Blade

Blade's mother was attacked by a vampire while she was pregnant. She died, but he lived. Unfortunately, he'd undergone certain genetic changes. He can withstand garlic, silver, even sunlight. And he's got their strength. This time tomorrow, all those wounds of his will be healed. He still ages like a human, though. You see, vampires age slower than us.

Unfortunately, he also inherited their thirst...

The story of a half-vampire half-human vampire hunter on a mission to rid the world of the vampire menace, Blade is from an era before the superhero movies as we know them now. Released in 1998, the film is from a time when the bloated and gaudy wreckage that the Batman franchise had become had turned the genre into a mark of shame, so as a result, it wasn’t marketed as a superhero movie, but as an action-horror film.

But regardless of that, that’s exactly what it was.

More so, Blade wasn’t just a full-fledged comic book movie featuring a full-fledged comic book superhero, it was the first Marvel comic book movie to feature a Black man in a leading role, and while it may not officially be the first movie of the MCU (the Marvel Cinematic Universe), it might as well be, and any nerd worth their salt acknowledges this. Blade wasn’t just a box-office success, and a hit with audiences, it was a trailblazer, paving the way for the Fox X-Men franchise, which brought the MCU to the Silver Screen.

So yeah, it’s basically the first movie of the MCU.

Blade

The idea of a Dhampir is mostly from Balkan folklore. A mythical creature that is the result of a union between a vampire and a human, usually a male vampire and a human female, and often a virgin woman, it is thing that entered folklore in the first place probably as the result of a general patriarchal fear of female sexuality. In addition, Dhampir children were said to be easy to recognize due to certain signs, like untamed dark hair, or if they were considered to be cunning or courageous, or because they were considered to be "very dirty" or to have a “soft” body, a big nose, or larger than normal ears, or teeth, or eyes, or because they have a tail. Other than that last one, all of these signs sounds like the usual kind of nonsense, just a bunch of vague “signs” that would allow assholes and bigots and religious zealots to more easily fuck over some person in their community that they don’t like, or are angry at, or are jealous of, or maybe because they are a foreigner. Same as it ever was, right?

Anyway, that’s what Blade is, a Dhampir vampire hunter.

Created by writer Marv Wolfman and artist Gene Colan in July of 1973, Eric “Blade” Brooks first appeared as a supporting character in issue #10 of the Marvel comic The Tomb of Dracula. Due to the vampiric enzyme in his bloodstream, that was a result of his mother having been bitten by a vampire while pregnant, Blade is immune to vampire bites. He also possesses superhuman strength, stamina, speed, agility, heightened senses, the ability to heal rapidly, blah, blah, blah, all the usual superhuman enhancement stuff. He is also, of course, a master martial artist. Most importantly, he has a fanatical hatred for undead bloodsuckers, and is unaffected by the light of the sun, which is why he's called The Daywalker. For a long time, he carried knives carved out of teak, and while I get the idea of having wooden stake weapons to use against vampires, I have to wonder, why was he was even called Blade in the first place? Why not Stake?

Regardless, now he’s known for his silver-edged katana.

Blade wasn’t originally a "daywalker" either. For a long time, he was just a regular human being who was just a tough son of a bitch, and was also immune to being turned into a vampire. It really wasn’t until the film that the comic book character was updated to match the film portrayal, which was a smart decision, because honestly, the movie version is the hands down better version.

Deacon Frost

Deacon Frost first appeared in The Tomb of Dracula #13 in October 1973, only three issues after Blade’s first appearance, and he has been the Daywalker’s main enemy ever since.

You can tell Deacon Frost was always a monster, because before he was a vampire, much like those creepy and sad old man snake-oil grifter assholes, with their gross old man oiled-up beef jerky bodies–like RFK jr, Bryan Johnson, and Dave Asprey–he was an old white guy desperately hunting for the key to immortality. And like all of those real world losers with their embarassing divorced dad energy, he went the supervillain route. But instead of drinking raw milk, or eating nothing but slabs of meat, or sleeping in a freezing chamber, or stealing his son's blood and injecting it into his penis, or adhering to some ridiculous weirdo sleep schedule, or whatever dumb shit these pathetic old farts latch onto, Frost kidnapped a young woman in order to inject her with the blood of a vampire, hoping that this would lead him to finding the thing that would return him to his glory days, a time when he was still able to play sports better than professional women atheletes and, in theory, young women found him attractive. Unfortunately, the girl's fiancé showed up, and in the scuffle, Frost accidentally injected himself, becoming a vampire.

