By Steve Erickson

Like other Eastern European artists, Radu Jude is at his best channeling his anger through dark comedy.

Dracula, directed by Radu Jude. Screening at Somerville Theatre on November 13

Serban Pavlu, left, and Adonis Tanta in Dracula. Photo: 1-2 Special

Radu Jude’s Dracula is a cry of rage against his native Romania, a collection of short films, a remix of the history of vampire stories, and a celebration of dirty jokes. It even dreams up Dracula’s TikTok account. If all of that seems almost impossible to stuff into one movie, well, being much too much is Dracula’s raison d’être. The film mirrors today’s overload of online images and info, and it doesn’t let up for 170 minutes, continually finding new angles to whiz down. Jude’s one of the few major European directors of his generation who seriously engages with modern technology. And in Dracula, AI turns out to be the ultimate vampire — but the filmmaker attempts to subvert it for his own purposes. He acknowledges that AI slop is among our era’s dominant media, but he also grants the electronic slosh the dignity that he feels is owed to a part of the history of visual representation. Dracula puts dreck in conversation with earlier forms of film and literature.

Throughout Dracula, a frustrated filmmaker (Adonis Tanta) converses with an AI chatbot. He is searching for commercial ideas for a new project, and needs help conceiving a new version of the story of the venerable bloodsucker. AI ends up inspiring 14 films-within-the-film, and they are a very eclectic assemblage — one episode lasts 50 minutes. The film’s other main plot thread revolves around two actors  who are performing in a dinner theater production of Bram Stoker’s novel. The audience is tiny. Vampira (Oana Maria Zahiara) and her much older co-star, Count Sandu (Gabriel Spahiu), go on the run when the theater turns out to be a front for sex trafficking. Audience members chase and attack the pair, stakes in hand.

Dracula’s visuals are cheap for conceptual reasons; Jude values the poor image. Watching the film is disorienting because it cuts between wildly disparate video textures. Some footage is heavily saturated and clean, but lots more is muddy and grainy. On top of that, Jude also draws on technology that many may see as outdated or flawed. In this proudly bawdy film, real obscenity lies in trying to sucker viewers with a false vision of reality — pictures slick and clean enough to pass for truth.

Some of Jude’s best jokes come at the expense of middlebrow filmmaking. (He describes Dracula as “my love letter to Ed Wood.”) Tanta’s director has no interest in making credible entertainment, much less art. When he complains that one of the AI’s stories is too heteronormative, he means that it doesn’t include sufficient T&A from its lesbian vampires. At one point, the director insists he wants to make a “touching love story.” This wish becomes a tale that ends with a priest being happily sodomized by a flying dildo. Even when it doesn’t deal with literal vampires, Dracula is full of scenes of some form of impaling.

Anger of this degree is common to Jude’s work, but it also points to the circumstances behind Dracula’s production. According to a Variety review, “Jude claims to have no special interest in Dracula, having agreed to make this film as a concession to his financiers (some of whom dropped out during production, further complicating the low-budget affair).” The fact that horror films have become one of the few cinematic genres that make a profit explains Dracula’s existence — and its farcically sardonic tone.

Although Jude’s never completely repeats himself, the structure of Dracula allows him to bring back ideas and images from his recent work, as BC555 noted on Letterboxd.  It takes a while to realize how much affection the film holds for Vampira and Count Sandu. Their foibles are treated with kindness. Unlike the Russian porn site that advertises itself during a screening of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, Vampira’s OnlyFans career is a matter of necessity. She needs to eat, and a career in the arts turns into a more exploitative form of sex work. Count Sandu’s  horniness is depicted with a similar understanding. Jude also has fun with outsiders’ ignorance of Romania. He re-stages a scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s film version of Dracula — spoken by Gary Oldman there in English-accented Romanian — turning it into an orgy of mutating organs, culminating with a penis sprouting from the vampire’s neck.  Laying claim to his country’s own version of the vampire mythology, he loosely adapts three stories by Romanian authors.

Jude bounces between features, shorts, and documentaries fearlessly, working as often as possible. (He’s already shot a new film.). The fact that a movie this excessive and challenging is being released in the U.S. testifies to the iconoclastic expectations the director has built up over the years: his audience demands crass provocations pushed to the limits, entertaining and/or titillating, and he delivers them. Like other Eastern European artists, Jude is at his best channeling his anger through dark comedy. Dracula’s fictional director is determined to use AI to create commercial pieces of IP, but he ends up (accidentally?) making crappy grotesqueries. Jude has no such illusions about what he’s doing: Dracula opens with 16 different AI incarnations of the legendary vampire instructing the audience to suck his dick. If ever there was a film bound to divide spectators, this is it. But its risk-taking exuberance is thrilling, though the results are uneven.

Steve Erickson writes about film and music for Gay City News, Slant Magazine, the Nashville Scene, Trouser Press, and other outlets. He also produces electronic music under the tag callinamagician. His latest album, Bells and Whistles, was released in January 2024, and is available to stream here. He presents a biweekly freeform radio show, Radio Not Radio, featuring an eclectic selection of music from around the world.