Blade (1998) Breakdown: Easter Eggs, Deleted Scenes and Hidden Details

Blade, the 1998 Marvel film starring Wesley Snipes, is the movie that started the superhero movie renaissance, and it's packed with hidden details, behind the scenes stories and scrapped ideas. This is my breakdown of the film, with some fun movie trivia along the way.

Originally released in August 1998, Blade was written by David S. Goyer and directed by Stephen Norrington, with Wesley Snipes in his iconic role as the vampire hunter Blade and Stephen Dorff as the villain Deacon Frost.

New Line Cinema once wanted a white Blade, and Laurence Fishburne was in the running

As beloved as Wesley Snipes' Blade would become, Snipes was not the only actor considered for the role. At one point, New Line Cinema wanted to race swap Blade entirely and make the character a white vampire hunter. Thankfully, David Goyer immediately shot that terrible idea down.

After that, Mike De Luca, the head of New Line Cinema, had Denzel Washington, LL Cool J and Laurence Fishburne in the running before Wesley eventually got the role with the assistance of Goyer. Fishburne would end up starring in his own iconic role as Morpheus in The Matrix a year after Blade's debut, so it's clear that 90s Hollywood had a lot of faith in Laurence Fishburne fighting and looking good in sunglasses.

Vanessa Brooks' opening scene hides a driver's license and a hint of her transformation

When the movie starts with Blade's mother, Vanessa Brooks, being rushed into the emergency room, her wallet falls to the ground in the commotion. That gives us a clear view of her driver's license, which says she lives at 125 Second Boulevard, Apartment 201, in Florida. It also shows she was single, 5'7", weighed 128 pounds and was born on February 16, 1944. After the wallet hits the ground, her library card and her MasterCard fall past the frame too.

After a bloody baby Eric is taken away from his mother, notice how Vanessa keeps her arm reaching upwards as the sound of her flatlining plays in the background. I think this was the movie's clever way of giving us a quick glimpse of Vanessa's transformation into an undead vampire, because typically when somebody flatlines, their arms go limp.

This introduction is drastically different from Blade's origin in the comics. There, Blade's mother wasn't named Vanessa but Tara Brooks, and while Tara is bitten by a vampire while pregnant, she does not survive the bite the way Vanessa does later in the movie. Vanessa's bite is the reason Eric Brooks can walk in daylight as a half vampire, half human hybrid. The comics Blade was not originally born a Daywalker at all. He grew up as a normal human being who was simply unaffected by vampire bites. It wasn't until Marvel Comics started changing the character because of this movie's success that Blade became a day walking vampire, courtesy of Dr. Michael Morbius biting him.

The human blood bags were meant to play a bigger part in Deacon Frost's plan

When Traci Lords' vampire Racquel leads her unsuspecting dinner date across the factory floor of human meat on the way to the vampire club, the man notices human beings in blood bags being carted away. This points to one of the vampires' many food sources, but these human sized blood bags were originally supposed to matter more to the story.

According to production designer Kirk Petruccelli, Deacon Frost was initially going to reveal that he had massive stores of these human bodies in preparation for the day he would use the blood god La Magra to turn every human on the planet into a vampire. After all, if everybody in the world is a vampire, that vampire planet is going to need a food source or else everybody dies.

After the vampires get their bloodbath through the sprinklers, we get the first appearance of the adult Blade, with a look and personality that had not yet been seen in the comic books. In the comics, Blade wasn't always this tough. After these movies were released, Marvel drastically altered the character in comic book continuity to closely match Snipes' version, because the character was struggling in popularity among readers at that time.

That nightclub is also our first look at this universe's vampires, whom the producers made sure were radically different from the typically romantic vampires people knew. By opening with a bloodbath inside a nightclub hidden in a human meat factory, David Goyer does a fantastic job of showing how unconcerned with human morality these vampires are, while also showing that they enjoy many of the same recreational activities as people did at the time. Having them look and dress like regular young people, rather than traditional Count Draculas or The Count from Sesame Street, helped this universe feel scarier, because these vampires can walk among society at night and blend in perfectly.

Hong Kong action and Tim Burton's Batman shaped Blade

When Blade arrives at the nightclub wearing sunglasses at night, we can see how much this movie was inspired by Chinese cinema. It was Wesley Snipes himself who came into the project with a deep desire to make a superhero action film that felt as exciting as the martial arts films being made in Hong Kong.

After Blade kills 22 vampires in the club, I like how the sequence ends with him essentially crucifying Quinn. Christian iconography like crosses doesn't kill vampires in this universe, but I like how they still nodded to that traditional holy style of vampire execution by pinning Quinn to the wall like Jesus and burning him alive. Unfortunately, also like Jesus, Quinn would return from the grave. Blade will apparently kill a total of 88 vampires over the course of the movie, and "that's just some good service right there."

