In mathematics, the fractal relates to a unique curved or geometric shape, whose parts are identical to the composition of a given object. The vampire mythos in entertainment follows a familiar pattern. The fable has been present on the silver screen for over a century, and has seen iterations of sprawling adaptations, with hundreds of films being made in every type of genre imaginable. No fractal, however, is as pertinent to the vampire objective as Radu Jude’s Dracula.

Yet, while sitting down with the critically acclaimed, award-winning director early Sunday morning, he qualified that the story “doesn’t really have anything to do with Dracula.” Instead, he “conceived the film as being a Dracula machine,” a descension of disorder of an immensely reproduced story.

His 2006 short film “Lampa cu căciulă (The Tube with a Hat)” is the most awarded short film in Romanian history, and forged the narrative style with which he would continue to tell stories; hearty, irreverent, and earnest. His recent film, Nu aștepta prea mult de la sfârșitul lumii (Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World) was a black comedy which took home the Jury Grand Prize at the 2023 Locarno Film Festival.

The nearly three-hour-long drama—which debuted at the Locarno Film Festival in August and showed at the New York Film Festival in September in a double feature screening with another one of his creations, Kontinental ‘25—presents itself as the amalgamation of a writer’s frustration, taking to an AI software to write a story to end all stories, satisfying every single potential viewer’s taste by doing so. The outcome is a writhing, hilarious onslaught whose mythos is on the fringes of even its own conception.

The vampire film became the preferred backdrop for this point to be made, with Romania’s own historical context of the famed Count Dracula mired with incongruency and generations of lost translation. By 1947, the Socialist Republic of Romania had taken power in the country, and with that, various historical motifs and the pop-culture lexicon of the nation’s existence were muted, or selectively undiscussed in the country’s forming communist enterprise. Jude was 12 when the Revolution of 1989 transitioned the country into its current presiding Democratic government. He recalls foreign travel being reinstated in the country, and being so confused by tourists talking about the reason for their visit being to see the Transylvanian Bran Castle, where it’s widely believed the Dracula mythos originated.

“It’s an interesting re-appropriation of the myth,” he says, describing the Romanian relationship in media with the fabled story, “filmmakers didn’t touch the myth for so long because it was just so alien in nature.” Yet stories of Vlad the Impaler, the infamous Voivode of Wallachia (modern-day Romania), and muse to the Dracula/vampire fable were glorified under communist rule. Many same sentiments remain as such to this day, with the far-right, ultra-nationalist political party AUR using Vlad’s likeness to campaign in 2024 (while Dracula was in production).

In the American entertainment industry, AI could take away thousands of jobs that have supported the special effects community, writers’ rooms across the country, and even acting roles, potentially becoming more sparse. Most notably, the AI discussion was at the core of a months-long Writers Guild of America strike in 2023. Dracula uses AI sardonically, though the reasoning behind its representation in the film is far more justified than a joke.

As an independent filmmaker, Jude details that, “there is no industry” he must comply with, and furthermore, funding and time constraints of projects drastically impact the resources he and many other international filmmakers have to create projects. To him, AI is merely a tool at his disposal, one whose presence in Dracula helps paint a grotesque intrigue, this maladapted translation as to what story is being told, as forgotten and transformed as the mythos in Romania itself. Vampires are everywhere. While not taking the form of an undead nightcrawler, they are in our timelines and swearing into positions of power across the globe. Their form is not new, nor one to head significance from. They are merely just the shape of a fractal that came before it. 

Photographed by Guy Ferrandis