10 Horror Movie “Mistakes” That Were Totally Intentional
1. The Cardboard Lampshade - Dracula (1931)
And we've saved the weirdest for last, with this totally bizarre flourish in Tod Browning's 1931 version of Dracula.
When Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi) visits a sleeping Mina (Helen Chandler) in her bedroom, many have pointed out the utterly bizarre presence of a piece of cardboard attached to the lamp on Mina's bedside.
For literally decades and decades, it's been pawned off as a mistake on the part of the filmmakers, that cardboard was attached to the lamp while the crew were dressing the set, perhaps as a prank, and apparently nobody thought to remove it before shooting started.
But it's since been discovered that this bizarre choice was indeed deliberate: the film's original script mentions a "dimming arrangement" being placed by Mina's bed.
Furthermore, it was apparently common at the time for nurses to use cardboard to shield their patients from lamp light, while allowing them to, say, read a book by the patient's bedside.
Even so, it's an ugly, baffling choice for such a huge, iconic movie that you can't really blame people for assuming it was an insane production oversight.
A few years back, James Rolfe produced a rather hilarious video on the entire debacle that's well worth checking out.