Blade, directed by Stephen Norrington, is a superhero movie that begins with a blood rave. We get a brief origin story by way of a flashback to 1967 where a woman goes into premature labor after being attacked by a vampire – and then we cut straight to a club that makes Gotham City look like Disney World. The sprinkler system goes off, blood rains from the ceiling, and everyone is soaked. Welcome to the first commercially successful live-action Marvel movie.
And that’s something that people tend to forget: Blade ushered in a new era of the superhero genre – comic book movies that don’t feel like comic book movies, ones that take the character off the page and adapt the material into media that has a little something for everyone. Gore? Zombies? Romance? Bad guys with guns? Blade ticked all the boxes. Plus, he was cool. He was cooler than Dolph Lundgren’s Punisher (1989), and he reminded fans of Brandon Lee’s The Crow (1993), guns a-blazing in a menacing leather trenchcoat.
