How Bad Is the AI Dracula Movie?
After all, generative AI is itself vampiric. To paraphrase that oft-quoted Karl Marx line from Das Kapital, AI is a dead technology that lives only by sucking on the living artistic and creative labor of actual people. In its “training,” AI slurps down countless “datasets” of extant images, videos and texts, ripping off the handmade work of artists and skilled technicians to produce a pale approximation of the same. (Incidentally, Dracula’s cinematic adaptations have their own rich history of parasitism. Murnau’s Nosferatu, now rightly regarded as a horror movie classic, was born out of a different form of theft: It was an unlicensed adaptation of Stoker’s novel that the author’s estate attempted to sue out of existence, and it only survived thanks to the circulation of bootlegged film prints.) There is a kind of crude “master’s tools” argument for Dracula’s deploying of AI. But of course, we all know what they say about the master’s tools.
It is even difficult to praise the film as some extended commentary on the vampiric influence of artificial intelligence on the creative arts. At one point a character cracks, “I don’t want any more of this vampire-equals-capitalism cliché.” At another, that same character remarks that the film, cobbled together from disparate parts, is more like Frankenstein’s monster than Count Dracula. (One imagines a defeated critic scribbling out such an observation in their notepad.) Dracula is so ironized and punishing that it becomes impossible to know which of its observations and criticisms we should even bother to take seriously. And this too is likely the writer-director’s M.O. The film lampoons not only Dracula adaptations, or generative AI technology, or the hypocrisies of a Romanian cultural and historical legacy built on a campaign of sadistic anti-Ottoman impalings. It satirizes the culture more broadly, where such disparate and distinct categories of observation and contemplation—pop culture, politics, history, religion—get reduced into a kind of icky morass; flattened, in internet terms, into mere “content.”
To fully crack Jude’s Dracula, it may make sense to look to the other film he made in 2025, and which toured the festival circuit in tandem. Kontinental ’25 is a sparser, more contained critique of a gentrifying European housing market (with the director’s usual digressions, of course) following a Romanian bailiff who struggles with tremendous guilt after a down-on-his-luck man commits suicide during eviction proceedings.
Shot on an iPhone in 10 days, immediately following the production in Dracula, and featuring many of the same actors, it is set in Cluj, the former capital of Transylvania (ancestral home of you-know-who), and its theme of gentrification begetting dispossession and death calls to mind the Count’s own diabolical schemes in the field of real estate speculation. But more than anything, Kontinental ’25 works almost as a reminder—to the audience, and perhaps to the filmmaker himself—that Jude can make a coherent, needling, realistic social satire, unburdened by both his usual irony, and by the distracting bells and whistles of generative AI graphics. It is an answer to Dracula’s original narrative prompt of a director stuck on good ideas, lazily petitioning AI for help.
