Radu Jude’s New ‘Dracula’: A Chaotic Experiment with Artificial Intelligence

Romanian director Radu Jude, known for his provocative and satirical style, has presented a new interpretation of the Dracula legend, created using generative artificial intelligence. His work immediately became the subject of heated debate, transforming the familiar story into a chaotic experiment that blurs the lines between art, technology, and intentional provocation.

According to information from the publication Inverse, the narrative centers on a fictional director named Adonis Tanta, who is tasked with filming a new version of “Dracula” using AI. Armed with a tablet, the hero begins generating scenes through neural networks, resulting in a stream of absurd and overtly sexualized imagery. As journalists note, the opening scenes of the film literally “attack” the viewer’s perception—a series of generated sequences unfolds where the vampire seems to be drowning in an abyss of his own passion.

Jude himself describes his work as “conscious and yet unconscious” cinema. The film’s visual style combines cheap costumes, deliberately crude direction, and strange digital textures, creating the feeling of an anxious dream. Critics suggest that the emphasis on hypersexuality is a reference to the Victorian era, where eroticism was masked by a veil of fear and social taboos.

The idea for the film was born from the director’s failed experiment with ChatGPT. Jude tried to use AI to create a script for a “vampire porn film set in Auschwitz,” but the neural network refused to generate such content. It was this refusal that inspired him to create a film that explores the very process of interaction between humans and machines.

“I pretended to be a machine,” Jude explained in an interview with WIRED. In the film, his alter ego, director Tanta, creates cinema solely through text prompts, and this process becomes an integral part of the artistic concept.

Jude insists that his “Dracula” is not just satire, but a deep exploration of how artificial intelligence distorts and transforms the very nature of creativity. “For me, it’s just a new tool. You can use it—or not use it,” he concluded.