The first Blade movie came out in 1998. Wesley Snipes starred with a few also-black supporting-cast members. This did well and so did its first sequel. Spawn also had come out, as comic-book movies go; doing less well. I'll treat the first Blade on account the sequels only exist because that first movie did as well as it did.
John Derbyshire considered this back half of the Clinton Administration an intermezzo in (black-) race realism, post Bell Curve and the OJ acquittal. So: why, if everyone was racist, did anyone bother greenlighting this script with this cast?
Proposal: Jeffery Dahmer.
The screenwriters and producers weren't intending an antiwhite parable, exactly. They were sketching a cabal of predatory pansexuals (avant la lettre). The whole movie starts in clubland, where a newbie realises in horror what his (female) date has brought him into - before funnybook action. Stephen Dorff, many critics complained, was miscast. I counter that the movie knew what it was doing: it wanted a hipster. Slightly fey. All creep.
The movie assumes not every young man always gets the choice when initiated into this world; Dahmer's prey certainly didn't. Whether or not Dahmer represents the Lived Experience of vulnerable black teenagers who get mentored by white male liberals... doesn't matter. In the late 1990s, a potential audience thought he did. Snipe's titular character, the "daywalker" or perhaps dhampir, presents a vengeance fantasy of victims. He fights this cabal where it lives.
BACKDATE 5/16 based on Anglin re Sinners.
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