From Dusk Till Dawn

• The whole thing started as a demo reel. KNB EFX co-founder Robert Kurtzman wrote a treatment in the late 1980s purely to show off his makeup company's work, then paid an unknown video-store clerk named Quentin Tarantino $1,500 to flesh out the script — the catch being that KNB would do the makeup on Tarantino's directorial debut, which turned out to be Reservoir Dogs.
• Tarantino was set to direct it himself before deciding he had enough on his plate writing the script and playing Richie Gecko. He stepped aside; Robert Rodriguez took the chair after Tony Scott and Renny Harlin had circled the project.
• Salma Hayek has ophidiophobia and at first refused the Santanico Pandemonium role because it required dancing with a live snake. She signed on after Tarantino mentioned Madonna wanted the part, then got through the python sequence — an albino Burmese — by putting herself into a self-hypnotic trance, and has said she barely remembers shooting it.
• Tom Savini's groin-mounted pistol as Sex Machine wasn't invented for this film. Rodriguez had already slipped the crotch gun into Desperado (1995) and brought it back here as the character's first answer to the vampire ambush.
• George Clooney landed his first feature lead off the back of ER. Rodriguez and Tarantino liked the irony of casting a TV doctor who saved lives as a killer who fills emergency rooms.
• Made for a $19 million budget, it pulled in roughly $59.3 million worldwide.

The midpoint genre-snap is the actual point, not a gimmick. The film spends its first half as a hard-edged Tarantino crime picture so that the vampire turn lands like an ambush on the audience too — you walked into the Titty Twister expecting one kind of movie, same as the Geckos walked in expecting a quiet night. The structure makes viewers share the characters' disorientation.

Read Richie as the film's real monster before any fangs show up. His hallucinations, his violence toward the hostage, his unraveling — the brothers are already surrounded by predatory appetite long before the bar reveals what it is. The vampires just externalize the rot Seth has been managing in his own brother the entire drive.

Santanico's hypnotic dance works as a thesis statement for the whole bar: seduction as the delivery system for slaughter. The Titty Twister lures with exactly what its marquee promises, and the film implicates the audience's own appetite for the spectacle — you're leering right alongside the doomed patrons a beat before the trap closes.

Two bank-robbing brothers — cold-blooded Seth and his unstable sibling Richie — drag a hostage preacher and his kids across the Mexican border in an RV, aiming to lay low at a trucker dive called the Titty Twister until a contact arrives. The crime thriller runs straight into a brick wall at midnight: the bar staff are vampires, the patrons are dinner, and the survivors have to improvise stakes, holy water and crossbows till sunrise. Half heist picture, half siege, it never bothers to apologize for the seam.