Film / Blade (1998)

"Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice skate uphill."

—Eric "Blade" Brooks

Blade is a 1998 superhero action-horror film that marked the first film in the Blade Trilogy. It was directed by Stephen Norrington and written by David S. Goyer, and released by New Line Cinema on August 21, 1998.

Eric "Blade" Brooks (Wesley Snipes), aka the "Daywalker", is a Dhampyr who was born as a result of his pregnant mother Vanessa Brooks (Sanaa Lathan) being fed on by a vampire and dying in the process. He has most of their strengths and only one of their weaknesses, having to fight the increasing bloodlust and urge to kill people. Hunting down the omnipresent vampires in the present day along with his mentor Abraham Whistler (Kris Kristofferson) and Dr. Karen Jenson (N'Bushe Wright), a hematologist he recently saved, he has to stop the renegade vampire Deacon Frost (Stephen Dorff) from completing a ritual to resurrect the ancient blood god La Magra and turn the whole world into a slaughterhouse.

The film is followed by Blade II.

Do not confuse this movie with The Blade.

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This film provides examples of:

• Actually Pretty Funny:
  • The henchman who gets his hand blown off by the failsafe on Blade's sword laughs like a hyena about it afterward.
  • When Karen demonstrates the anti-coagulant to Blade, she has him look at the reaction through a microscope, which promptly explodes. Whistler, watching, just snorts in laughter, while Blade is initially unamused.
• Adaptational Attractiveness: Deacon Frost is made into a "Gen X" hipster played by Stephen Dorff. In the comics, he was an old white haired guy with a German accent from the 1860s.
• Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole: Without watching the deleted scenes or reading script/source material, you wouldn't know how on Earth did Frost plan to survive if La Magra turns the entire world vampiric: by creating People Farm facilities where humans are bred and exsanguinated while braindead/lobotomized. Also, Mercury kills one of the Twelve purebloods needed for a ritual, without explaining where did she get a replacement.
• Adaptation Origin Connection: Inverted. Deacon Frost, the Big Bad of the film is the vampire who bit Vanessa Brooks while she was pregnant, causing Blade to become what he is. Turns out he fully turned her and she's now on his side. While Deacon did turn Vanessa in the comics, him being the Big Bad is new to the movie.
• Age Lift:
  • Deacon Frost is reimagined as a more Gen-X type of character. His comic book counterpart was an older, German accented, white haired gentleman that hailed from circa 1868.
  • Blade himself is also younger, having been born in 1967, instead of 1929.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: The vampires invade Blade's Abandoned Warehouse.
• And the Adventure Continues: After the defeat of La Magra, Blade is offered a cure for vampirism. "There's still a war going on, and I have a job to do. You want to help? Make me a better serum." The film then cuts to a vampire attacking a woman in Russia, only for Blade to walk out of a snowstorm, drop a one-liner, and begin to fight as the credits roll.
• An Arm and a Leg: Quinn has a bad habit of losing limbs, but he can just grow them back.
• Artistic License – Biology: The hematologist remarks that Quinn's red blood cells are "biconvex." Meanwhile the microscope's monitor displays regular biconcave red blood cells, so we can recognize them.
• Backstory: Plenty of it, be it for Blade or La Magra.
• Bad Boss: Deacon Frost makes a sport of killing off his familiars when they displease him. Subverted when he prepares to test Blade's sword on Quinn's arm, stops and reveals that he's just kidding. Notably, Quinn probably deserves the punishment, as he had proven himself incompetent at basically every opportunity and had already lost and grown back two arms by this point.
  Frost: (holding Blade's sword) Hold out your arm, Quinn. Now.
  Quinn: Deac, I... (obeys)
  Frost: (winds up) Just kidding. (bro-punch to the chest)
  Quinn: (Beat, laughs) He was just fuckin' with me, man! He was just fucking with me.
• Big Bad: Deacon Frost is responsible for all of the danger in the film and Blade's main goal is to stop Frost's ritual to resurrect the ancient blood god La Magra.
• The Big Easy: Averted, the film is set in New Orleans, but you wouldn't know if you hadn't read the original script or caught a blink-or-you'll-miss-it shot of a road map.
• Birth-Death Juxtaposition: The opening hospital scene with Vanessa dying from her vampire-inflicted wound while giving birth to him.