It's an overly-contrived origin made all the more weird as he not only gained the usual vampire abilities, but inexplicably, he was also to create vampiric clones of anyone he bites, which are then under his control. I don’t understand how this even works, or why he can do it. Like, where does the extra organic matter that makes up these clones come from? Even worse, he can then create more replicas of these duplicates by then biting them. The duplicates are also able to absorb the original victim into their own body. It’s just so random and dumb, and it makes no sense. I don’t approve, but… comics, y’know? Still, I'm glad the movie ditched it. After that, Deacon Frost went on to a pretty regular supervillain career. And while Frost has been generally unsuccessful in his attempts to usurp the title of the Lord of Vampires from Dracula over the years, he did manage to kill Blade's mother, so Blade’s been after his ass ever since.

Anyway, in the comics, Deacon Frost is a tall, white-haired, late middle-aged gentleman with red eyes, who likes to wear 1860s Germany period clothing. In the movie, he’s played by everyone's favorite poor man’s Ethan Hawke, Stephen Dorff, who seems to like to dress like a tech bro bad boy who is ready to pitch a new app at any moment, and will most likely use a slur when you turn him down.

But I digress... The Movie

In 1967, a pregnant woman is attacked by a vampire. The doctors are able to save her baby, but the woman dies.

Thirty years later, a different woman lures a frat boy dipshit to an underground party that turns out to be a vampire “blood“ rave put on by the vampire Deacon Frost. That’s when Blade shows up.

Known as The Daywalker, he has all a vampire’s strengths, and none of their weaknesses, a fact he demonstrates as he wades through the various vampires in attendance, leaving nothing but vampire-ash and the dead bodies of their familiars in his wake. During the fight, Blade runs across Frost’s right hand vamp, Quinn, and asks him to let Frost know that it’s “open season on all suckheads,” and then he sets Quinn on fire.

The cops show up. Since Quinn is still alive, they take him to the hospital. There, he kills Dr. Curtis Webb, and tries to feed on hematologist Dr. Karen Jenson, but Blade shows up to finish Quinn off.

Unfortunately, the cops show up to help…

Quinn escapes.

Blade takes a bitten Karen to a safe house, where she is treated by his old friend, Abraham Whistler. Whistler makes the weapons, and Blade uses of them. Whistler had a family once, a wife, two daughters, then a drifter came calling one evening, a vampire, and now he and Blade are waging a secret war against the vampires, the Hominus Nocturna. He tells Karen that vampires are everywhere, and that she’s probably seen them herself and didn't know it, on the subway or in a bar. He explains that he and Blade track the vampire migrations from city to city, using weapons based on their weaknesses, sunlight, silver, garlic, and that while he and Blade, and a few others, try to keep the war from spilling out in the street, sometimes people like her get caught up in it. Also… shocker… Whistler lets her know that the vampires own most of the cops and people in power. He warns her that she is now marked by the vampires, so she should leave town, because they’ll be coming after her. Finally, he lets her know that he might not have been able to destroy the vampire infection in her blood, saying…

I’d buy yourself a gun, if I were you. If you start becoming sensitive to daylight, if you find that you’re thirsty, no matter how much you’ve had to drink… then I suggest you take that gun and use it on yourself. Better that, then the alternative.

Whistler paints a grim picture of the real world, not the world that Karen lives in, that's just a sugar-coated topping, but the world beneath it, the real world, one where you need to LEARN! TO PULL! THE TRIGGER!

Meanwhile, at the meeting of the vampire council (one of which is Udo Kier, which is always great), Deacon Frost is called to the carpet for continually trying to incite war between vampires and humanity. Frost is a rebel and an upstart, so he tells the vampire elders to eat shit, because he’s gonna do whatever he wants, because the humans are their food, not their allies.

Meanwhile, Blade drops Karen off her apartment, where she is attacked by a weaselly little police officer, who is a familiar, a human servant to a vampires who hopes to someday be turned into a vampire. But Blade was using her as bait, so he appears out of nowhere and beats some info out of the cop. This leads Blade and Karen to a Japanese vampire club, and a secret basement archive that not has the pages from the Vampire bible, but also a very impressive computerized depiction of the ritual that is needed to summon the vampire Blood God known as La Magra, which in Spanish seems to mean “the lean” and in Italian means “the thin one” and in German means “La Magra.”

Also, guess what? Blade’s blood is the key.

Blade regularly takes a special serum that suppresses his urge to drink blood, but the serum is beginning to lose its effectiveness as he develops a tolerance. Luckily, Karen is a brilliant hematologist, so she figures out how to cure everyone who isn’t a pure blood vampire, meaning any vampire who wasn‘t born a vampire, but was turned by a bite. Will Blade take the cure? Will he choose to become a full human, even if it means losing his vampire powers?

While Blade is out running some errands, Frost and his men attack the hideout. They kill Whistler and abduct Karen, all in an attempt to lure Blade to the Temple of Eternal Night so that they can summon La Magra. Killing Whistler? Kidnapping Karen? This is all that Blade can stand, and he can’t stand no more.

Cue the EDM, mother fuckers, it’s time to kill a whole bunch of vampires.

