Toward a More Creative Vampirism

Radu Jude’s ‘Dracula’ shines sunlight on the vampirism of cinematic AI and the ways studios have bled the vampire IP dry.

By Ryan BedsaulJanuary 26, 2026

• Film

• Cultural Studies

THE FIRST DRACULA FILM ever made was a copyright violation. Bram Stoker’s widow, Florence, pieced this together when she received a program for the film Nosferatu (1922) acknowledging her late husband’s novel as its source material. Dismayed by the revelation, she filed a suit claiming infringement and fought for the royalties owed to her. After several appeals, she went for the jugular: an order that all copies and negatives of the film be destroyed. Fortunately, enough copies of Nosferatu survived for experts to reassemble the fragments into various “official” restorations.

Five years after F. W. Murnau’s film premiered, Universal Pictures wanted its own bite of Stoker’s IP after a theatrical production based on the novel became a Broadway hit. This time, studio heads secured the rights to the play, along with Stoker’s novel. Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), starring Bela Lugosi as the Count, earned back double its production budget and received much praise from critics. But its success paved the way for another, albeit more legitimate, kind of IP exploitation: sequels. By the 1940s, the IP had been thoroughly plundered in the form of Mark of the Vampire (1935), Dracula’s Daughter (1936), Son of Dracula (1943), Return of the Vampire (1944), and House of Dracula (1945), not to mention the Count’s cameos in House of Frankenstein (1944) and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). Or so it seemed: In the years since, there have somehow been over 50 filmed versions of the Bram Stoker character, with little sign of a slowdown in Dracula demand.

Until now. This fall, Radu Jude’s Dracula (2025) arrived in a few theaters around the United States seemingly intent on driving a stake through the heart of this century-long history of creative vampirism. Acclaimed for his previous film, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023), Jude structures his riff on Stoker around a vulgar screenwriter (Adonis Tanța) shouting prompts for a new Dracula film into a program on his iPad called “Dr. AI JUDEX 0.0.” As he explains, his last film was a critical failure (82 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) and he’s been left with no choice but to use Dr. AI JUDEX to generate a more commercially viable take on the property. His obedient software is ready to assist (“Yes, mein führer”). Over the course of the film’s nearly three-hour running time, viewers are treated to 16 discrete parts, ostensibly generated by LLM prompts. These include a “visually enhanced” Nosferatu interspliced with penis enlargement ads, a crude adaptation of Vampirul (1938) by G. M. Amza and Al. Bilciurescu (the first Romanian vampire novel), a one-off Dracula musical number, and a retelling of the biblical Parable of the Sower in which a farmer mistakenly sows a penis crop and resorts to selling the disembodied appendages to women in the region.

Frequently, the screenwriter-turned-AI-prompt-writer finds himself apologizing direct-to-camera for the low-quality slop. Between these asides, the film cuts to a primary storyline about two performers at a Dracula-themed dinner show—the Count and his victim (Gabriel Spahiu and Oana Maria Zaharia, respectively)—who abandon the stage when work conditions prove too humiliating to bear. In the segments that follow, they run from a mob of homicidal ticket holders who have been given permission by the show’s manager to hunt down and kill the two defectors with real wooden stakes.

All these sequences are realized via comically low-budget means. Tourists wearing backpacks wander through pivotal dramatic scenes; cardboard cutouts serve as extras against backdrops that make no attempts to disguise their two-dimensionality. But why stop there? Many of the shorts are shot entirely on a smartphone, all the costumes in the film look like the variety one finds bagged up on a Spirit Halloween rack, and the cinematography is so haphazard it could make a first-year AFI fellow nauseous.

But such aggressively amateur aesthetics hardly hamper the experience. It turns out that autofocus blips and light balance auras look warm and expressive next to their AI counterparts. What Jude’s film reveals is that the very presence of AI lowers the bar so much, even the sloppiest execution looks like solid craftsmanship by comparison.