• The Blade Always Lands Pointy End In: When Blade's sword is knocked out of Quinn's hand, it sticks in the ground, straight up, next to Karen.
• Blood Bath: Blood is showered on vampires at a vampire rave with the punny name "Blood Bath".
• Blood Magic: It's of little surprise that the ancient vampire artifact runs off of blood. Blade is strapped into a huge bloodletting device that causes his blood to fill up all the magical symbols below him.
• Blown Across the Room: Played straight (and ludicrously so) during the shootout in the night club in the beginning of the movie.
• Book Ends: The present-day section of the movie begins with a vampire luring her victim to his doom, before Blade interrupts. The film ends with a vampire in a different city luring his victim to her doom, with exactly the same dialogue, before Blade interrupts.
• Braggart Boss: Quinn, The Dragon vampire, keeps boasting about how he intends to harm Blade.

• Bulletproof Vest: Blade uses a ridiculously effective one, though with his half-vampire physique, he can more easily ignore the kinetic impacts of bullets.
• Bullet Time: Used in the first confrontation between Blade and Frost. The film also came out a year before The Matrix.
• Butt-Monkey: For his brief amount of screen time, Officer Krieger spends about 90% of it getting ten shades of shit kicked out of him by Blade, Blade again, and finally Frost, who does the sensible thing and drains him for being a screw-up and Jerkass.
• The Cavalry: Blade is pinned to a wall and surrounded by bad guys, when Whistler bursts through the wall holding two machine guns and delivers the Pre-Asskicking One-Liner; "Catch you fuckers at a bad time?!"
• Car Fu: Blade did it, using a bike to smash through the window of the Big Bad's office-building, instead of entering through the door as the waiting goons had expected.
• Chekhov's Boomerang:
  • The "vampire mace" Blade gives Karen is seemingly paid off in a joke where Karen tries to use it on a guy who turns out not to be a vampire. Then it's not mentioned again until the end of the movie when she gets to use it properly at a key moment in the final fight.
  • The anti-theft mechanism on Blade's sword keeps, as it were, popping up after Karen learns about it: first there's a straight use where it gets one of Frost's mooks, then a subverted use when Frost himself demonstrates how much he knows about Blade by circumventing it, then one last use during the final fight when Blade uses it in a manner for which it was not intended.
• The Chosen One: Invoked by name, though decidedly negative in context.
  Blade: You're the key. He needs your blood. The blood of the Daywalker. You're The Chosen One.
• Chunky Salsa Rule: Any vampire exposed to the anti-coagulant explodes into a gory mess. Including Frost.
• Cool Shades: At Blade's lowest point, his shades are taken from him. Just before the climax, he casually decapitates the goon who took them and slowly puts them on. Fight music plays as Blade proceeds to kill about a dozen vampires in a minute with his bare hands and then rushes straight into the final battle, all while looking cool doing it.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Immortality provides considerable advantages to estate planning and asset acquisition, which has allowed the elders of the vamps to get their fingers into a bit of everything and maintain quiet influence over humans.
• Crazy-Prepared: Blade's sword has a boobytrapped handle which will burst the hand of anyone holding it without flipping the safety switch, as poor Quinn finds out.
• Creator Cameo: The vampire who looks up as the car chase goes past is director Stephen Norrington.
• Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Gangster!: Being a vampire turns you into an Always Chaotic Evil bloodthirsty psychopath, but you will look good forever, join a secret society that secretly rules the world, and live and be encouraged to live an eternal un-life of absolutely debauched sex, violence, partying and hedonism. Basically one of the reasons the film works; it both captures the sheer utter bastardy of the nosferatu race and yet perfectly illustrates why people would want to be such evil bastards in the first place.
• Deadly Hug: How Blade brings rest to his mother. She begs Blade to come closer and hug her, then he takes the chance to pierce through her heart.
  Blade: I must release you.
• Dead Star Walking: Traci Lords, killed off in the very first action scene.
• Defends Against Their Own Kind: Blade — although technically, he's only half-vampire.
• Den of Iniquity: The techno club in the opening sequence is implied to be a well-kept secret, concealed within a meat processing plant and allowing those within to do as they please.
• Designated Girl Fight: While Blade and Frost have their final showdown, Karen faces off against Mercury (Frost's henchwoman).
