Blood and race – The black male vampire as action hero in the Blade trilogy

This article examines the representation of the black male vampire as an action hero in the Blade trilogy. Specifically, this article builds on Yvonne Tasker’s scholarship on racial discourse in the action cinema, where her reading of Predator 2 (1990) leads her to contend that ‘blackness is repositioned in terms of the monstrous within the film’s symbolic hierarchy’. Extending this argument to a relatively less analysed but commercially successful text, we suggest that even when cinematically presented as an action hero in the Blade trilogy, male vampiric blackness is inevitably conceived as aberrant, gesturing towards the failure of cinematic containment strategies. These complex and contradictory articulations ‘queer’ Blade from within, producing a peculiar cinematic vampiric masculinity and masculine identity that renders Blade as both an action hero and a villain. To this end, this article considers the spectacle of the black male vampiric body in action and inaction, and how other characters in the trilogy (re)define Blade’s vampiric masculinity. Consequently, this article examines how and why other forms of (white) masculinities threaten the survival of the protagonist and concludes by making the claim that the Blade trilogy has opened up a cinematic space for understanding the complex narrative strategies involved in the negotiation and articulation of marginal identities within a cultural system of hegemonic practices.