The sword-wielding human-vampire hybrid Blade is a legend among vampire hunters, and one movie moment remains the Daywalker’s most iconic, by far. Blade arrived in theaters in 1998 as an intriguing curiosity to many moviegoers, the movie’s fast-paced, kinetic trailer and marketing selling audiences on a dark, moody, action-horror combo of Wesley Snipes slicing and dicing Nosferatu left and right. Upon its release, Blade became one of the biggest sleeper hits of 1998 and the signature role of Wesley Snipes. Centering on the half-human/half-vampire Eric Brooks, aka Blade, the movie sees the world’s most feared vampire hunter on a mission to stop the plot of vampire power player Deacon Frost (Stephen Dorff) to revive the vampire god La Magra to conquer the world. Blade was aided on his mission by his mentor Abraham Whistler (Kris Kristofferson) and hematologist Dr. Karen Jenson (N’Bushe Wright).
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Blade was the first Marvel Comics-based movie to emerge as a box office hit, with the movie’s success launching the Blade character into the mainstream with two sequels and a TV series, along with Snipes returning as Blade in 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine. Renowned for his confident stride into action with his sunglasses as essential to his terror-striking image as his deadly sword, Blade has had no shortage of fantastic fight sequences, one-liners, and moments of human introspection throughout his cinematic career. Nonetheless, the Daywalker’s very first fight scene in a blood-soaked vampire rave in 1998’s Blade remains undefeated as his most iconic and timeless moment.
Blade’s Opening Fight Scene Was the Perfect Introduction to the Daywalker
Blade dives right into showing its hero doing what he does best when Blade enters a vampire rave, setting the movie’s introductory action sequence in motion, featuring the Daywalker kicking and slicing every vampire in sight. The setup for Blade‘s vampire rave is masterful, the sequence starting off with a young man lured into what he believes is a typical rave by Racquel (Traci Lords). Once the sprinkler system starts showering the club’s patrons with blood, however, the man realizes he’s a lamb to the slaughter with everyone around him revealing their fangs as he tries to escape. Crawling through a literal river of blood, the man runs right into a new, unexpected player.
The camera then pans up as the rave’s partiers whisper among themselves, “It’s him! It’s the Daywalker!” with Blade offering a sly grin to the vampires he has come for. The rave battle then kicks off with many of the rave’s partiers fleeing as Blade takes out one vampire after another with guns, swords, and his powerful martial arts skills. The rave smackdown ends with Blade nailing his old vampire nemesis Quinn (Donal Logue) to a wall and asking him to “Give my regards to Frost” before setting him ablaze and checking to make sure the man lured into the rave wasn’t bitten. As Blade departs before the police and fire department arrive, the movie has established its title character in the best manner possible.
Blade’s Vampire Rave Fight Is Still Phenomenal 27 Years Later
It cannot be overstated how little known Blade was in 1998 outside of the most die-hard of comic book geeks (and even then, he was still a C-level character at best). This meant that Blade had to be marketed first and foremost as a Wesley Snipes action movie, a fact that the movie’s opening action sequence captured masterfully. For the vast majority of moviegoers watching the opening of Blade, his battle in the vampire rave was their introduction to the Daywalker, and the impression he made was outstanding thanks to a combination of the horror movie atmosphere, the combo of Blade’s cool persona, wardrobe, and weaponry, the rave’s techno soundtrack that still remains synonymous with Blade, and especially the movie’s Hong Kong-style fight choreography.
It’s easy to take great fight scenes in superhero movies as a given in the 21st century, but superheroic hand-to-hand action was hit and miss, at best, until Blade came along with fight scenes steeped in the template of Hong Kong action. With Wesley Snipes being a seasoned martial artist of multiple disciplines in real life, Blade‘s opening was able to sell the Daywalker as the ultimate butt-kicking slayer of the hominus nocturna. The added bonus was the fact that, due to Blade’s Marvel Comics origins being comparatively in the background of the movie’s marketing, audiences would come to discover along the way that Blade was a superhero movie as much as it was a vampire action-horror flick anchored by Wesley Snipes.
Why the Opening Fight Scene of Blade Remains His Most Iconic Movie Moment
First impressions are essential to building audience interest in a new superhero, and that was even more true in the late ’90s when superhero films were on very thin ice. The fact that Blade was such a little-known character at the time was, fittingly, a double-edged sword, since he was an entirely fresh Marvel character for audiences, but one for whom there were also next to no expectations. That made Blade‘s opening fight sequence in the vampire rave hit even harder, audiences blown away by the kind of picture-perfect, finessed fight choreography they’d simply never seen in a superhero movie before, combined with Wesley Snipes’s total command of Blade as a keenly strategic and enviably cool vampire hunter.
So fantastic was Blade’s introduction that audience expectations were inevitably through the roof within the movie’s first ten minutes, a standard which Blade fully met in its outstanding finale of the Daywalker battling dozens of henchmen leading into his final showdown with the La Magra-possessed Deacon Frost. Furthermore, the subsequent Blade movies had a very clear standard in Blade’s style of action and looking cool while doing it to meet, a standard that Blade II rose to, while Blade: Trinity lamentably did not. Blade‘s opening remains ridiculously re-watchable 27 years after the movie’s debut, with its outstanding fight choreography, atmosphere, soundtrack, and stylized look and feel. True to the longevity of the very first Blade movie, Blade’s most iconic moment also still remains the vampire rave in which the world first met the Daywalker.
Blade is available to rent on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home.
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