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Before the final showdown Blade is in desperate need to feed on blood, and has no serum on hand, so Karen offers herself. What follows is a lengthy segment of them in each others arms, with periodic spasms as Blade feeds ravenously on Karen, who moans for him to stop as he's taking too much, ending with Blade roaring up like a triumphant beast.
• Dodge the Bullet: Frost can do this, though no other vampire does. In the DVD Commentary the makers gripe over how they came up with this trope before The Matrix.invoked
• Dramatic Wind: Blade walks out of the vampire club into an empty alleyway where a strong wind is blowing trash to and fro. Blade walks through the strong winds without breaking stride, all while his Badass Longcoat flows through the wind behind him.
• Driven to Suicide: When Whistler gets infected by Frost, Blade decides to help him end his life by giving him his gun.
• Early Instalment Weirdness: This is the only film in the trilogy that contains explicitly supernatural elements, with the main villain becoming an avatar of a vampiric god through a ritual, the other two films drop the supernatural aspect. Even with the final film having Dracula, he has no mystical abilities.
• Establishing Character Moment: Blade's introduction has him crashing a vampire techno club, scaring the vampires shitless with his very presence, and then proceeding to kick ass all over them.
• Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: Deacon Frost's idea of a joke is to make his buddy Quinn think that he's about to chop off his arm to test the sharpness of Blade's sword. Especially bad since Quinn's repeatedly had his arms cut off by Blade (specifically with that sword no less). Quinn's sense of humor isn't any better since he thinks Frost's prank is Actually Pretty Funny.
• Evil Overlooker: The poster of the film shows the vampire antagonist Deacon Frost ominously watching over the Daywalker Blade in a blood-red background.
• Exactly What I Aimed At: A variant. Blade tosses his sword into a platform to try to and knock lose a serum he needs to fight Deacon Frost. The sword gets embedded in the stone without doing anything and Frost knocks him, only for the sword's anti-theft mechanism to kick in, destroy the platform, and send the serum flying into Blade's hand.
• Experienced Protagonist: Blade is already a seasoned vampire hunter and The Dreaded among the vampire community.
• Fantastic Slur: Blade at two point makes slurs against vampires.
  Blade: You give Frost a message from me. You tell him it's open season on all suckheads.
  Blade: (in Russian) Hey you leech!
• Fast-Forward Gag: The Car Chase, unintentionally, presumably because Los Angeles didn't want to have an actual car chase for some reason.
• Fat Bastard: Pearl, the hideously bloated vampire from the archive.
• Feet-First Introduction: A vampire's victim crawls away in search of a safe place to hide and comes face-to-toe with a pair of boots. The camera pans up to give the audience its first view of the adult Blade.
• Find the Cure!: After Karen discovers she's been infected with vampirism, she sets about using her medical knowledge to find a cure. She discovers a retrovirus which can turn vampires back into humans and she successfully uses it on herself, although she speculates it will only work for vampires who were once human and not for Purebloods due to the vampire virus being genetically fixed into them.
• First-Name Basis: There's only one person who refers to Blade by his birth name: his mother.
• Flynning: Blade and Frost's final battle is a Sword Fight where the two spend half a minute smacking their swords into each other, with Sword Sparks flying and Audible Sharpness galore. That is, until Blade kicks into high gear and starts striking faster and faster until he lands a blow on Frost... and he heals in an instant. Frost then starts trying and Blade can't rely on swordplay to win.
• Foreshadowing: When Blade drives into base and yells Whistler's name, the latter is listening to Credence Clearwater Revival's "Bad Moon Rising", which at that moment is singing, "I know the end is coming soon/I feel rivers overflowin'/I hear the voice of wreckage and ruin"''; Blade is later revealed to be key to Frost's plan to trigger a vampire apocalypse.
• God of Evil: La Magra, the vampire Blood God. Frost's evil scheme is to complete a ritual to summon him into a vampire avatar so he can walk the earth. If he fights humanity, he will turn everyone into vampires by his mere presence. Deacon Frost summons La Magra into himself and becomes much more powerful, being made entirely of blood and showing insane regenerative powers. Blade kills Frost by loading him with anti-coagulents, but it's unknown if this killed La Magra too.
