MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Modern vampires are carriers for specific contemporary anxieties of the cultures that create them, and the Blade trilogy acts as an origin for a strain of contemporary vampire narrative that engages with epidemiology in a way that demonstrates how people think about and fear disease and contamination rather than how infection actually works. One cannot demand absolute scientific accuracy from narratives predicated on undead immortals, but the “science” on which the Blade films depend for their narrative tension, like Blade himself, has gone rogue.

Blade (1998), Blade II (2002), and Blade: Trinity use vampirism as a metaphor to evaluate how contemporary culture too often abandons logic, knowledge, and scientific truth in favor of panic when confronted with illness and death, utilizing a layperson’s understanding of science to update vampirism, identifying it as a virus that causes immortality and blood thirst with side effects like light sensitivity and an allergy to garlic and silver. Vampirism is a natural, albeit overwhelmingly unfortunate, condition that hematologists can—and do!—mutter about in their laboratories, even as the virus behaves in ways that no virus ever has before. I argue that these films use to a specific purpose the pseudoscience that generated the myth of the “crack baby” and the horrific treatment of HIV/AIDS patients that defined the 1980s and 90s and still impacts us today: unfettered by reality and giving free rein to fears of a worst case scenario, vampires represent fears of total annihilation or irreversible degeneration of the human race. While the odds of such an event occurring naturally and on a global scale in the short term are only slightly higher than those of a vampiric apocalypse, we are, these movies argue, right to be afraid, even if we don’t fully understand what we should be afraid of.