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.[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]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 suffering existential dread over Tilly Norwood; imagine the freedom to choose to use AI for interstitial shots without kicking the Letterboxd hornets’ nest, as did the brothers Cairnes with Late Night With the Devil back in 2024. That’s a very different movie from Dracula, despite sharing a genre label of horror, but the Cairnes and their producers-cum-VFX artists viewed AI the same way Jude does now. “Using AI for us was just another tool that we could afford, for the things we could not afford with a regular budget,” Jude says. “I didn’t work with a specialist.” Rather, he worked with Vlaicu Golcea, a composer and jazz musician whom Jude describes as “an amateur user of AI.” “[The film] was made in a very amateur way, and we loved doing that,” he adds. Jude’s thoughts on AI echo talk from Hollywood’s pro-AI camp, from Kevin O’Leary to James Cameron to Netflix, about the technology as an implement for cutting costs. The key difference, of course, is funding; O’Leary, Cameron, and Netflix don’t really need to concern themselves with cash, compared to a filmmaker like Jude, working in a regional movie industry. O’Leary boasts a net worth of around $400 million. His advocacy for replacing extras with “a hundred Norwood Tillys [sic]” reflects his status as a multimillionaire entrepreneur, secured through the aggressive expansion of his brand. This suggests that his interest in AI has much less to do with facilitating art than with seizing an opportunity, such is the entrepreneurial way.The artist’s way, of course, is sincere, even if in the case of Dracula, sincerity begets just under three hours of unsparing cultural commentary and full goose bozo vulgarity. Jude begins Dracula with a montage comprising rotating portraits of Romania’s 15th century national hero, Vlad “the Impaler” Țepeș himself, each inviting the viewer to perform an intimate act on him too spicy to mention here; aesthetically, the pictures range from “classic medieval” to “Vlad in a spacesuit.” After about a minute of this, the sequence cuts to an on-screen director (Adonis Tanța), who having been charged with making a film based on the Dracula myth, and having discovered he has exactly less than no talent for filmmaking, turns to a fictional AI app to make his movie for him. Jude structures Dracula around his protagonist’s conversations with the app (voiced by Jude), which are more like arguments, and the “movies” the app spits out: a picaresque adaptation of Romanian author Nicolae Velea’s romance novel Just So, as normal as the film ever gets; scenes from F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu cut into an infomercial promoting Romanian tourism; a take on Bram Stoker’s Dracula that embraces its source material halfway and half-asses the set decoration the rest; a short set at a private health clinic, whose patrons pay for youth treatments in hopes of achieving immortality; and, best of all, a tale of labor in revolt, where a union-busting Dracula summons the revenants of soldiers involved in the Grivița strike of 1933 to terrorize a team of exploited video game testers. Jude intersperses these scenes within the Tanța wraparound, supplemented by a recurring plot in which Sandu (Gabriel Spahiu) and Vampira (Oana Maria Zaharia), likewise maltreated at the Dracula-themed dinner theater where they work, plan to escape their jobs, their boss, their country, and the frothing mobs of overzealous customers who too eagerly participate in the show. Put bluntly (but complimentarily): there’s a lot of movie here. That’s one of Jude’s calling cards of late: distended running times that fall in sync with his all-encompassing eye as a storyteller. Dracula is firmly of a piece with his proclivities, as a filmmaker, to offer social and political critiques issued through character studies. Unlike Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World or Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, though, Dracula lacks a true lead character—an effect of the film’s anthology format that ultimately cedes space to Jude’s AI imagery. It’s a stretch to call AI the “star” of the movie. Nonetheless, its presence is felt, and that’s the point.“One of the things [about] what is called artistic intelligence is to know how to transform limitations into advantages,” Jude explains. He references the semi-famous anecdote about the Turkish bath scene in Orson Welles’ Othello, a product of invention by necessity; thwarted by tailoring delays in his Shakespearean costume drama, he chose to shoot his actors naked. “All the history of cinema, and all art, is full of examples like that,” Jude says. “My limitation was my budget. We tried to find all kinds of ways [around it], and AI was one; we started to work with it, and I liked it so much in a certain way, because you can criticize it and we can see how dumb the things it creates are. But also these dumb things, from another perspective, can have a certain type of digital trashy poetry. Why not use it?”Rather than endorse AI, though, Jude merely accepts its existence: the genie is out of the bottle, so artists might as well make a few wishes. “Once a new technology is there, I think it’s very difficult to kick it out,” Jude says. “I don’t think it’s going to go away.” Nor does he feel comfortable with the idea of AI’s unabated propagation, for ethical reasons as well as artistic ones. Dracula mines ugliness from its AI images, which are constitutionally unnerving at face value as well as for the way they mirror genuinely ugly remarks made by the film’s supporting characters: one participant in the Dracula dinner theater sings the praises of Unit 731, a covert research facility run by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II, where they conducted lethal human experimentation on thousands of Chinese civilians. “Torture solves a lot of issues,” the man professes. “Enhanced interrogation, I mean. Otherwise, our way of life would go down the drain.” Ugly sentiments deserve ugly art, though Jude takes a nuanced stance on this matter. “There’s no such thing as an ugly image,” he says. “An image is ugly or not depending how it’s framed in a context, how it’s put in a context. There’s no way you can isolate a photograph from a film and say, ‘Look at this image, look how ugly it is, this film is bad because it has ugly images.’” “Ugly” is in the beholder’s eye. Once upon a time, patrons of the arts thought charcoal drawings were dross compared to the grandeur of oil painting; in more recent history, people likewise pooh-poohed movies shot on iPhones. To Jude, iPhone films are beautiful, too–just in a different way than, in his words, “a VistaVision film by Paul Thomas Anderson.” Framing and context serve important roles in Dracula’s composition. Jude didn’t intend the grotesqueness of the film’s AI images to reflect humanity’s own grotesque behaviors; that’s a matter of interpretation. There is, however, a capitalist critique baked into their surface-level ugliness. “There’s something here,” Jude says, “maybe not in the logic of nationalism, but the logic of the minimum you’re given in a capitalist society. Excellence is of course very rare, but usually for your money you get the minimum and I think most of these AI programs are offering you almost nothing. I mean, it’s really, really, really, really low quality for what you pay for.” Higher quality AI output comes with a heftier price tag–a stroke of bitter irony for technology promoted as cost saver. Otherwise: cheap in, cheap out. There are, of course, worse things new technology can be than cheap. If the only worry with AI was the quality of their output, Dracula’s integration of AI-generated imagery wouldn’t have demanded to be addressed in reviews and festival reports. But other worries abound, a la O’Leary’s remarks about extras, to say nothing of broader cultural detriments like brain-draining our college students. Jude readily acknowledges these problems. “I think it’s dangerous,” Jude says. “I’m not minimizing it.” Governments, he believes, should regulate, or liberally tax, AI, or barring that take action to rein in the companies tripping over themselves in a mad rush to innovate technology that researchers increasingly have come to trust less the more they use it. (And if governments do pass AI legislation, Jude also thinks we should take heed lest society fall under the spell of political censorship.) Until that happens, though, Jude adopts the same stance as the characters in his movies when faced with overwhelming cultural or political tyranny: “What else can we do?”