Blade as an allegory of sorts for the now-decades of anxiety surrounding Barack Obama’s racial and national heritage. The comparison, while specific, is solid:
Blade’s central conflicts all reflect the anxiety of purity logics rendered as a tool of oppression.
A human-vampire hybrid known as the “Daywalker,” Blade (Wesley Snipes) supposedly moves with “the best of both worlds,” which is more to say that his vulnerabilities aren’t immediately legible. In this world, the vampires have their own hierarchy of “pure bloods” (those born vampire) who laud power over those merely turned. Where Blade sees his vampirism as something equivalent to contaminate and curse (following the likeness of earlier Black vampires), Deacon Frost (Stephen Dorff) sees in his hybridity the opportunity to obliterate the vampire hierarchy and seize dominance over humankind through invocation of La Magra, the Blood God, said to unleash a “vampire apocalypse.” The Daywalker’s blood is, of course, the key to this invocation.
32 Things We Learned from the 'Blade' Commentary
"What do you do with a 900 pound vampire?" and other pressing questions, answered within...
New Line Cinema where we sit and listen to filmmakers talk about their work, then share the most interesting parts. In this edition, Rob Hunter revisits the best Marvel film… Blade.
Marvel movies are all the rage these days, but one of the best hit the big screen way back in 1998.
Blade brings the famed half human/half vampire hero to life with a stellar Wesley Snipes, plenty of attitude, and even more blood. The film is new to 4K UltraHD — and it looks absolutely terrific — so after rewatching the movie itself I dug into the supplements and listened to the commentary for the first time.