• Gratuitous Spanish: "La Magra" means "The Skinny Female One" in Spanish. This name was made up for the film, but the concept evokes certain vampires from the Latin American folklore.
• Groin Attack: In the opening action scene, pornstar Traci Lords received a rifle butt to the groin, and then a stake to the face when she doubles over. One can't help but wonder if the crotch shot was a reference to the actress's career.
• Guns Akimbo: Blade wields a pair of machine pistols as one of his primary weapons.
• Hacker Cave: The vampires' archive beneath the nightclub that Officer Krieger leads Blade and Karen to. Within a dark, basement cave are rows of silver server racks, and a nook hosting Pearl, Frost's Evil Genius assisting with his research of the lore of La Magra, surrounded by laptops and a miniature TV.
• Iaijutsu Practitioner: After fighting a small army of baddies with his bare hands, Blade pulls his sword out of a wall it got embedded in and kills two vampires in that same motion. To emphasize the moment, Blade does a Victory Pose.
• I Banged Your Mom: Frost mocks Blade by implicitly mocking how he turned his mother Vanessa into a vampire after killing her and made her his lover for years without Blade's notice, kissing Vanessa upon the reveal and gleefully revealing the truth as Blade is being tortured by his goons.
• Idiot Ball: Quinn captures Blade, and decides to torture/beat him. He punches Blade in the stomach several times to no effect and once in the face to some minor effect because Blade is wearing body armor. How did Quinn think those punches would do anything? He could have gouged out Blade's eyes, chopped his hands off, broken his kneecaps etc but uses this golden chance to punch Blade in the stomach. Even if Blade has the same healing factor of other vampires, he still would have been crippled for the near future.
• Immortality Hurts: In the opening, Blade dispatches Deacon Frost's Dragon Quinn, a vampire who can heal from most injuries. Blade notes that he's run into the guy so many times by that point that he's getting bored with hacking him up all the time, and tries burning him to a crisp instead—which still doesn't hold. Later, Frost himself messes with Quinn as well by pretending that he's gonna chop off his arms again, then stops at the last second.
• Improbable Infant Survival: The girl Frost throws across the park, through a hot dog stand, and into the street is none worse for wear when Blade saves her from the bus a moment later.
• Incest Subtext: Vanessa, as a vampire, shows a more than motherly interest in her own son to indicate how depraved she's become since Frost turned her. There's also the part where said son ends up staking her, an act which has had phallic undertones since Lucy Westenra bit the dust.
• Informed Ability: Frost's transformation into La Magra was supposed to make him a One-Winged Angel in the form of a giant blood cloud. Test audiences were all "Where'd Stephen Dorff go?" so they redid the ending to leave Frost his "human" form. Frost also supposedly took the powers of all 12 pureblood vampires such as pyrokinesis and mind control, but neither he nor the purebloods (or even Drake-ula, the granddaddy of all the pureblood vampires) displayed any of these powers at any time.
• Interrupted by the End: As Blade opens and swings his sword to confront a vampire in Moscow at the end of the film, the shot cuts to the closing credits.
• Inverse Law of Sharpness and Accuracy: In the final Sword Fight, Blade and Frost spend most of the fight not landing a single on each other with their swords, but every punch or kick they try manages to find purchase. Blade eventually has some luck, only after learning Frost can't be killed by swords. Frost, however, can't hit the very killable Blade with his sword.
• Just One Man: Deacon Frost, while Blade is on the way to attack his headquarters: "Look, make it happen, all right? It's one guy, on foot..." Cue Blade's Car Fu entrance, followed by Curb-Stomp Battle.
• Kill It with Fire: Blade uses fire on the vampire Quinn. This doesn't kill him, but it probably makes him wish it had, at least for a while. Funnily enough, Blade probably only set him on fire as a new form of bullying Quinn.
  Blade: Quinn, I'm getting a little tired of chopping you up. I thought I might try fire, for a change.
• Kryptonite-Proof Suit: SPF 1,000 sunscreen, though they also have black leather outfits with UV-blocking visored helmets.
• Lock-and-Load Montage: Blade is seen loading guns, sheathing his sword and knives, and strapping on other weapons before the final assault on Frost's skyscraper.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Vampires explode upon being injected with anticoagulant, or after ingesting concentrated garlic; Mercury learns this the hard way.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: Blade discovers that his mother Vanessa is still "alive."
