The project had been in development for nearly 2 years. In 2019,
Aidan Manley worked as a writer's assistant for
Jonathan Sobol. When he asked Sobol for future filmmaking advice, he told Manley to make a web-series and then cut it together into a feature-film. That way he could show that he's capable of episodic work and features. Manley started to develop an idea, but the plot didn't work so the project was shelved. He picked it back up during the summer of 2020 and changed the story after being inspired by
Layers of Fear (2016), but then struggled with trying to make a feature-length story with only one actor, leading him to almost drop the project and develop it as a novel instead. When he found out that the original Dracula novel was written as a collection of interviews and journal entries, he thought that would be the perfect format for the novel. But then he decided that the story can still work as a movie if done in the found-footage genre. Manley has said that if it wasn't for this decision, the movie would never have been made.
