It was only a matter of time before AI started making movies. But Radu Jude’s Dracula is probably not what most people envisioned.
The new movie by the arthouse cinema world’s resident provocateur, whose 2021 film Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn was banned in several countries and is mostly only available in censored form, Dracula opens with a barrage of AI renderings of Dracula engaging in ludicrous and increasingly pornographic activities. Then a filmmaker (Adonis Tanța) appears onscreen, seated at his desk with an iPad housing the latest in generative AI technology. He’s been tasked by his studio to make a Dracula movie, you see, but he’s at a loss. How do you make a good movie about Dracula that hasn’t been done already? So he decides to do the opposite: make a uniquely terrible Dracula movie made completely by generative AI.
Only, Jude’s Dracula isn’t actually made by AI. There are plenty of AI sequences in it; in fact, there’s an aggressive amount of it. But Jude conceived of this bizarre, surrealist concoction on his own, in the way only he could. And it was inspired by ChatGPT refusing to make the Dracula movie he wanted it to make. “When ChatGPT appeared, I had this idea of structuring the movie around that. I tried a few scenarios with ChatGPT, I tried to get it to make a Dracula porn film set in Auschwitz, and it rejected it,” Jude told WIRED.
So Jude decided to do his best impersonation of AI. And the result is a strange, obscene anthology film that runs nearly three hours long, and skewers both the stupidity of the new technology and the idiocy of humans who depend on it. Divided into 14 chapters, some of which tell complete stories and others mostly act as brief interludes, the film explores vampirism in all its forms: literal, metaphorical, psychosexual, and everything in between. There’s one segment where a washed-up actor playing Dracula in a pornographic stage play is hunted down by a mob of tourists. Another segment where penises grow in a wheat field and are sold to horny villagers. Another where the actual Dracula is a tyrannical boss of a group of tech workers. And one that simply recreates Bram Stoker’s story, but with cardboard cutouts.
All the segments are created by “prompts” by Tanța’s fictional filmmaker, who is a stand-in for Jude. But they’re all just Jude imagining what it would be like to be AI itself. “I was pretending that I am the AI machine,” Jude explained to WIRED.
But, of course, Jude, who shot in his native Romania with a small ensemble of actors and real-life citizens, is actually using AI for large stretches of his film. It helped him when he was making a movie on a small budget, he said to WIRED. But while it is “a critique of AI images. But it also came from a curiosity of how they work. For me, it’s a new tool. And like any new tool, you can use it or not use it.”
It’s clear that Jude is not precious about using AI in his filmmaking, which is still a touchy subject for most filmmakers and film lovers. But while he’s not fully embracing it, he’s also not opposed to skewering it. The result is an odd film that feels like the death knell for cinema as we know it, but also a cheeky nod to how quickly the movie landscape is changing.
“In the last 10, 20 years, you hear it from all directions, this kind of crying over the death of cinema. “Cinema is dying!” Cinema is already dead. Cinema died 20 years ago, in the ’90s or whenever. It’s like a prolonged funeral around filmmaking,” Jude told The Film Stage.
So is Dracula the funeral or the furnace from which cinema is burned and reborn anew? Maybe both. Maybe neither. Maybe it’s AI slop for the arthouse crowd. Whatever the case, it’s a film doing something more interesting with AI than any other movie out there.
