2025 was the year of vampires, but you missed the most interesting one

It all started early this year, with Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu released on January 1 (in Italy); then came the inevitable Halloween season, marked by Luc Besson’s Dracula, met with mixed reviews; and again Dracula, single-as-symbol announcing the return of Australian band Tame Impala, newly reborn prophets of the deconstructed mainstream male. Vampires everywhere this year, figures at the center of yet another major revival. Groundbreaking, one might say. But that was another teaser. By the end of 2025, Dracula himself has become someone else. Today’s Dracula is exhausted, worn out, carnivalesque; he is forced to pull out his own teeth because dentists charge outrageous prices. He is commodified, turned into a consumer good in the most brutally literal sense of the term, and the most “2025” imaginable. This is Radu Jude’s Dracula: the Romanian director took it on the festival circuit, including Locarno, before giving it a brief theatrical run, once again around Halloween.

Far from national-popular – though entirely hyperpop – the film takes the shape of those 1990s teenage diaries that, by the end of the year, had become almost unrecognizable in their original material: warped, overstuffed with every kind of paper, plastic, physical and organic insert imaginable, as long as it felt incongruous. Or at least appeared so.
The film runs for a straight three hours, anchored by a pathetic contemporary storyline set in Romania’s vampire-tourism industry, which serves as the base for a dozen digressions of wildly varying length: one of them, a staged adaptation of a 1930s novel, lasts nearly an hour.

Aesthetically, this means saying goodbye to Coppola’s lush late-20th-century imaginaire; goodbye to Eiko Ishioka’s sumptuous, infernal-Japanese drapery and armor; goodbye to tears shed to Annie Lennox over the end credits. A real loss.
Radu Jude’s Dracula is a film in which design plays a central role, but not as product design or object aesthetics. Here, design permeates the entire construction of the work in a subtle way: in its processes, in its gaze on spaces, people, iconographies, and their meaning in the contemporary world. 

AI comes first. Tons of AI, not as a tool, but as an active character, more co-protagonist than instrument. In a representation of contemporary creative processes – a not-so-abstract metaphor for design processes – the film begins with a director in creative crisis (Jude’s alter ego, played by his fetish actor Adonis Tanța, who also appears in other roles) asking a dedicated Transylvanian artificial intelligence for vampire story ideas. What follows is a journey between hell and Miami Beach (if they can even be told apart), where Dracula can step out of his own film into the TV room of a post-Soviet clinic for billionaire seniors; morph into 1960s-style monsters generated in perhaps twenty seconds of processing time; or reappear as the exploitative manager of a company, summoning a mini zombie apocalypse populated by the soldiers who, in 1933, opened fire on striking workers. Elsewhere, we encounter Murnau’s now century-old Nosferatu, this time bombarded with rigorously vintage porn advertising. 

Then comes the city: its built space cannibalized, its exteriors and interiors devoured by consumption that doesn’t even bother to spit out the bone. (A not-entirely-marginal note: the film was shot in under a month, on a shoestring budget, in some passages even using an iPhone.) The Dracula of 2025 inhabits the spaces of overtourism. He returns to Sighișoara (in the form of a girl) and is expelled as a nuisance from his birthplace, now turned into a tourist trap. He goes to a dentist, but can’t afford the fee and is kicked out onto the street, forced to extract his legendary canines himself. The city – and Transylvania as a whole – its very space, has become a purchasable commodity, and not a cheap one, sold to tourists who, once they’ve paid, demand an experience, calmly convinced that the people themselves are part of the package they’ve bought.

Here, design is the true monster, in the negative sense of the word. Gone is the mythology of Dracula-as-vampire as an exorcism of unresolved historical traumas, or as a figure mediating religion and the realm of the unknown – call it the occult, if you like. Jude’s Dracula is a vampire “by design,” prompted into an artificial intelligence and unfolded into a palette of different personalities, all squalid, grotesque, or failed. He is vilified in the cheap design of his birthplace, now a papier-mâché museum lit with fairy lights celebrating his impalements; or reduced to a program item in the obscene dinner-show that serves as the film’s leitmotif, a shabby marketing project whose very sordidness proves uncannily well-calibrated to its target audience.

This is a vampire “by design” moving through a world “by design”: the world of capital, which can only ever be designed, in every one of its miserable aspects, to make money, ideally for others, and, if all goes well, to siphon a little back for yourself from time to time.
There is no escape from this dimension. “Though you fight to stay alive, your body starts to shiver, for no mere mortal can resist the evil of the thriller,” Vincent Price intoned before closing Michael Jackson’s Thriller with the most famous diabolical laugh in the world. Or, less evocatively: “There is no alternative.” That was Margaret Thatcher. Quoted again, with no small amount of despair and with a question mark attached, by Mark Fisher. Happy holidays.

All images: Radu Jude, Dracula, 2025. © SagaFilm, Nabis Filmgroup, PTD, Samsa, MicroFilm 2025. Courtesy Locarno Film Festival.