Universal Pictures’ All Quiet on the Western Front (USA 1930; dir. Lewis Milestone) won an Oscar for Best Picture but cost four times as much and required twice as long to produce as Dracula (USA 1931; dir. Tod Browning), prompting the studio to redefine itself as a producer of monster movies (Schatz 1996: 82–97). In classical Hollywood, genre conventions were informed by financial and marketing decisions (Altman 1999: 15–16). Studio head Carl Laemmle Jr. envisioned Dracula and its Spanish-language counterpart Drácula (USA 1931; dir. George Melford) as launching a series of monster movies but was concerned about censorship under the new Production Code. A conse¬quence of primacy of business decisions is our critical habit of thinking about classical Hollywood vampire films primarily according to genre. The English-and Spanish-language versions of Dracula establish cinematic conventions and audience expectations for vampires, not as monsters but as immigrants with foreign accents, antiquated customs, and dangerous seductiveness. The films drew upon segregation comedies, assimilation romances, and miscegenation melodramas, discussed in the previous chapter. Genre was actually as fluid as the shape-shifting figure of the vampire. On loan from MGM, director Tod Browning wanted to minimize associations with horror. Billed as “The Strangest Love Story Ever Told,” Dracula's scenes of vampires’ elongated fangs penetrating male and female necks, of vampire hunters driving wooden stakes through vampires’ hearts, and even of the vampire's full body emerging from his coffin in the English-language version were suggested but not visual-ized. Publicity photos were more suggestive of the vampire's fangs penetrating a female neck than scenes in the films. Dracula opened on 12 February 1931 at New York's Roxy Theatre with a pre-screening fanfare that included the high-kicking Roxyettes. The choice to première on a Thursday, rather than a Friday, allegedly avoided inauspicious associations with Friday the 13th. Promoted as mystery rather than horror, the film's release close to Valentine's Day invited associations with passion and romance. Count Dracula carried the limp bodies of his female victims into his crypt, reproducing images of Valentino's Sheik Ahmed carrying the limp body of his female conquest into his tent.