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This madness reaches an almost interminable frenzy with Dracula, one of two films the director released this year. This time, Jude returns to one of Romania’s foundational myths. The title may refer to the blood-sucking Count first appearing in the Irishman Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. But Jude’s ostensible subject is Stoker’s inspiration: the ruthless Wallachian prince Vlad Tepes, a.k.a. Vlad the Impaler, a.k.a. Vlad Dracula. The historical Tepes is regarded in some quarters as a Romanian folk hero, for his fierce opposition to Ottoman invaders (“His cruelty,” a character in Jude’s film notes, “was born out of patriotic spirit!”). Dracula, meanwhile, has become one of the stock villains of the silver screen, a lecherous menace whose threat is diversely symbolically encoded across a range of artistic and academic interpretations. It’s another one of those knotty contradictions that sparks Jude’s imagination. Dracula opens with a frustrated film director (Adonis Tanta) addressing the camera dead-on. He has been charged with mounting a “super-commercial” Dracula movie. No small task, considering the scores of extant adaptations, and variations. Stuck for inspiration, he turns to the most contemporary refuge for the constipated creative hack: AI. Through a series of prompts muttered into his tablet, the technology serves up about a dozen Dracula movies (and some entirely non-Dracula movies), many of which incorporate actual AI-generated imagery. In one, Tepes returns to his childhood home and is galled to find it full of lollygagging tourists. An early segment sees Jude (or his creatively bankrupt filmmaker stand-in) abusing “fair use” copyright laws, by interrupting clips from F.W. Murnau’s formative film adaptation of Dracula, Nosferatu (1922), with annoying pop-up ads for online porn sites. An attempt to exploit “fair use” copyright laws to rework Francis Ford Coppola’s own kitschy 1992 adaptation proves even less successful. In one excruciatingly long chapter, a character modeled after Stoker’s hapless realtor-hero Jonathan Harker is consumed with proving that the vampiric presence in a village is actually an Orthodox priest.
