Edward Ward scored the trailer
An alternate ending with a second twist, in which Lionel Barrymore's character receives a telegram from the vaudeville actors apologizing for not being able to make their train for the castle assignment, was proposed, but Browning rejected it.
Filmed January 12-February, leaving Bela Lugosi unavailable for the Warner Oland role in Universal's "Werewolf of London." He also has no dialogue, until a brief exchange at the very end.
Large South American bats were imported for the picture.
Preview reviews list a running time of 80 minutes, indicating that considerable footage was cut prior to the film's release. This would explain why many credited actors are not seen in the final print.
The actors all played their roles as though they were in a conventional horror movie, unaware of the twist-ending until the last few days of shooting.Director Tod Browning deliberately kept them in the dark because he wanted authenticity.
The film was banned in Poland, and censors in Hungary excised the screams, shots of bats and other gruesome scenes.
There was a remarkable degree of difficulty in shooting the scene where Carroll Borland flies like a bat. A jockey initially doubled for her but became nauseated on the wires. A bar was placed down the back of her dress running from her neck to her ankles, but it took some time for her and the handlers to get this right. The single shot took three weeks to work (all of this for a scene where Borland is supposed to be an actress pretending to be flying).
This movie was banned in Sweden by the Swedish Censorship Board, identity number 52.956. MGM never came back with an alternative cut down version.
Throughout the film, Count Mora (Bela Lugosi) has an unexplained bullet wound on his temple. In the original script, Count Mora was supposed to have had an incestuous relationship with his daughter Luna, and to have committed suicide. After filming began, however, MGM deleted references to the crime (and any remaining references may have been deleted when 20 minutes of footage was removed after the film's preview). Because director Tod Browning's previous film, Freaks, had been a box office disaster, Browning was unable to object to any changes made by the studio.