Dracula is dead in a New York morgue, and his daughter has come to claim the body. The attendant at the desk is David Lynch, playing it completely straight, and she hypnotizes him.

NADJA (1995) follows the title vampire, played by Elina Löwensohn, as she drifts through downtown Manhattan nightclubs and all-night diners in the wake of her father’s death. In a bar she meets Lucy, played by Galaxy Craze, and seduces her, not knowing that Lucy’s husband Jim, played by Martin Donovan, is the nephew of Van Helsing, the man who staked her father. Van Helsing, played by Peter Fonda, drags Jim into hunting Nadja and her ailing twin brother Edgar, played by Jared Harris, caught between the family’s bloodline and the modern city around them.

Michael Almereyda shot it in black and white, with sections run through a cheap plastic Fisher-Price toy camera, giving the vampire’s point of view a grainy, degraded texture unlike anything else around it. Mary Sweeney and Amy Hobby produced, with Lynch as executive producer. The project began when Lynch invited Almereyda to come up with a low-budget genre film.

Suzy Amis plays Cassandra, Edgar’s nurse and lover, who has a hidden tie to the Van Helsings. Simon Fisher-Turner’s score and Jim Denault’s cinematography turn a low-budget vampire picture into an art-house reverie, a Dracula story filtered through downtown New York’s underground film scene of the early nineties.