07.02.24, 20:30, Blade (1998), Kinoclub #37

Sharpen your weapons and show your teeth, Kinoautomat takes you under the wings of cinema's most illustrous daywalker.

Like a katana in a vampire's head, Blade slammed into the creatively bankrupt Hollywood landscape of the late 1990s. We are writing 1998, superhero movies were just an evil dream and Wesley Snipes was still doing his tax returns. For several years, the idea of bringing Marvel's horror-noir hybrid to the big screen had been toyed with. Penned in the 1970s, the comic series drew on the success of the blaxploitation wave in popular culture to bring to the screen an African-American vampire hunter who was to be a badass break from Marvel's own pantheon of boy scout heroes. Blade's battle against sunlight-hungry bloodsuckers was translated so hypothermically cool to film that blockbusters could feed off its impact for many decades.

Our guest speaker on duty dusts off his leather coat for an introduction to the cultural blood transfusion that Blade turned out to be. Fusing age-old myths with nineties pop culture (the raves, the hairstyles, the music!!!!!), it established a unique universe that would serve as a blueprint for both nillies horror-action hits and Marvel's cinematic empire. So buy a new pair of sunglasses for this on 35mm crackling dive into the night.

This film will be introduced by filmmaker Zaur Kourazov.