It was the National Association of Mosquitos. They wanted bats associated with monsters so that people would kill bats. Dracula was just anti-bat propaganda sponsored by big Mosquito.

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I read that the trope of vampires turning into bats comes from Vlad the Impaler who once had his troops retreat a valley at sundown so that the sun would be in his enemies eyes and then released rabid bats, making it seem as if his soldiers had turned into bats. The story itself is likely not true but this myth is the origin of vampires turning to bats

Down with Big Mosquito!

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Def remember it from some bugs bunny cartoons before this. No idea where it started tho

A swarm of bats? I'm not sure. Doesn't he turn into a singular bat in the Lugosi film? I know in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel he could turn into all kinds of shit. A bat, a wolf, some fuckin smoke cloud or something.

>But I don’t think this was ever a literary device

He turns into a bat in the novel:

>[Dracula] can transform himself to wolf, as we gather from the ship arrival in Whitby, when he tear open the dog; he can be as bat, as Madam Mina saw him on the window at Whitby, and as friend John saw him fly from this so near house, and as my friend Quincey saw him at the window of Miss Lucy.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/345/345-h/345-h.htm

>the name of the movie

Dracula (1931):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2dz1LaQZE8

I recall reading Discworld and there being a vampire character who had to make do with a full swarm because the law of conservation of mass wasn't going to budge

I don't recall it happening in film before the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen adaptation