The celebrated Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude produces a clutch of truly disturbing sights in his latest film, Dracula, where mangled bodies and blood-gorged ghouls leer at the audience from the screen. But what makes these images efficient nightmare fuel stems from their construction more so than their appearance: they’re the product of AI rather than human artists. The famed fanged count of Transylvania feasts on victims in repose as their limbs entwine and mouths emerge in areas of the anatomy where mouths most certainly do not (and should not) exist; the ghouls howl until their own faces fall off and they dissolve into what’s best described as visual fog, horrible and hideous all at once.
In most stories, this is where the author would make a pat remark like “and that’s the point.” This is not that story, because Jude, following up his sublimely vulgar 2024 opus Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World while waiting out the days ahead of the release of his next movie, Kontinental ‘75, had no such pretense in mind using AI to realize chunks of Dracula’s colossal 170 minute running time. Like tripods and lenses and cameras, AI served a purpose in the film’s production other than “cultural lightning rod.”
Of course, in notices from the Locarno Film Festival, where it premiered in August, as well as festival screenings from Busan to New York, AI proved a subject of heavy scrutiny. “I never thought, for one second, that it was going to be an important issue,” Jude casually admits in a recent discussion with TIME. “I think it’s because [the Romanian] film industry, if you want to call it that, is so small that the stakes are so low, financially speaking, that nobody feels threatened, because there’s nothing to lose.”
For filmmakers in other markets around the world gnashing their fingernails way past the quick, the atmosphere Jude describes may sound liberating. Imagine not…
