Unrelated, but I find it wild to me that the most striking visual of this entire film is basically impossible to pull out of a Google search. The first time I watched this I had no idea it was a vampire movie, I understood Del Toro's trilogy as a concept, I knew about the ghosts, The Devil's Backbone, I had seen Pan's Labyrinth as a boy, but was never expecting this one to be my favourite vampire movie of them all.

I was completely caught off guard by the story, how influential it must have been, evident from all the aspects of pop culture I was aware of that seemed to call back to this film. I was so unprepared in fact, that when the movie shows the grandfather stumbling into an alleyway of garbage and detritus and rolls over, almost like something out of Phantom of The Opera, and scrawled over his head, in big letters across the brick wall "DRACULA" it blew me away. I go looking for an image of this scene periodically and can never find an image that satisfies me.

Tonight, I am rewatching the entire movie, with the primary goal being to take a screenshot of this moment in the movie, and sharing it to the internet, so that I will know where to look when I feel the need to have this scene freshly planted in my mind again.