When the police arrive to find Quinn burning alive, we were originally supposed to get a Stan Lee cameo as one of the cops, but it was cut. I also enjoyed how Blade mysteriously disappears before the police arrive, in a very Batman like way. This feels extremely intentional to me, because David Goyer has said they all looked very closely at the Batman movies for guidance and inspiration while crafting this film, specifically Tim Burton's Batman and its realistically dark atmosphere.

Goyer's love for the Batman world would eventually land him as the story writer for the Nolan Batman trilogy, and as screenwriter and executive producer on Batman v Superman. One of those is a lot better than the other, but I won't say which. With Blade and Batman both being nighttime avengers, taking inspiration from Michael Keaton's Batman was a wise decision, especially since they purposely avoided the cheesy mistakes of the Batman sequels that followed, which significantly toned down the adult themes and violence to appease parents and reach a younger audience.

Donal Logue's real hospital trip and Whistler's wedding ring

During the hospital scene where a charred and resurrected Quinn attacks an unsuspecting Karen, actor Donal Logue dislodged his jaw after his face accidentally landed forcefully on the ground. Ironically, the production had to rush Logue from their fake hospital to a real one while he was still in the makeup of a dead burn victim, which freaked out pretty much everybody there.

Later, as Whistler checks out Karen Jenson's bite wounds, we can see that he is still wearing his wedding ring. That hints that Whistler once had a close family, before he reveals later in the film that his wife and two daughters were brutally killed by vampires.

Abraham Whistler is an original creation for the movie, made as a loose adaptation of comic book Blade's original mentor, Jamal Afari. In the comics, Jamal Afari is an old Black vampire hunter who takes Eric in and teaches him everything he knows about making vampires run for their lives, or their afterlives. I'm not sure why they felt the need to change that, and at the time I very much hoped Marvel Studios would include Jamal Afari in their adaptation. When Whistler tells Blade to steady Karen on the table, we also get a great example of how strong Blade is, as he uses just one hand to keep a convulsing Karen on the table.

The vampire council's chairs and what Deacon Frost's human roots say about him

When we meet the council of vampires sitting together at a glass table, notice how the tops of their chairs are all curved. I believe this was a direct nod to traditional famous vampires like Count Dracula, who often wear capes with curved collars, so the council members all look like they are wearing curved cape collars as they sit back. That was a great choice in my opinion, because these council members represent the classic vampires of old, who likely had a wardrobe like Count Dracula's at some point in their extremely long lives as pureblood vampires.

Learning that Stephen Dorff's Deacon Frost is not a pureblood, but a former human converted into a vampire, reflects his personality and motivations in my opinion. Human beings as a species have historically had strong tendencies towards conquering people they see as weak and consuming things in excess. It seems to me the filmmakers are heavily implying that the evil side of Deacon Frost is rooted in his human DNA.

The pureblood vampires on the council were naturally born that way, and they appear to completely lack Frost's very human thirst for living beyond his means and reaching for more. These old vampires are perfectly content being left alone and hiding in the shadows while humanity rules the world. Deacon Frost is not about that.

The La Magra prophecy on Deacon Frost's computer screen

When Dragonetti confronts Deacon Frost while he is translating the sacred vampire texts on a big CRT computer screen, the translated text on the right of the screen seemingly tells the origin of vampires in this universe. The blood god La Magra used to rule a completely dark Earth as the god of all vampires, until an ancient force the vampires called the Unholy One defied La Magra's rule and built a prison for the blood god, before supposedly creating the day and night cycle. That forced vampires to hide in the shadows while humanity evolved and prospered.

The prophecy does leave the vampires some hope. It promises that humanity will end up destroying itself by destroying its habitat, which is true, and that the coming return of the blood god will convert all of humanity into vampires and let the vampire species reclaim the planet that was stolen from them. I wrote the entire prophecy out, just in case anyone is thinking about changing religions anytime soon.

Karen's sunny apartment, Blade's hybrid gun and a Star Trek poster

After Blade drops Karen back into the daylight, she heads to her apartment. I like how the set designers decorated her sunlit space with a little smiling sun and a painting of a sunflower, which gives the audience a false sense of solar security. That security gets shattered by Officer Krieger, right before Blade smashes Karen's table with Krieger's body.

When Krieger runs away, Blade pulls out a weird looking square gun. That machine pistol is two real guns combined, with the trigger half being a MAC 11 and the front half being the casing of a MAC 10. During the car chase with Krieger, we can see director Stephen Norrington feeding on a woman on a nearby street corner, which I thought was a fun little Easter egg.

As Blade and Karen prepare to enter the building Krieger just went into, there is a boxing poster for Dunner versus Fresno. That poster was also featured in episode 12 of season 1 of Star Trek: The Next Generation, so technically Blade takes place in the Star Trek universe. Not really, but it's more fun to think it does. I could see Jean Luc Picard as a vampire: "Captain's Log, I'm thirsty for blood."

