Last Updated on July 31, 2021
The 1996 film FROM DUSK TILL DAWN is one of my all-time favorites. The Robert Rodriguez / Quentin Tarantino collaboration (Rodriguez directed, Tarantino wrote the screenplay and has an acting role in the film) truly captured my imagination at the time of its release and blew me away with its incredible cast (George Clooney, Harvey Keitel, Juliette Lewis, Cheech Marin, Danny Trejo, Tom Savini, Fred Williamson, Michael Parks, John Hawkes, the list goes on), cool characters, memorable lines, awesome concept, and unique structure.
The first half of the film is a crime thriller, with two violent criminal brothers on the run from the law. It then dives into horror in the second half, when the brothers and their hostages realize that they've stumbled into a den of vampires. A den disguised as a strip club.
The two halves of the movie are bridged by a dance performed by the club's star attraction, Salma Hayek as vampire Queen Santanico Pandemonium. Appearing on stage with a snake wrapped around her, Santanico picks Tarantino's psychotic character out of the crowd and does her dance specifically for him. As soon as the dance ends, all hell breaks loose. That's how Tarantino described it in the script: "all hell breaks loose" when the vampires attack the club's clientele.
Hayek looked back on that dance scene during a recent interview with Yahoo! She goes into how she got the job, and the fact that she had to dance with a snake despite being afraid of snakes. It's great to see her reminisce about FROM DUSK TILL DAWN all this time later, talking about the role she played in a movie that had a major impact on me twenty-one years ago.
You can watch the FROM DUSK TILL DAWN portion of the interview right here:
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