• Matricide: Blade discovers that Deacon Frost had turned his mother Vanessa into a vampire when he inadvertently made the unborn Blade a dhampyr. Blade is eventually forced to kill her for good when he sees how horrible she has become.
• Mentor Occupational Hazard: The hunter who taught and raised Blade, Whistler, is fatally injured by Frost and left to die. This leaves Blade without a fellow hunter in the finale and gives him a lot more reason to hate Frost.
• Monstrosity Equals Weakness: This trope was the reason the Final Battle was changed. Test audiences didn't care for Frost transforming into a giant Blob Monster made of blood, so the theatrical version ended with a Sword Fight instead.
• Mouthing the Profanity: After Deacon Frost shrugs off an attack that should have killed him, courtesy of a magical ritual, Blade mouths "What the fuck?"
• Mr. Fanservice: Deacon Frost spends a lot of time with the his chest exposed. Blade as well, particularly in the final act.
• Naïve Newcomer: After being rescued by Blade, Karen gets the situation explained to her and thereby to the audience.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Karen Jensen nearly becomes a vampire (and her ex-boyfriend Curtis Webb is killed) because Blade chose to set Quinn on fire rather than staking him, even though he knew it wouldn't kill him.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Mercury kills one of the purebloods Frost needs to fully complete his ritual. Past that point, he can only hope to partially summon La Magra, assuming he could even get the other 11 purebloods and The Chosen One in a room together.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown:
  • When storming Blade's hideout, Frost tells Whistler he's not going to turn him and proceeds to beat him until Whistler is barely clinging to life, and later asks Blade for a mercy kill.
  • Blade gives a pretty savage beating to Frost's familiar Officer Krieger when the latter tries to kill Karen in her apartment.
• Non Violent Initial Confrontation: Frost lets Blade find him in a public park and forces him to have a peaceful chat with him by holding a little girl hostage by his side. He tries to sway Blade over to his side and interrogate the vampire hunter's motives, but it becomes clear that Blade won't leave without a fight, so Frost throws the hostage into traffic so he can get away without a fight. This lets the villain and hero interact a bit and build some animosity while building more anticipation for when they actually come to blows.
• Now It's My Turn: Deacon Frost demonstrates his new powers from the ritual after Blade attempts to hack him apart.
• Offhand Backhand: Blade attacks a vampire sneaking up on him with the butt of his shotgun during the nightclub fight.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • The partygoer at the nightclub has a moment of terror when he sees that vampires are going to attack him. Seconds later, everyone gets a Mass "Oh, Crap!" when they see Blade for the first time.
  • Quinn when Blade cuts off his arm again at the train station.
  • Dragonetti when Frost pulls out his vampire teeth with a pair of pliers before exposing him to the sunlight.
  • Two of Frost's mooks when Blade uses the EDTA serum on them.
  • Mercury when Karen uses garlic on her.
• Our Vampires Are Different: The film is one of the first mainstream depictions of otherwise-traditional vampires being the product of a retrovirus instead of a supernatural curse. The folklore weaknesses to garlic and silver are explained as anaphalactic allergies, they're vulnerable to any UV radiation, not just sunlight, and their need to drink blood is due to not being able to produce their own hemoglobin.
• Physical God: Deacon Frost after turning into La Magra, becoming the physical manifestation of the evil Blood God. As strong as he is, he's still vulnerable to anti-coagulants.
• Punch-Clock Villain: As Blade is about to kill a henchman, said mook replies "No... please! I just work for them!"
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: Towards the end of his duel with Frost, Blade says "Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice skate uphill." He uses the last syringe containing the EDTA serum to kill Frost for good.
• Present Day: After the first scene set in the 1960s, it flashes to "Now". The "Now" when the movie was released was 1998.

• Rasputinian Death: Blade abuses Quinn in every way possible (impaling, burns, beatings, pushing his head against a passing train) before decapitating him.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Pallantine, a Pureblood leader who also opposes Frost's actions early in the film, but shows less Fantastic Racism towards him than Dragonetti, and proves to be a Defiant Captive as Frost is preparing to use the purebloods as sacrifices.
• Retirony: Whistler is doomed from the moment he pauses during his big damn rescue scene and complains that he's getting too old for this sort of thing.
