How ‘Blade’ Ushered in the Marvel Age of Movies
Howard the Duck, The Punisher, Captain America and The Fantastic Four. Not counting made-for-television productions, these were the only feature films that Marvel Comics had made before 1998. Only one of them went to theaters, and that was Howard the Duck, in 1986, a famously disastrous bomb. The Punisher and Captain America were both released direct-to-video, and The Fantastic Four was not released at all. This was a far cry from the massive success DC had seen with Superman and especially the Batman films that dominated the ’90s, though they certainly had their ups and downs at the box office. The decade also saw indie comic book hits like The Crow and Spawn.
Marvel and DC have long been considered the “big two” of comics. They were always in healthy competition with one another and yet in the ’90s it didn’t seem like half of the big two was even in the game. There were several attempts to get many of Marvel’s biggest properties off the ground and onto the big screen throughout the decade. James Cameron famously penned a treatment for Spider-Man. Andrew Kevin Walker of Seven fame and several others wrote scripts for X-Men, but those attempts could never quite seem to find their footing. Then, in 1998, all of that changed when Blade hit the screen.
This was a Marvel movie that didn’t let you know it was a Marvel movie, because unlike Superman or Batman it was not based on one of the most popular characters of all time. Blade had been introduced as a supporting character in the pages of Tomb of Dracula in the 1970s and had barely even had a comic book of his own. The character’s only on-screen appearance before his breakout movie had been in 1994’s Spider-Man: The Animated Series. As a character, he was Marvel’s go-to vampire hunter. And the people at New Line Cinema developing this movie were so smart to lean into the vampire hunter, more than the comic book, in terms of approach. No Marvel property had been proven on the big screen, but Wesley Snipes fighting vampires? That’s a winning formula.
The actual plot focuses on a hematologist named Karen Jenson, who is rescued from a vampire attack by Blade and subsequently becomes our audience entry point as we are introduced to the world of Blade and his mentor/assistant Whistler through her eyes. Karen has already begun to turn, and discovers that Blade himself is half-vampire as his mother was bitten by a vampire while giving birth to him. Meanwhile, Blade’s already-established nemesis Deacon Frost, a vampire with a chip on his shoulder because he was bitten and is shunned by the powerful elites who were born vampires, seeks to awaken an ancient mythical vampire god in order to become imbued with all of the power he believes he is owed.
As is impossible to ignore in a film with a Black lead, Blade features deeply ingrained themes of “purity.” Our hero is famously referred to as the daywalker, because he is claimed by neither humans nor vampires. There’s too much of one side in him, and not enough of the other. He of course uses this to his advantage, infamously evidenced in the notion that he has “all of their strengths and none of their weaknesses,” and has become an urban legend in the vampire community before the movie even begins.
Frost, meanwhile, is the classic 1990s heroin-chic white boy archetype. He’s powerful and has clearly built a small empire for himself that would be plenty to satisfy any mortal man, with his own night club and a never-ending supply of armed goons, but he is not a normal man. The thought that screenwriter David S. Goyer put into the vampire lore is one of the appreciated things that really makes Blade stand out from other, similar-themed works. There are houses, and politics, and a whole vampire society built on bureaucracy. All of the wealth is hoarded by the pureblood who were born vampires, while Frost is looked down on as barely more than human and it’s clearly something that gets under his skin every time they bring it up. Frost represents the new blood, he’s an entrepreneur with a different way of thinking and his finger on the pulse of the time.
He’s a threat to them solely because he doesn’t care about their old methods or traditions. That allows him to usurp them and take them out while they are barely aware that he is even doing it. Both Blade and Frost are at war with vampires, but they are waging that war in fundamentally different ways. There is no possibility of ever putting aside those differences because they are both so blinded by hate and their respective end goals are vastly different. Blade wants to exterminate vampires both for the sake of human safety and out of a deeply personal vendetta. With Frost, his takedown of the vampire elders and dismantling of the respective Houses is just as personal, but his end goal is ultimately power. It’s also simply personal between the two of them, in their dynamic. Frost is the vampire that killed Blade’s mother. Every single time Blade takes one of them down, he might as well be killing Frost.
The performances are strong across the board. Snipes is the Clint Eastwood of killing vampires from the moment he first steps on screen. His presence and athleticism are second to none and there’s a reason he cemented this character as a pop culture staple almost immediately. Kris Kristofferson’s Whistler is the perfect counterbalance to Blade’s stoicism. He’s been at this a long time and he fits the “I’m too old for this shit” archetype like a warm glove. His tired, sarcastic approach provides the film with some of its very best lines.
Stephen Dorff as Frost is also one of the most unsung comic book villains. He is entirely unsubtle in his approach, and yet there are layers to this character, especially in the way he lashes out at his own perceived insignificance and the way he seeks to prove himself to the vampire community by utterly dismantling it. Screenwriter Goyer must also be acknowledged. He has become synonymous with the comic book movie boom of the 2000s, so it is only fitting that he wrote the movie that truly kicked it off. Since Blade, he went on to write the second film, then direct the third (no matter how troubled a production it might have been) and then co-write the Dark Knight trilogy with Christopher and Jonathan Nolan, as well as Man of Steel and numerous others.
Blade worked at the time because it was a unique hybrid of action and horror, and equally appealed to both crowds. It boasted a major action star with Snipes and delivered on spectacular fight sequences and stunts. At the same time, it did not shy away from being a sleek, stylish and gory vampire film with show-stopping sequences of horror, particularly the opening with sprinklers raining blood onto a crowd and revealing the night club is made up entirely of vampires.
Its legacy as a comic book film should be celebrated. It was Marvel’s first theatrical success. For better or worse, it gave us what we have today. Long-gestating projects like X-Men and Spider-Man finally found their footing and hit the screen in 2000 and 2002, respectively, and I don’t know if we would have gotten there, at least at that time, without Blade paving the way.
