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For more than a century, the figure of Dracula has been drained of meaning through cinematic repetition. Hollywood, with its endless appetite for sequels and spectacle, has sucked the myth dry, leaving little more than a pop-culture husk of a once potent legend. Into this exhausted terrain strides Radu Jude, the Romanian provocateur whose latest film, Dracula (2025), attempts the impossible: to reclaim the vampire for his homeland, to restore a sense of locality and cultural friction to a myth that was born in the soil of Transylvania but exiled to the dream-factory of the West. In typical Jude fashion, he accomplishes this not through reverence but through desecration. His Dracula is a cinematic exorcism, a chaotic act of cultural repossession that deconstructs both the vampire myth and cinema itself.
Jude has long been a director obsessed with the mechanisms of storytelling — and with the ways in which history and image-making intertwine. From I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians to Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, his films inhabit that uneasy zone between satire, documentary, and intellectual prank. Dracula extends this project into the realm of pulp, gleefully mixing high and low culture until both are unrecognizable. As he put it in interviews, the film “deconstructs the myth of Dracula through dozens of stories — absurd, pulpy, literary, playful, political.” What results is not so much a narrative as a collage, a hyper-saturated mosaic of fragments: TikTok confessions, AI-generated landscapes, pornographic parodies of classic vampire scenes, and grainy iPhone wanderings through modern-day Transylvania, now a tourist trap haunted by its own commodified history.
The conceit is as dizzying as it is liberating. Jude opens his film with a series of 16 crude, AI-generated portraits of Vlad the Impaler, each one grotesque in its synthetic imperfection, each announcing in Romanian and English, “I am Vlad the Impaler, you can all suck my cock.” It is a statement of intent as much as an incantation. The film’s Dracula is not a singular figure but a viral idea — one that has infected the global imagination and now, in Jude’s hands, is being forced to confront the glitching mirror of the digital age. “The AI and Dracula are the same thing,” Jude has said. “They both suck everything.” In this way, Dracula becomes a double allegory: a satire of vampirism as cultural extraction and a reflection on how technology itself drains originality from art.
Formally, the film is a provocation. Shot mostly on iPhones with the occasional intrusion of AI-generated sequences, Dracula rejects the polish of contemporary prestige cinema. Jude has never been interested in gloss. His rough digital textures, overexposed skies, and handheld chaos are part of a larger aesthetic argument: that art made from scraps, from the discarded and the imperfect, can tell more truth than the most expensive studio epic. The use of AI, far from a gimmick, feels like a natural extension of his critique of capitalism and image-making. Where Hollywood fears AI as a threat to artistic labor, Jude treats it as a mirror for our own vampiric tendencies — our hunger for novelty, for content, for the instant consumption of ideas once they’ve been drained of context.
In one extraordinary sequence, the film cuts between footage of a costumed Dracula guiding tourists through a Transylvanian castle and AI-generated images of the same scene, rendered in grotesque parody — faces smeared, eyes misplaced, textures melting into one another. The juxtaposition is absurd and horrifying: a commentary on how both tourism and artificial intelligence cannibalize reality, reducing experience to caricature. Elsewhere, Jude turns the camera on his own crew, filming their logistical discussions, their frustrations, their laughter. “It’s a film about cinema itself,” he says, and indeed, Dracula often feels like a film within a film, a myth within a myth. The vampire story becomes a pretext for meditating on what it means to make movies at all — to steal light, to capture time, to consume the world through a lens.
That this is also a deeply Romanian film is crucial. Jude’s project is not only artistic but political: an act of cultural reclamation. “I am from Romania,” he says. “My father is from Transylvania. It’s time someone makes a Romanian Dracula movie.” Yet this is not a nationalist gesture so much as a satire of nationalism itself. In the film, Dracula appears as a mascot for tourism, a face on political posters, even a meme circulating on Romanian social media. He is at once a symbol of identity and a parasite upon it — a mirror of how post-communist societies have commodified their own pasts. Jude’s camera roams through roadside hotels, karaoke bars, and decaying monuments, exposing the gap between the myth of Transylvania and its banal reality. The result is at once hilarious and mournful, a vision of a country haunted not by vampires but by its own representations.
Throughout, Jude’s tone veers between academic irony and vulgar exuberance. There are scenes of explicit absurdity — a priest preaching about blood transfusions as the new Eucharist, a YouTuber performing an unboxing of “authentic” Transylvanian soil, a montage of AI-generated orgies where extra limbs and melted faces parody the excesses of desire. These are the “bad images” Jude loves: images that refuse beauty or coherence, that reveal the seams of their own creation. In his view, the bad image is the truest reflection of our media-saturated world. “It’s about the pleasure of bad stories,” he says, and Dracula revels in precisely that — the delirious pleasure of seeing art collapse into noise.
Yet beneath the surface chaos lies a rigorous intelligence. Jude connects the figure of the vampire to capitalism, to media, to politics. “You can think of Putin and Netanyahu as the most horrible vampires since Hitler,” he remarks, and his film echoes that sentiment through montages that link historical footage of dictators to the language of consumption. In one of the film’s most striking sequences, we see archival footage of Romanian laborers spliced with shots of influencers advertising blood-energy drinks, a sardonic nod to the exploitation that underpins both spectacle and survival. Here, vampirism becomes not fantasy but metaphor — the endless extraction of labor, attention, and creativity by systems that promise immortality while draining the life from those who feed them.
Dracula is not an easy film to love. It is messy, repetitive, often overwhelming — a monstrous collage that deliberately resists coherence. But that is its power. Where most films about myth aim for transcendence, Jude’s seeks confrontation. He refuses to offer closure, instead leaving us amid fragments: a TikTok dance here, a 19th-century engraving there, a glitch of pixels morphing into the face of Vlad Țepeș. It is cinema as compost, decaying and fertile at once. In reclaiming Dracula, Jude has also reclaimed the right to make art that is impure, unruly, defiantly alive.
By the end, it becomes clear that Jude’s Dracula is not really about vampires at all. It is about what it means to live in a world where everything — stories, histories, even identities — has been fed upon, replicated, and returned to us as content. It is a requiem for originality and, paradoxically, a celebration of creativity’s persistence in the face of exhaustion. “Dracula sucks everything,” Jude says. But in the act of sucking, he also gives something back: a reminder that cinema, even in its most distorted form, can still bleed, can still bite, can still surprise us with its raw, unruly pulse.
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