Blade II secrets: why are the Reapers modeled on leeches?

Blade II is packed with hidden references, production stories and design choices that are easy to miss, and I think Guillermo del Toro does an absolutely phenomenal job with this movie. The 2002 sequel, starring Wesley Snipes, Kris Kristofferson and Ron Perlman, takes the vampire hunter to Prague and pits him against a terrifying new breed of vampire called the Reapers.

Below I go through the sequel in order, from the gross opening to the very last scene, covering the Easter eggs, the casting changes and the stories behind how it was made.

David S. Goyer wrote Blade II with Guillermo del Toro in mind

Blade II was again written by David S. Goyer, returning after writing the first Blade, and he wrote it specifically with Guillermo del Toro's directorial vision in mind. Goyer had wanted del Toro for the first Blade, as he was a massive fan of the director's early films, in particular his 1993 vampire debut Cronos and his 1997 film Mimic.

Del Toro only agreed to make Blade II under one very specific condition: he had to be allowed to make it even scarier than the first. Making creepy movies was one of his favorite things to do, and you can see that in the design of the Reapers, which are "certified nightmare fuel." That is why he opened the movie with a scene showing how disturbing his new creation was.

The opening shot establishes Prague in the Czech Republic, where most of the filming took place. That worked out well for the production. The crew could take advantage of the region's Gothic architecture, and they were also able to buy a couple of abandoned factories at a good price.

The Reapers were modeled after leeches

When the movie opens with Jared Nomak attacking one of the Vampire Nation's blood banks, del Toro made sure to gross out as many people as possible by having Nomak split his head open like a hot dog so he could feed on the vampires preying on the homeless. I truly love this opening, because you can immediately see that the Blade universe has introduced a new kind of intense vampire.

Del Toro says he purposely modeled the Reapers after leeches, because leeches are all about one thing: finding a blood source to feed on. In his opinion, vampires in popular media at that point had become too much like humans, infused with romance and human emotion rather than being bloodthirsty humanoid monsters with an animalistic drive to hunt and consume.

He liked how real leeches did not evolve into attractive beings obsessed with finding a mate. They are single minded creatures focused on the nearest warm body to feed on. So del Toro made the Reapers as disgusting as he possibly could, both on the outside and in their biology on the inside, as we see later during the Reaper autopsy scene.

Morbius was the character the writers of Blade wanted as the main antagonist for the sequel. Unfortunately the rights to Morbius sat with Sony and could not be used by New Line Cinema, so they opted for Jared Nomak instead.

Whistler's family and the matador motorcycle chase

The intro credits include a flashback to Blade's birth scene from the start of the first film, with Blade's mother, Vanessa Brooks, making a very brief appearance. Right after that, as Whistler is introduced, we get a quick flash of what looks like a police report about an event at a family residence in Washington, DC. The names at the top read Whistler, Susanna, Sarah, Becky.

Those are very likely Whistler's dead wife and two daughters. In the first movie we learned that all three died in a vampire attack, which is what pushed Whistler into a life of vampire hunting in their name.

The movie then has Blade chasing down vampires who try to escape on red and black motorcycles, red and black being vampires' favorite colors because of their associations with blood and the darkness of night. Blade jumps from the very top of a building to stop them, a display of his superior half vampire genome, and he is completely computer generated for that jump.

After that, Blade uses his black and red jacket to taunt and dodge his attackers the way Spanish matadors use red capes with bulls. I particularly love that when Blade wrecks one red motorcycle, a cow can be seen winking on a wall in the background to accentuate the matador theme. That wall is an advertisement for a milk brand made at a creamery that served as a front for the vampires holding and torturing Whistler, and boxes of the milk sit next to the vampire goons doing drugs right before Blade kills them all to rescue Whistler.

Scud's comic book taste and his Powerpuff Girls habit

Back at the hideout, Scud references Frank Miller's 1986 Batman comic The Dark Knight Returns while listening to "Gorillaz on My Mind" by Gorillaz and Redman. Scud is clearly a big fan of comics and superheroes, and later he wears a Hellboy shirt with the BPRD logo, which stands for the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense from the Hellboy comics.