• Revised Ending: In the ending as it was originally planned, Frost turned into La Magra and became a large swirling mass of blood instead of keeping his form. This was scrapped because they couldn't get the special effects to look right. It can be seen as a special feature on the DVD.
• Sacrificial Lamb: Karen's ex-boyfriend has a brief bit of banter with her in the morgue to establish him as an alright guy just before a skinless vampire rips his jugular out and attacks Karen. His death propels Karen into the plot and gives the audience a real taste of how brutal vampires are.
• Sadist: Deacon Frost, an upstart vampire who believes that humans are cattle and the vamp establishment is weak for not acknowledging this. His response to this issue is to sacrifice a bunch of his brethren to become a Blood God. He's also the one who turned Blade and his mother, and finds it hilarious when he sets his mother upon him.
• Say My Name: The last action scene begins with Blade putting on his shades and yelling "Frost" at the top of his lungs before rushing through a hallway full of vampires. He stops every so often in the midst of the fighting to scream "Frost" again before moving on to kill some more vampires, all culminating in him actually confronting Frost.
• Shapeshifter Guilt Trip: The vampire who was once Vanessa tries the "You couldn't kill your own mother" guilt trip when he gets free near the end. (Which might have worked better if they hadn't already had the That Man Is Dead conversation last time they talked.) Blade's response is that if there's any of his mother left in the vampire, killing the vampire and setting her free would be doing her a favor.
• Silver Bullet: Blade uses them against the vampires (as well as other silver weapons, including stakes and a silver-edged throwing star). Some of the bullets have hollow points filled with garlic essence, just to be doubly sure.
• Single Serving Friend: Early in the film Blade visits Kam, an herbalist who supplies the serum that inhibits Blade's bloodthirst. Kam shows concern that the serum is becoming less effective, and the two part with a Man Hug; despite obviously being an ally against the vampires, Kam never reappears.
• Single-Stroke Battle: The recurring minion Quinn rushes at Blade only for Blade to hold out a cable wire and cut the goon's head off in one fluid motion.
• Stealing from Thieves: Dr. Karen Jenson takes umbrage at the fact Blade steals the money from a bunch of crooks that he saved her from (actually minions of the vampires that were out to silence her). Blade snarks that his line of work isn't a charity and thus he needs to get the money from anywhere he can (there is also the underlying irony of using the money from the absurdly rich vampire courts to fund his hunting).
• Supernaturally Young Parent: In the climax, Blade meets his mother Vanessa for the first time, who was turned into a vampire by Frost. As a result, she looks the same way she did the day that Blade was born, while Blade aged normally as a dhampyr.
• Sword Drag: After Blade unsheathes his... blade, he delicately draws a line around himself on the floor as one of his many Intimidation Demonstrations
• Sword Sparks: Every time Frost and Blade cross swords in the finale, massive sparks fly from their blades.
• That Man Is Dead: "Try to understand, Eric. Your mother died a long time ago."
• There Is No Cure: Discussed and averted. When Karen tells Frost she cured herself of vampirism, Frost and Mercury scoff at the notion and Frost tells her there's no cure, to which Karen counters she's discovered there is a retroviral cure if a vampire was originally human.
• This Is Reality: Blade tells Karen that crucifixes and holy water are ineffective against vampires, and advises her to "forget what you've seen in the movies."
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • In the opening scene, the vamp who lured the human to the bar when she cusses out Blade unarmed instead of fleeing, as well aso one of the vampires attacking Blade. Up against a guy who has a big rep for killing vamps, armed with a shotgun - mind you, loaded with silver bullets, which is the Kryptonite for vampires, what weapon does she choose to take him on with? A crowbar. She deserved to die for that stupidity.
  • Officer Krieger, after leading Blade to Pearl, really shouldn't have said "Shut up, bitch!" to Frost's girlfriend when called out on it.
• The Tooth Hurts: Deacon Frost rips a vampire elder's fangs out of his mouth with pliers before executing him.
• Train Escape: Blade grabs the end of a train with one arm while holding onto Karen with the other. The train pulls them to safety while dislocating his shoulder.
• Trap Door: Dr. Karen Jensen falls down into a trap chute near the end of the film, where she's attacked by her former research partner, Dr. Curtis Webb, (who has turned into a ghoulish, zombie-like vampire), but climbs back out of the chute using an old bone as leverage.
