William Marshall’s Dead: Blade, Blaxploitation, and Gothic Punk

    Following the release of Ryan Coogler’s 2018 blockbuster Black Panther, many publications--popular and academic alike--heralded it as a decade defining film. From Time: “The Revolutionary Power of Black Panther”; from Esquire: “Why Black Panther Is History in the Making”; from The New York Times: “Why Black Panther Is a Defining Moment for Black America”; the list goes on. Indeed, Black Panther’s cultural impact was quite impressive. In the months that followed its debut, dozens of celebrities were seen flashing the “Wakanda Forever” salute popularized by the film up and down Sunset Boulevard, Walmarts the world over struggled to keep T’Challa action figures in stock, and children and manchildren alike were united in their collective worship of a man in black polyester catsuit. Black Panther mania came to a head at that year’s Oscar’s, where the film was nominated for Best Original Score, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Editing, and Best Picture, winning the awards for Best Original Score, Best Production Design, and Best Costume Design.

    Perhaps one could be forgiven, then, at the height of the Black Panther craze, for believing that the film was the first (and only) superhero movie with a Black lead. And while it is true that Black Panther was the first (and--so far, at least--only) film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe proper to feature a Black actor in the leading role, it is the 1998 film Blade that truly deserves the title of “First Black Superhero Movie,” hitting theaters a full two decades before Black Panther. But in addition to being the first Black lead superhero movie, Blade--and to a lesser extent its two sequels, Blade II and Blade: Trinity--also represents the synthesis of 1960s and ‘70s blaxploitation horror cinema with the so-called “gothic punk” aesthetic pioneered by White Wolf Publishing’s role playing game Vampire: the Masquerade. What follows is an analysis of the ways in which the aforementioned artistic works and commercial trends have influenced, and continue to influence, popular culture using the 1998 film Blade as a case study.

    Blade stars Wesley Snipes as the titular vampire hunter. Because his mother was bitten by a vampire while pregnant with him, Blade was born a half-human, half-vampire hybrid. As such, Blade inherited the strength and agility of a vampire without any of the vampire’s classic weaknesses--save for an unquenchable thirst for blood. The film follows Blade as he pursues Deacon Frost (played by Stephen Dorff), the vampire who believes is responsible for his mother’s death, through a demimonde of Nosferatu nightclubs, devilish databases, and repulsive restaurants.

    Blade made his first appearance in July of 1973 in issue #10 of The Tomb of Dracula, a Marvel horror comic that detailed the exploits of a rotating cast of supernaturalists as they attempted to rid the world of Dracula and his evil progeny. Blade himself was the brainchild of writer Marv Wolfman and illustrator Gene Colan, and he cuts a striking figure in his comic book debut; clad in a neon green safari jacket and wearing yellow sunglasses beneath his afro. So striking, in fact, that Wolfman was afraid Blade “would eclipse the other characters.” A well founded fear, maybe, considering that Blade has long since outlived his co-stars in the public imagination. When was the last time anyone mentioned Solomon Kane in conversation? Or Rachel van Helsing, for that matter? In a 2001 interview with TwoMorrows’s Tom Field, Colan recalls:

Oh, I knew it was good, this character. Blacks were not portrayed in comics up to that time, not really. So I wanted to be one of the first to portray blacks in comics. There are black people in this world, they buy comic books, why shouldn't we make them feel good? Why shouldn't I have the opportunity to be one of the first to draw them? I enjoyed it!

Thus in creating Blade, Wolfman and Colan had--likely unconsciously--transposed the creative and commercial ethos of blaxploitation cinema to the comic book industry. “Blaxploitation,” broadly defined, is a term that includes “films made between 1970 and 1975 by both black and white filmmakers to capitalize on the African American film audience." Many of the films that fit this description also fit quite comfortably in other genres, as Walter Metz notes in his “From Harlem to Hollywood: The 1970s Renaissance and Blaxploitation” where he asserts that “one of the many regrettable things about using ‘blaxploitation’ to group a set of African American-themed films produced in Hollywood in the early 1970s is that the label separates them from a wider critical context…” Indeed, by creating a separate, hermetic body of scholarship around Black films of this era, academics may in fact further marginalize said films. Metz, for his part, proposes that critics and scholars seek “to understand intertextual relationships, in their full multidimensional complexity…” Of particular interest are his remarks on the Black vampire films Blacula and Ganja and Hess and their place in the cinematic canon. Metz writes:

Made by American International Pictures (AIP) in full exploitation mode, Blacula is perhaps more hindered by rigid adherence to genre conventions than is Ganja and Hess, but both films activate the metaphors of the vampire mythology in order to understand the racial experience of the United States in the 1970s. Both of these films are properly located in the middle of a continuum of horror and anti-horror, genre and resistance to genre.

This method encourages a more fruitful dialogue, both along lines of genre and across the borders of media, and in this way allows the Blade comic character to enter into conversation with his cinematic antecedents (as is the case with Blacula, 1972) and contemporaries (as is the case with Ganja and Hess, 1973). But, regardless of Blade’s antecedents and contemporaries, cinematic or otherwise, the character only continued to grow in popularity, appearing in a plethora of comics through the 1970s and 80s. And, in 1994, Blade debuted in his first stand-alone comic series Blade the Vampire Hunter.

