DreadClub: Vampire's Verdict

DreadClub: Vampire's Verdict is an 87-minute English-language animated feature written, directed and produced by Hooroo Jackson. It premiered on 3 July 2024 and was released on Prime Video on 26 July 2024, with a Blu-ray following on 31 August 2024. It is Jackson's third feature and his first animated film, and it is drawn as a 2D film in the style of 1980s and 1990s anime. It is billed as the first AI-animated feature film and the first AI anime feature.

Jackson made the film largely alone between February and July 2024, for a budget of $405 (his social posts say $400). It was built from more than 17,000 high-resolution AI images, and AI tools produced the sound, music, video and performances. Jon Peddie Research says the images were made with Midjourney and then animated, and calls the $405 figure "purportedly" so; the tools for the other parts are not named by it, by Jackson's page or by his interview with God of Prompt. Wikipedia adds that he used AI as a writing partner and assembled some sequences from paper edits dictated by an LLM. He documented the prompts in a self-published ebook, Artificial Imagination: The Making of "DreadClub". The Blu-ray comes in two cuts, a 100% Machine Cut and a Director's Cut that includes non-machine elements, and a soundtrack came out about a month after the streaming release.

Jackson's cinema debut was Aimy in a Cage (2015), with a cast that included Crispin Glover and Paz de la Huerta. After eight years of pitching in Hollywood without success, Filmink reports, he turned to AI in 2023 and made Window Seat (2023), described as the first feature with fully AI-generated video and performances, for about $100. His later films include A Very Long Carriage Ride and My Boyfriend is a Superhero!? (both 2025), and he has announced a sequel, DreadClub: Hieroglyphics Hex, which he said is at least a year from production.

On YouTube, the film's upload had 17,403 views when the record last read it on 1 October 2026. At festivals it won Best Animated Film at the Kraken International Film Festival, Jackson won Best Director at the Miami Street International Film Festival, and it was an official selection at the Burano Film Festival and the AI Film Awards Venice, according to his portfolio page.

Rotten Tomatoes lists three professional reviews, two of them positive. Film Threat's Bobby LePire called it an intriguing first step into AI in filmmaking and praised Jackson's style, and Martin Carr found it cinematic and engaging. William Schwartz of Book & Film Globe criticised the pacing, writing that "the characters never, ever stop talking", and Ronak Kotecha faulted its excess dialogue while calling it an engaging mix of myth, mystery and melodrama. Wikipedia cites Sight & Sound and Animation World Network for the film's status as the first AI-animated feature, which is why critics treated it as an early test case for AI in filmmaking, and Jon Peddie Research presents it as evidence that AI can make animation far more cheaply than traditional production.