Later, in the light of rising sun, Karen offers to cure Blade of his vampirism, but Blade is like… fuck that. Instead, he asks her to create a better version of his serum so that he can continue killing vampires. In an epilogue, Blade confronts a vampire in a snowy Moscow, and for the first time in my life as a fan of the X-Men, I finally get to hear the correct pronunciation of the Russian word “tovarishch.”

New World Pictures bought the rights to Blade, the original plan was to make a Mexico-set western starring Richard Roundtree as the vampire hunter, which in theory sounds awesome, but we all know would’ve been terrible, especially in the early 90s. The project languished for a few years before Marvel Studios and New Line Cinema got the rights, and started to develop Blade as an LL Cool J vehicle, which is unimaginable to me, but it probably would've also been epically terrible. Basically, there's at least two realities out there where someone finds a VHS copy of Blade in a box marked "$1" at a garage sale, either starring Richard Roundtree or LL Cool J, and going "When did they make a Blade movie?" Anyway, New Line apparently wanted to do Blade as a spoof, because comic books will never shake the Biff, Pow, Bam legacy of the Adam West TV show, and also wanted Blade to be white at some point, but then writer David Goyer convinced them to not make the worst possible decisions, and instead grounded the story as a kind of trench coat clad response to the lace kravat wearing vampires that appear in things like Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire.

Finally, Wesley Snipes signed on after failing to get a Black Panther film into production, and produced the film through his company Amen Ra Films. It was Snipes’ influence that locked in the character, obviously pulling in attitudes and style from his Black Panther project and mixing in Blaxploitation film influences to create a bad ass mother fucker fighting a war against vampires, and also White Supremacy and the system that supports it.

It wasn’t all pure and good though, as these comic book adaptations never are, as on the eve of the film’s release, Marv Wolfman rightly sued Marvel over ownership of the characters he had created for them. Unfortunately, as these things always seem to go whenever the creatives who are actually responsible for making the fuel that the money machines that power Marvel and DC comics and their corporate parent companies run on ask for a fair share, the courts came down on Marvel’s side, saying that Marvel's use of the characters was sufficiently different to protect it from Wolfman's claims, which is fucking nonsense. Same shit, different day, and as a result, we now have things like the Hero Initiative, something which Blade co-creator Gene Colman has needed.

Please feel free to click the link and give some financial support, if you can.

A bastard child of Burton’s Batman meets Richard Roundtree’s Shaft, Buffy’s younger brother, and a predecessor to the Matrix, who weirdly often gets the credit for the look that Blade wore first, Blade is not just a great vampire film, it’s also one of the few stand-alone superhero films that isn’t overshadowed by the obvious hole in their world that comes from them refusing to acknowledge the rest of the universe that their world is supposed to be a part of.

It’s an iconic movie, from the unforgettable Blood Rave opening sequence, to Wesley Snipes’ smirk and swagger, at this point, I rate all of my vampire films off how easily Buffy and Blade would be able to wipe the floor with the vampires. Still, there's pros and cons. It is an imminently quotable film, and also a great example of a well done 90s style film. Of course, being that it's a 90s film also means the CGI is awful, but to be fair, I'll never say the word "hematologist" any way except for how Whistler says it. And all that having been said, in an effort to maintain the appearance of fairness, I think I should also point out, Blade is the reason we got Underworld, so there's that, unfortunately.

But above all else, Blade is Wesley Snipes’ signature role. Like Iron Man before Robert Downey Jr, Blade’s personality didn’t really exist in comics before this film. There were glimpses and pieces, but like Robert Downey Jr did with Tony Stark, Wesley Snipes defined the character of Blade. He made Blade into a character that people wanted to see. That’s ultimately why the tv show tanked, and why the new MCU version can’t get off the ground. As the man himself says in Deadpool 3…

“There’s only been one Blade. There’s only ever gonna be one Blade.” 

Of course, in Deadpool 3 he didn’t use the katana, which irks me.

I suppose that you could say that Blade’s katana has a silver edge, which means that it’s meant to be used on vampires, because vampires will burn instantly upon contact with silver. But since silver is a soft material, if used on regular people too much, it would dull quickly, since regular people don’t turn to ash when cut. I get that, I acknowledge the Nerd Rules. Still, there’s something to be said for tradition, especially in the absence of any narrative explanation. And tradition aside, there’s also the whole idea of basic visual appearance.

Deadpool 3 also didn’t have Blade wear his trench coat either, which seriously undercut his cool factor. Check out the group shot... Ol’ Blade looks likes he’s started to wear his pants a little high above his waist in the years since the last Blade movie, right?

Anyway, Blade still holds up, because it’s a blast. Always has been, always will be. If you haven’t watched it in a while, you should definitely think about checking it out again.

Also, just fyi, Blade would've wiped the floor with the vampires in Sinners, and all without even breaking a sweat. He would've saved the sweating for the dance floor afterwards.