    At the same time Blade was enjoying something of a renaissance in his native medium, Mark Rein-Hagen and his team at White Wolf Publishing had begun work on what would become Vampire: the Masquerade. In Vampire, players roleplay as--as one might reasonably expect from the name of the game--vampires negotiating their night-to-night struggles against their own bestial natures, vampire hunters and each other. Vampire differed from other role playing games of its time by placing an emphasis on storytelling rather than combat, encouraging players to truly inhabit their characters and immerse themselves in the world of the game. But Vampire represented a break not only from the mechanical aspects of its contemporaries, but from their style as well. Travis Williams, one of the co-creators of the game, remembers the exact instant the seeds for Vampire were planted in Rein-Hagen’s mind. Williams, Rein-Hagen, and the other members of White Wolf Publishing were driving through the rustbelt on their way to GenCon, an annual roleplaying game convention held in Indianapolis, when Williams asked, “Who would live here?” To which Rein-Hagen answered, “Probably vampires.”

    With this pronouncement, Rein-Hagen made explicit the connection between the noir and the Gothic. Joseph Entin, writing on John Okada’s 1957 novel No-No Boy, describes noir as an update to “the gothic tradition (in the process drawing upon naturalism, modernism, and popular melodrama) for corporate capitalist society; an increasingly urban and bureaucratic world governed by massive, multinational commercial and governmental institutions operating beyond individual control." Director George Romero (of Dead trilogy fame) made a similar connection in his 1977 cult vampire thriller Martin. Martin centers on its title character, a teenage boy who is convinced that he is an eighty four year old vampire. The film is replete with Gothic staples: vampirism (obviously), decaying architecture, and outré romantic entanglements. But strip away the snap-on fangs and black eye-liner, and it becomes clear that Martin is really just a noir flick playing dress up, the film’s more outwardly Gothic elements being little more than window dressing.

    Vampire innovates on the formula Martin established by reintroducing the explicitly supernatural to the equation and positing a world where decrepit cathedrals stand side-by-side with glittering skyscrapers; a world where “bloodsucker” is more than just an insult, but rather an accurate descriptor; a world, in short, where noir was reunited with the Gothic. In doing so, Rein-Hagen et al. created a conceptual space that was much more inclusive than the Tolkien and Howard derived Euro-fantasy that had dominated the world of role playing games through the 1970s and ‘80s by drawing on real world subcultures and political movements for inspiration. In an interview for the World of Darkness documentary, Father Sebastian--a self described “fangsmith, author, and impresario”--said: “What I loved about the Vampire culture was it didn’t matter what gender you were, it didn’t matter what color you were, it didn’t matter what ethnic or cultural background you came from… You were just a vampire.”

    The artwork provided by illustrator Timothy Bradstreet played a large role in establishing the egalitarian spirit of the game. Bradstreet frequently had his friends--most of whom were members of punk and/or goth rock bands--sit as models for his compositions, lending his illustrations a grit that was wholly absent from something like Dungeons & Dragons or GURPS. Travis Williams remarked, “I remember reading many Dungeons & Dragons books, and I would maybe see a Black person. World of Darkness was different.” Eventually, the style Bradstreet created came to be known as “gothic punk,” sitting, as it does, at the intersection of Gothic sensibilities with noir-ish alienation. In fact, it was Bradstreet’s art that would eventually unite Blade and Vampire: the Masquerade, though under regrettable circumstances. A few years after Blade’s release, Bradstreet and the film’s writer, David S. Goyer were having a conversation about the film. Bradstreet recalls:

He turns to me and says “Y’know, on Blade I--dude we totally had your artbooks.” I’m like, “You’re kidding, really?” [laughs] He goes, “Yeah, yeah, we had your portfolio, your Vampire portfolio, we had your artbook, we had…” And I was like, “So… You just borrowed my stuff and didn’t hire me for that?” And he’s like, “Oh…”

Even without this admission, the similarities between Bradstreet’s art for Vampire: the Masquerade and Blade are undeniable. Wesley Snipes’s Blade bears almost no resemblance to Wolfman and Colan’s Blade, having traded in his neon green safari jacket and afro for a black trenchcoat and a flat top haircut. But despite the film’s aesthetic borrowings--though “thievings'' may be a more accurate term--from Vampire: the Masquerade, Blade draws just as heavily from the Black horror tradition as it does from Vampire.

    As Metz noted, this is far from the first time a Black vampire has appeared on screen, being predated by several decades by Blacula (and its sequel Scream Blacula Scream) and Ganja and Hess, as well as a plethora of other B pictures which have since fallen into (arguably well deserved) obscurity. Blade’s preoccupation with blood recalls the concerns of both Ganja and Hess and Blacula, as does it’s merging of a contemporary setting with classic horror tropes. The synthesis of Gothic horror with urban environs seen in both Vampire: the Masquerade and Blade was further explored in the late 1980s and 1990s in films like Johnathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, Bernard Rose’s Candyman, and David Fincher’s Se7en, though if any of these works could be said to be the clearest, most legible expression of the aesthetic for a wide audience it is, of course, Blade. With the announcement that yet another Blade movie--starring Mahersala Ali of True Detective fame instead of Wesley Snipes--had entered into pre-production at the 2019 San Diego ComicCon, it seems likely that the character will once again enter the limelight. Especially given that this iteration of the character will be part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a pop cultural powerhouse able to wring the kind of hyperbolic praise from critics with which this essay began. Thus, now more than ever, it is crucial that scholars understand the culture that produced Blade as a character and his position therein if they are to be able to properly contextualize the film in broader discussions regarding Black and genre cinema.