take place in towns enduring an outbreak of the plague. And while disease and plague is much less of a focus in 1931’s Dracula, the filmmakers may have found a way to nod at the link between vampires and disease by including — here it is — the armadillo. Why? The armadillo is the one creature besides humans to carry leprosy, an ugly disease that numbs feelings and kills slowly.
Dracula feels nothing for his victims and kills them over time, so maybe we could say he has Leprosy Of The Soul?
Eh?
Eh?
Let me have this one; it’s a damn sight better than “an armored possum swam the Atlantic just to chill with Bela Lugosi.”
There’s something else going on with armadillos that’s worth noting
Like wolves and bats, these four-legged speedbumps are no-gos when it comes to domestication. They are primitive animals, not pets. They are the Joe Pescis of the animal kingdom — small, hard-shelled, and most definitely not here to amuse you.
And that is notable when it comes to being associated with vampires. Dracula gets his jollies by singing along with, polymorphing into, and keeping close quarter with wild, untamed animals. NEVER domestic animals. Dracula is not friends with horses, or golden retrievers, or parakeets. Domesticated animals are represented as being firmly on the side of humans; they know which side their tummies are rubbed on.
It’s only those animals that have some air of “otherness” to them — those who are wild, who are uncontrollable, who we gave up trying to make our servants — that are cozy with the ultimate other: the dark prince of Transylvania.
I don’t know what you want to do with this last factoid, but Hollywood historian David J. Skal dug up an article from 1927 on the long-lost vampire film London After Midnight, made during the silent era with Lon Chaney and directed by Tod Browning, who went on to direct Dracula years later. That article noted that Browning imported a special animal from Texas to appear alongside Chaney’s “vampire”. That animal? A sumbitchin’, grubchuggin’ armadillo.
So there. That proves something.
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Image Sources: Universal Pictures, Alamy, National Wildlife Federation, Radialhead, Tee Public,