In fact, and despite the initial claims of the screenwriter-narrator, AI-generated video takes up little actual space in the film, which is a relief, because when it does appear, it’s disturbing. To wit: One montage presents a grotesque bastardization of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 adaptation, featuring graphic distortions of anatomy, genitalia, and sexual intercourse far too nauseating to detail here. If the film ever came across an MPA panel, I’m sure Jude would sooner save everyone the trouble and check all the boxes for an NC-17 rating. Maybe he’d even insist the prudes at the MPA add a new classification to the slate: gratuitous LLM obscenities. (Did I mention the film opens with a series of AI Draculas proclaiming, “I am Vlad the Impaler Dracula, you can all suck my cock”?)

If Jude does not shy away from using AI in genuinely upsetting fashion, at least it’s not all for shock value. He also uses it in ways film studios may be employing it in the very near future: for instance, in place of establishing shots, special effects, or the many other superfluous images inherent to unimaginative commercial filmmaking. The film’s inclusion of a period-accurate adaptation of Nicolae Velea’s obscure romance story “Just So” seems designed to make a mockery of such banal applications. Jude interrupts this gentle love story, in which a dairy deliveryman courts a young farmwoman on his route in the Romanian countryside, with hideous AI graphics, hypothetically intended to communicate transitions from night to day and from season to season. The results are difficult to describe, but try imagining a wobbly scarecrow propped in a blurry cornfield occasionally overtaken by amorphous flocks of birds or by snowfall that somehow shrouds the landscape without sticking.

In embracing these low-budget slop aesthetics for his cinematic Dracula mosaic, Jude presents viewers with a maximalist commentary on the vampirism of AI, of adaptation, of remakes and IP. The point is not so much to condemn this kind of vampirism as it is to call attention to its possibilities by embracing it as a thematic constraint. As Jude said of his use of AI in the film, “I wanted it to generate the worst possible images, because these bad AI images contain a peculiar kind of poetry. And as I began working with the technology, I realized that AI itself is exactly like Dracula—the principle of sucking up everything without asking permission.” In this way, Jude hearkens back to both Murnau’s unlicensed adaptation of Stoker’s source material, and Stoker’s appropriation of Vlad the Impaler’s last name. Compared to the historical and stylistic fidelity of recent studio adaptations like Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu (2024), Jude’s approach is the one that proves more faithful, if not to the text of Stoker’s novel, then to the tradition of appropriation it has engendered since its release.

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If this all sounds like a lot to process, that’s because it is. I caught the film’s West Coast premiere at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica, and the reception I witnessed was such an ever-changing mixture of amusement, agitation, impatience, adulation, and disgust that I couldn’t say for sure whether it was well received or not. The critical response has been similarly ambivalent, encompassing apologetic art-house endorsements as well as complaints about the movie’s exhaustive length and excessive phallic humor. Jonathan Rosenbaum called it “a compendium of crude and adolescent sexual gags and diverse swipes at capitalism” as well as “dross and hammy overstatements.” The trades were more mixed, with The Hollywood Reporter describing it as “rowdy and off-the-wall three-hour patience-tester,” while Variety dubbed it “an ecstatic, unruly mess of a movie.” But no critic got more meta than John Bleasdale, who went so far as to marvel at the basic difficulty of subjecting the film to any kind of critique: “One of the problems with criticising Jude—as is no doubt evident from this review—is that he is so self-aware that he includes the criticisms of his films within them. The critic and the audience are second guessed and risk looking priggish if not in on the joke.”

It’s hard to think of another filmmaker who could spark such restlessness in critics and audiences alike, but provocation is par for the course with Jude. Even his more accessible films maintain a revisionist sensibility. His black-and-white Western Aferim! (2015) resembles a traditional period piece, but its premise suggests more radical intentions beneath the surface. Set in 1830s Wallachia, the film follows two policemen (father and son) tasked with hunting down and capturing a runaway slave for a wealthy boyar. This choice to center the film on two anti-heroes, and to foreground Romania’s history of slavery, ran contrary to the reputation of the genre there, which during Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime frequently acted as a vessel for nationalist mythologies that legitimized his dictatorship. (In fact, Aferim! was the first film since 1920 to address Roma slavery.) Even relative to New Wave peers whose social dramas offer similarly bleak assessments, Jude’s dark outlook stands alone. Aferim! ends after the policemen deliver the escaped slave back to his boyar master and bear witness to his punishment: a brutal public castration. As the man screams in agony, the policemen leave the boyar’s estate and walk across the countryside in silence. Noting his son’s harrowed state, the father attempts to reassure him. “Don’t be a rag,” he says. “He ain’t your fuckin’ brother. […] This world will stay as it is, you can’t change it, try as you might. We live as we can, not as we want.”