Del Toro was a big fan of Hellboy, and he proved it by making Hellboy (2004), also starring Ron Perlman, as his very next movie after Blade II. He went on to direct 2008's Hellboy II after making Pan's Labyrinth.

Scud's name is also a possible reference to the comic series Scud: The Disposable Assassin, set in a future society where anyone can buy a robot assassin from a vending machine. These robots self destruct once their target is eliminated, and Scud is one who becomes a mercenary by keeping his target alive in the hospital to hold off his self destruct programming. If that is the inspiration, I think it is very fitting, since the vampires view their familiars as disposable humans.

Scud might be scum, but he is "a scummy scud with good taste," because he watches The Powerpuff Girls multiple times. The episodes used are season 2's "Down 'n' Dirty," season 1's "Bubblevicious" and season 3's "The Mane Event." In "Down 'n' Dirty," which he is watching when he first meets Whistler, Buttercup stinks up Townsville with her body odor after refusing a bath. Buttercup is usually on screen when Scud watches, which makes sense given Blade later insults him for not helping during the autopsy, possibly foreshadowing that Blade could smell Scud's stench from a mile away. Whistler even calls him "skid" when they first talk, further hinting at his nature as a vampire familiar.

Blade's headquarters was a Soviet missile factory

Blade's headquarters in this movie used to be a factory that made missiles for the Soviets. The crew figured they would convert this old weapons facility into a vampire weapons facility for Blade, which was a great choice in my opinion.

That facility is soon infiltrated by Asad and Nyssa in vampire ninja outfits that del Toro designed himself, heavily inspired by anime. Del Toro has always been a massive fan of Japanese anime and has gone on record saying the action in anime very much inspired the action sequences of Blade II.

We get slight hints of Scud's allegiance to the vampires during this scene. First, he licks the blood off his finger after Whistler hits him in the face with a gun. Second, he compliments Nyssa and Asad's suits in a way that suggests he is on their side. Scud probably even designed those suits for them.

Caliban Industries and the Blood Pack

Nyssa and Asad bring Blade to Damaskinos's headquarters at Caliban Industries, a reference to Caliban, the half human, half monster character in William Shakespeare's play The Tempest. That makes sense, because Caliban Industries was secretly making half vampire, half monster hybrids through Damaskinos's attempts to perfect the vampire genome. The symbol on the helicopter landing pad even appears to be a double helix, foreshadowing his experiments.

Asad then introduces Blade to the Blood Pack, an elite team of vampire warriors whose name plays on the medical blood packs used to store extracted blood. After Daz Crawford's Lighthammer comes his girlfriend Verlaine, a character originally meant to be played by Traci Lords as the twin sister of Racquel, the female vampire from the very beginning of the first Blade. The character was retooled to be played by Marit Velle Kile.

After Tony Curran's Priest comes Snowman, played by martial arts legend Donnie Yen, who also served as the movie's fight choreographer, because del Toro knows talent when he sees it. Then there is Chupa, played by Matt Schulze, whose name comes from the Spanish word chupar, meaning to suck.

Finally there is Reinhardt, played by Ron Perlman, who has done a number of projects with del Toro, most notably Hellboy in the first two Hellboy movies. Reinhardt is so cool that he is the only character who never takes off his sunglasses for the entire film. When he first faces off with Blade, he asks if Blade can blush, a racist comment someone once made to Wesley Snipes in real life. Snipes insisted the line be included so that Blade would truly despise the character.

The Radu sign and the House of Pain nightclub

As the Blood Pack does its slow motion walk to the club, a giant neon sign reading Radu glows behind them. Radu the Handsome was the real Prince of Wallachia and the brother of its ruler, Vlad the Impaler, born Vlad Dracula, who has been said to have inspired Bram Stoker's Count Dracula. Putting the name of Vlad's brother behind Nyssa and her team could have been the film's way of teasing that Nyssa's own brother is the main threat.

The sign flickers red and blue, very likely symbolizing the warm blooded Daywalker alongside the cold blooded Blood Pack. A few moments later, when Whistler looks at the group through his thermal scope, Blade's body is the only one glowing red, while the rest show up blue.