• Uncomfortable Elevator Moment: Played for drama. Karen Jensen gets into a lift with two sinister-looking types. When she averts the protocol, turning to look directly at one of the two, his response is a chilling but polite "How ya doin'?"
• Vampire Dance: The vampire rave that opens the movie, complete with Blood Bath.
• Vampire Hickey: Karen Jenson is bitten early on by the vampire Quinn. She spends the rest of the film covering the bite marks with a bandage while working to cure herself before she turns; at one point Whistler examines them and remarks that she'll turn vampire within days.
• Vampire Refugee: Karen is bitten by Quinn early on. She uses her medical training to devise a cure for herself, but Blade refuses to be cured of his vampirism so he can remain super-powerful and continue to wipe out the race.
• Vampires Own Night Clubs: The movie begins with a vampire luring a young man to a secret club in a butchery, where vampires rave as sprinklers douse them in blood. It turns out this is an unusual establishment set up by upstart young vampire Deacon Frost, who in creating these clubs is defying the traditionalist vampire council's dictates to avoid large gatherings of their kind.
• Vegetarian Vampire:
  • Inverted. Deacon Frost is exceptionally evil because he wants to industrialize blood production.
  • Late in the movie, we see a vampire who has subsisted on animals (primarily rodents) and corpses. While this may be more ethical than sucking people's blood, these vampires are left more like shambling zombies, so starved that they'll treat old friends and even other vampires as potential food.
• Vehicle Vanish: Inverted when we see Blade latch onto a train as it passes by, and he dislocates his shoulder in the process.
• [Verb] This!: Between Officier Krieger and Blade:
  Officer Krieger: Go fuck yourself.
  Blade: (producing gun) Fuck me? No, you fuck this!
• Victory Pose: Near the end of the movie, Blade stands still and points his blade to the ground after finishing off the last two vampires in a horde. He holds the pose for a few seconds even though there's no one there to see it, but it sure looks cool.
• Video Will: Deacon Frost leaves a tape for Blade that starts off with "By the time you watch this Whistler is dead..."
• Villain Ball: When Frost throws Karen into the zombie pit, then doesn't stick around to make sure she's dead.
• Villain Opening Scene: The film opens with vampires having a rave (with a helpless human dude), which is crashed by the title hero.
• Villainous Friendship: Frost's relationships with Quinn and Mercury seem to be a mild, but genuine version.
• Voluntary Vampire Victim: Karen does this for Blade when he is wounded and needs to regain his strength to fight the Big Bad.
• Waif-Fu: The teen/tween in the archive. She looks about 12 or 14 and she kicks Blade so hard he falls back. She even plays helpless, scared and cute when he first sees her, then kicks him through some Soft Glass.
• Waking Up at the Morgue: The vampire Quinn wakes up in the middle of his own autopsy after being set on fire.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Karen's doctor friend is bitten but rather than transforming from human into a fully fledged vampire he is stuck halfway in a zombie like state. After she escapes from him in his underground cell he is never seen or mentioned again. Either he starves to death or Karen remembers him later and Blade returns to put him out if his misery.
• Worthy Opponent: During the Video Will, Frost tells Blade in seeming sincerity, "If it's any consolation, [Whistler] put up a hell of a fight", as Whistler and Karen did take down several mooks before getting outwhelmed.
• Would Harm a Senior: Frost shoots Whistler in his bad leg, beats him up and has Quinn bite him, so Blade can find him a bloody mess.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: One of Frost's friends is a vampire who looks like a little girl (either that or a young pureblood vampire; she's credited only as "Martial Arts Kid"). She pretends to be an innocent kidnapping victim so that Blade will let his guard down, upon which she kicks him in the face.
• You Have Failed Me: Officer Krieger gets ripped out to Frost he sold humanity out to after screwing up one too many times.
• You Killed My Father: Frost was the one who bit Blade's mother while she was pregnant. Unbeknownst to Blade, she became a vampire.
• Your Head A-Splode: Mercury, after Karen "maces" her with garlic. Two vampire mooks also get a spectacular version of this when Blade tests the experimental anti-coagulant that Karen whipped up to "Blow some vampire heads." Chunky Salsa Rule applies.

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