Pearl took five performers, and the Book of Erebus has a fitting name

At the back of a club full of sunglass wearing Japanese vampires, Blade and Karen run into the extremely large vampire Pearl, hidden in the club's refrigerator. According to director Stephen Norrington, Pearl got that big by eating human babies and infants, so don't feel too bad that Karen fried him.

Five people were inside Pearl's body, which was made of seven thousand dollars' worth of silicone. Actor Eric Edwards was Pearl's head, one performer worked the left arm, another the right arm, and two people puppeted the legs.

Blade and Karen then enter the Erebus archives, where the pages of the vampire bible, the Book of Erebus, are stored. It's an aptly named book, as Erebus was the god of primordial darkness in Greek mythology. I also love how Deacon Frost's bed looks like a high tech metal casket, since vampires are famously known for sleeping in coffins. The movie uses that bed best during the Vanessa Brooks reveal, as the opening metal coffin symbolically points to Vanessa rising from the grave her son thought she was in all along. As Frost walks through his house party ignoring Krieger, a vampire girl has a Mortal Kombat movie playing on a TV, another New Line Cinema adaptation that came out in 1997.

Whistler's disappearance in the train tunnel may hint at a changed fate

After Whistler helps Blade and Karen escape the Erebus archives, the three walk along the side of a train tunnel. What is crazy about this moment is that Whistler inexplicably disappears from the scene after his bomb explosion makes him lose his footing, only to reappear without explanation in the following scene. How does a normal senior citizen survive falling off the side of a tunnel into the path of a moving train?

Something tells me Whistler's original fate was probably to die in this moment, but they probably changed it to turn Whistler into a vampire for a potential Blade sequel. That's just a hypothesis for now.

Deacon Frost and Blade are both outcasts

I found the conversation when Deacon Frost holds a little girl hostage quite interesting, because it shows how similar Blade and Deacon are as half blood vampires in their own ways. Deacon tries to recruit Blade not only to manipulate him into giving up some of his special blood, but also because he can relate to how it feels not to fully belong to any one group.

They are both powerful people who feel like outcasts to both humanity and the vampires. Having Deacon extend an invitation to Blade, despite everything Blade has done to them, seems to reflect Frost's hatred of being made to feel inferior by both the vampire council and humanity at large. He reaches out to his fellow underdog, but ends up calling Blade an Uncle Tom when Blade refuses.

Whistler's death, Snipes' laughter and the flower Blade cuts

After Deacon Frost finds Whistler's hideout and badly wounds him, Whistler hurls an insult at Blade about his mother. That is great foreshadowing in my opinion, because Whistler was right on the money: Blade's mother turns out to be a vampire only a few minutes later. As sad as this scene is, Wesley Snipes apparently could not stop cracking up. He found the image of himself lightly dabbing the wounds of a man bleeding all over the floor too funny to stay in character, and I don't blame him, because the dabbing doesn't seem to be doing anything.

In the following scene, Blade cuts the roots of the flower he has been caring for. It's a hybrid of two different plant species, much like Blade is a hybrid himself. Blade cuts its roots to symbolically show his disdain for his own vampire roots after his quest to avenge his mother got his father figure killed.

Blade echoes that mentality later when he tells his mother "I must release you" before killing her. I love that line, because it implies Blade is releasing his mother from her vampire corruption while also releasing her as the main motivation for his entire life.

The lobby fight, the scrapped blood monster and the Morbius tease that never happened

Then there's the lobby fight scene, which gives off the vibes of the lobby fight in The Matrix, even though Blade predates The Matrix by a whole year. It's just weird that Hollywood produced two action sequences of a man in sunglasses clearing out a lobby full of goons back to back like that.

The final sword fight between Blade and a powered up Deacon Frost was not in an earlier version of the film. A deleted scene had Frost completely transform into a massive, poor CGI blood monster that chased Blade around the room, but test audiences hated it so much that the ending had to be changed. In my view, "two human looking people fighting each other is much more interesting than a man fighting a giant red blob." What is this, Thor: The Dark World?

When Blade and Karen say their goodbyes in the sunlight, an alternate scene was supposed to tease Dr. Michael Morbius for Blade 2, with Morbius standing on top of a nearby building. When they realized the rights to Morbius belonged to Sony's Spider-Man deal, they had to scrap that scene and their plans for him. Apparently one earlier plan also had Whistler himself be the vampire Blade faces at the doors of the Russian club right before the credits, which would have been great. Still, I think Blade had been traumatized enough for one movie, especially after his vampire mom tried to seduce him, a scene that is deeply uncomfortable. The lesson of the day: if your mom starts flirting with you, call Blade, because she's probably a vampire.