The House of Pain nightclub scene was filled with around 400 extras in a single room. Del Toro was a little nervous about managing that many people, but he ended up loving the experience, because they were all fun and hardworking. Because they danced for so long, though, the room quickly started to smell, and the director wished the production had budgeted 400 deodorant sticks.

Blade is disgusted at what the young vampires are up to, like kissing with razor blades in their mouths and mutilating their own backs, which I guess is the point of a club called the House of Pain. To underscore the theme, the stage backdrop is a giant red sun. In Marvel Comics, red suns are one of Blade's main weaknesses, much like they are for Superman in DC Comics, and in 2019's Avengers #27 Blade has his energy drained as the Avengers fly near a series of red suns.

Damaskinos's racism and a lost Michael Jackson cameo

As Priest walks through the crowd, he is disgusted that many of the clubbing vampires are not pure bloods like his team, showing how racist Damaskinos has raised his squad to be. That fits, since del Toro deliberately made Damaskinos a racist, fascist vampire who valued only the genetically pure, which is why he cast out his own son once his experiments poisoned Nomak's DNA.

When Nyssa heads upstairs to look for Reapers, what she doesn't find is Michael Jackson. He was originally supposed to make a quick cameo as a vampire handling human remains, but for unknown reasons he could not make it. They filmed the moment with another actor but scrapped it as a deleted scene.

When the Reapers attack, one resurrected Reaper struggling with Lighthammer was a combination of practical and computer generated effects, with some shots using a completely robotic Reaper. Del Toro did not want to over rely on CGI, so his design team built the upper torso of a Reaper as a moving robot with realistic skin, sparing audiences the uncanny valley feeling of much of that era's CG.

Doctor Strange, Daredevil and a blinding autopsy

During Blade and Nomak's fight in the church, a Doctor Strange Easter egg sits behind Nomak: what appears to be the closed golden Eye of Agamotto, designed the way it looked in Marvel Comics before the MCU's influence.

After the church scene, we ironically watch Priest die. He begs Chupa to kill him so he will not become a Reaper, and Chupa mutters "a Man Without Fear" before shooting him, which definitely feels like a reference to Daredevil.

The Blood Pack then takes a dying Reaper to be cut open and examined. Apparently around 30 crew members were temporarily blinded by the UV lights used in that scene. While the team prepares for its underground assault, Blade quotes the Chinese philosopher General Sun Tzu, telling Whistler he intends to keep his friends close and his enemies closer. Del Toro places Scud right behind Blade in the frame, since Scud proves to be Blade's enemy in disguise.

The Prague sewers were built by hand

The Blood Pack heads into the sewers of Prague to lure and destroy Reapers, using a Reaper's own secretions to hunt them down. All of those tunnels were built by hand by the set designers in Prague, and they were as long as a football field. That blows my mind, because I would never have guessed it. It feels like a real location.

What I could guess was that these vampires would betray Blade at the first chance, a prediction Blade makes earlier in the film. It comes true when Reinhardt and Damaskinos's goons knock Blade out and take him back to the lair at Caliban Industries.

Mike Mignola designed Damaskinos's lair

The interior of Damaskinos's lair was designed by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, further proof of del Toro's love for Hellboy, and comic artist Tim Bradstreet was heavily involved in the concept art. The massive clock seen when Blade arrives is based on Prague's famous astronomical clock, which has been around since 1410, so I have a strong feeling Damaskinos is probably at least as old as that clock. It tracks not only the time but the position of the sun and moon, things a vampire needs to know at all times.

Damaskinos himself, especially his pale skin and bald head, was heavily based on the vampire from the 1922 German film Nosferatu, an adaptation of the Dracula tale.

When Damaskinos's human familiar Kounen puts Blade on a slab to be drained, much like in the first film, Blade has a number of new tattoos. Wesley Snipes revealed that Blade gets a new tattoo after a particularly memorable vampire hunt, as each tattoo tells a story. Karel Roden, who played Kounen, had all his lines dubbed over by a British actor in post, apparently because his thick Czech accent was too much for audiences.

At the very end, Blade ties up a loose end by killing Rush, the vampire from the very start of the film, in London, inside an adult parody of Buckingham Palace.