Can you believe it’s already been over 20 years?

Movie fans are often begging for Quentin Tarantino to make a horror movie, but we kind of already got one way back in 1996. Tarantino of course co-wrote (and starred in) the Robert Rodriguez-directed From Dusk Till Dawn, which feels very much like, well, a Quentin Tarantino horror movie. It’s part crime thriller, part vampire flick, and it’s one of the very best horror films to come out of the decade that’s often considered be the genre’s all around worst.

One of the most memorable scenes in From Dusk Till Dawn saw a bikini-clad Salma Hayek dance around on stage as sexy snake-whisperer Santanico Pandemonium. Over 20 years after the release of the film, Hayek recalls how she landed the role in a chat with Yahoo:

They were casting strippers for Four Rooms (I was not a part of that), and the day of the shoot, in the morning, Robert [Rodriguez] called me and said, ‘Can you please come and be the stripper? We won’t see your face.’ He goes, ‘Just put a bathing suit on. Put a bathing suit on and we won’t see your face.’ So I did it. And from that dance, Quentin saw it and wrote me the part in From Dusk Till Dawn… where of course he makes me dance only for him.

Hayek continued, revealing how Tarantino got her to do the scene:

Quentin told me, ‘Oh by the way you’re dancing with a snake.’ And I said, ‘I can’t do that. It’s my greatest fear.’ And he said, ‘Well Madonna will do it. I already talked to her and she’s willing to dance with the snake.’ I had to overcome my greatest fear. I had to go on trace to do this. And it was improvised. There was no choreographer, nothing.

Revisit the sexy snake scene below!