A lot has changed since the 1830s, but Jude doesn’t waste time appreciating any humanitarian gains made in the interim. Grand notions of progress don’t factor in his work, which tends to occupy itself with atrocity and injustice. In an essay covering Jude’s work up to Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Alan Dean summarizes Jude’s characterization of human history (by way of Romania) as a “long parade of brutal, stupid regimes.” His films reflect a spectrum of cinematic approaches, carefully chosen to address the distinct varieties of abuse Romanians have experienced or abetted over the centuries. Sometimes these choices are relatively straightforward: the documentary essay film The Exit of the Trains (2020), for instance, uses archival photos and footage to detail Romania’s participation in the Holocaust. Other choices are more experimental. I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018) is a metadrama about a theater director who tries to stage a reenactment of the 1941 Odessa massacre, in which the Romanian army, alongside German forces, killed thousands of Jews.

In Dracula, Jude juggles many approaches all at once. Even the neorealist style more commonly associated with the Romanian New Wave makes its way into the final sequence of his film, in which a garbageman is asked to stand a few paces away from the school where his daughter is performing in a class play. The connection between this story and Dracula is basically nonexistent, but it offers a necessary reprieve from the fantastical, derivative content that precedes it. For a moment, we are asked to contemplate the life of a public servant whose profession does not receive the respect it deserves—a reminder of the nonparasitic humanity that exists outside of the symbolic realm of predatory slop we’ve spent the past few hours inhabiting.

A deep concern for the oppressed and marginalized peoples of society lies beneath all the glib humor that colors Jude’s work. This concern often manifests in his close examinations of the corrupt governments and institutions that inflict pain on everyday people. And it also marks Dracula, which, amid its gonzo theatrics, draws us back to the historical figure who ostensibly inspired Stoker’s book: Vlad the Impaler (a.k.a. Vlad Dracul). There’s no evidence Stoker borrowed anything other than the man’s name for his novel, but the connection has always been significant to Romanians given the former prince of Wallachia’s reputation for defending modern-day Romania from the Ottoman Turks—and for executing thousands of men, women, and children by impalement. This particularly brutal execution method often resulted in prolonged, excruciating pain for the victims. Yet Vlad is still considered a heroic figure of Romania by some and has even become an icon for the country’s far-right political party.

Vlad makes appearances throughout Dracula, the most hilarious of which finds the character visiting his birthplace museum in Bucharest. He walks in on a tour group presentation about his life and begins to play the heckler. Initially, he nods along and celebrates his legacy of war and brutality. But when the guide recounts a rumor that Vlad impaled rats on small implements during his prison sentence, he erupts in outrage and embarrassment. “Lies!” he exclaims.

Such cameos remind us that Stoker’s Dracula is already a heavily sanitized version of the tyrant from whom he borrows his name. Jude himself makes a cameo in the background of this sequence, filming the guide’s talk with an iPhone, as if he were just another tourist learning about a legendary war criminal. It makes sense that this would be Jude’s preferred mode of self-portrait. He has spoken before about the democratizing effect of TikTok and Instagram, which he believes represent a kind of vernacular cinema. “I just believe that small cameras, especially mobile phones, are great tools to democratize cinema, as cinema is still not democratic enough,” he explained to In Review Online. By embracing a maximalist approach in his adaptation—providing a what-feels-like-but-could-never-be-exhaustive take on his source material—Jude manages to realize the possibility of a more democratic cinema while also serving up an original take on an intellectual property the film industry bled dry decades ago.

Dracula, to date, shows no sign of getting a wide US release, and the creative possibilities Jude mentions are as intriguing as they are likely to remain untapped, at least by the industry. As American studios prepare for an uncertain future via the most risk-averse means possible—cutting down on competition through mergers and acquisitions, consolidating resources, and doubling down on derivative IP—AI, the most advanced form of plagiarism ever invented, seems poised to exacerbate the cultural stagnation. But if the studios were to pay attention, they might see in Jude’s outlandish experiments something they recognize: an auteur-driven remix of audience-friendly IP, and a whole new frontier of value extraction.