Everyone knows the story of Dracula, and everyone has seen one of the three million adaptations of Bram Stoker’s classic vampire tale out there. You probably haven’t seen anything like Radu Jude’s Dracula, which is being released by independent distributor 1-2 Special and just received its first trailer. Described as an “Absurdist, AI-Laced” version of Dracula, the best way to describe the film’s premise is to just use the official synopsis, which reads:
“What happens when a young and curious filmmaker challenges his creativity with the limitless possibilities of a fake A.I.? A surprising mix of various stories, from new and old times, about the original myth of Dracula: a vampire hunt, zombies and Dracula crashing a strike, a science-fiction tale about Vlad the Impaler’s return, an adaptation of the first Romanian vampires novella, a tragic romance, a vulgar folktale, A.I. generated kitsch stories… and much more!”
If that isn’t bonkers enough, then you can see the trailer for the film Roger Ebert.com’s Robert Daniels called “f-cking nuts.” And it is hard to disagree.
What is Radu Jude’s ‘Dracula’?
Other than referring back to the official synopsis, it is pretty much impossible to do the idea behind this completely unhinged and never-to-be-repeated adaptation of one of the great classic Gothic horror novels ever written. If it can even be called that.
Although the movie is mostly made up of scenes of sex, violence, AI-generated content, vampires with rubber fangs and a plethora of penises (we tried to tell you, yes, it needs to be seen to be believed), it somehow has a runtime of 170 minutes. As per Daniels’ review of the movie, “the overall effect is as if you fed a bawdy medieval verse to ChatGPT.”
Just to be perfectly clear, there is nothing serious about this version of Dracula in the slightest. The movie’s narrator (Adonis Tanta) acts as a plot device and keeps things making (something close to) sense, as he sits in a stark cell in a bathrobe and explains that he has been instructed to make a new Dracula movie with some in-universe AI models. For that reason, the film includes a lot of the kind of thing Hollywood is fighting against becoming the norm in the industry. In fact, that seems to be a large part of the reason for the movie existing – to show that an AI revolution is an eccentric nightmare that we all really need to make sure doesn’t happen outside a satirical piece of garbage that knows exactly what its purpose in this world is.
Dracula garnered a 69% Rotten Tomatoes score (steady on), and will find its way in front of cinema audiences on October 29 when it gets a limited theatrical run in the U.S.
- Release Date
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October 31, 2025
- Runtime
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170 minutes
- Director
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Radu Jude
- Writers
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Radu Jude
- Producers
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Rodrigo Teixeira