Today marks the 20th anniversary of Blade slashing its way into theaters. In the decades after Wesley Snipes’ R-rated vampire film grossed a surprising $131 million worldwide, people have credited Blade with really kickstarting the comic book movie craze that has become the foundation of popular culture in the 21st century. Those people are right, by the way. Blade was the very first Marvel Comics movie to actually make money in theaters; 1986’s Howard the Duck was a notorious flop, and the Punisher and Captain America movies of 1989 and 1990 were banished to video store shelves. It was Blade, two years before X-Men and four years before Spider-Man, that proved audiences would respond to a take on heroes that didn’t talk down to them.

The point I don’t often see made, and I know this because realizing it took me by surprise, is that Blade came out one year after Batman and Robin. One year! We went from Bat-nipples to Blade-bloodshed in back-to-back summers! One movie ends with the Dynamic Duo (plus Batgirl) bounding towards the camera in silhouette, the other begins with a vamp massacre at a blood rave. We’re so busy talking about what came after Blade that we don’t think too much about what came before it–like, immediately before it.

These two movies feel as if there are millions of years between them. Batman and Robin represents the end of the previous era, undone by its own excess (the movie opens with butt shots and then features Batman sliding down a dinosaur’s back like a crimefighting Fred Flintstone). Blade represents the genre’s rebirth as something new, presenting superheroes as both grim and grounded but still–and I can’t believe I’m saying this about a movie that begins with a pregnant woman dying in a pool of blood–proudly silly.

Before Blade, superhero movies operated in two starkly contrasting tones. In 1989, Tim Burton’s Batman proved that comic book movies could be dark–literally. That movie was lit by one lightbulb swinging from a lone wire. It was visually creepier than the bright Superman movies of the late ’70s, and Burton turned Gotham into a macabre metropolis. But after Batman, superhero movies struggled as movie studios leaned heavy on the 1930s-era action serial aspect of Batman’s history instead of making… actual superhero movies. These went for grounded but still came off as a really silly (sorry, Billy Zane).

And when Burton left the Bat-franchise, incoming director Joel Schumacher dialed up the silliness like a Bat-villain showing off his terrifying gizmo. Batman and Robin was Schumacher dialing it up to 11 before the whole thing exploded. So while Batman made audiences take superheroes seriously, no film after that knew how to balance the gloomy gravitas and excellent excess that’s at the heart of superhero comics.

Enter: Blade. Blade is a deeply silly movie–and it knows it. The trick is, though, it doesn’t really feel silly while you’re watching it. Instead, things like Blade throwing a double-bladed boomerang and decapitating a chamber full of vampires seems wickedly cool. When Wesley Snipes declares with a sneer that it’s “open season on all suck-heads,” he’s radiating righteous conviction even though he just used the phrase “suck-heads.” Just like Batman and Robin, Blade is a movie that does everything it wants to do, and it does it so hard. It’s just that instead of focusing all of its hyperactive energy on coming up with ice puns and Bat-gags (never forget the Bat-credit card), Blade channels its energy into cutting-edge fight scenes. Yeah, Blade did bullet-time and hallway fights well before The Matrix and Netflix’s Marvel shows.

What makes Blade work so well, and what honestly makes it hold up 20 years later, is the cinematography. We had no idea at the time, but Blade created a visual language practically from scratch that would come to be known as the superhero house style. Batman and Robin is a chaotic movie in every possible way, and that includes its visuals. The movie is all magenta and lime lighting, which is crazy when you remember the no-nonsense black of 1989’s Batman. Keeping that in mind, Blade’s muted cool tones look downright revolutionary. It’s a lot brighter than Burton’s work, but it’s a millionth less saturated than Schumacher’s crime carnival of ice and ivy.

I remember not being at all excited when Blade came out, not because I didn’t know who Blade was. I religiously collected Marvel Universe trading cards, so you best believe I knew the Nightstalkers on sight. I remember not considering it a superhero movie, possibly because superhero movies looked like Batman and Robin and Batman Forever. They were garish affairs that only colored with the new crayons, the ones with words like “acid” or “electric” in the names. But in retrospect, Blade looks exactly like a superhero movie, way more in line with everything that came after it as opposed to what came before. Blade looks like what X-Men looks like, what Batman v Superman looks like, what Jessica Jones looks like, what Captain America: The Winter Soldier looks like. In 1998, Blade was the outlier. In 2018, Batman and Robin is the outlier.

Looking at what came before Blade is important, because it exposes what the Daywalker was up against and what he was responding to. Blade not only proved that Marvel was a moneymaker and that comic book movies could be serious again, but it proved that a superhero film didn’t have to jettison its wackier aspects in the process. Remember, Blade is a movie with garlic-infused vampire mace! And it’s also a film where the protagonist causes his undead enemies to blow up like fleshy balloons of blood. Just like the titular vampire slayer, Blade was a movie that had all of the strengths of the superhero films that came before and few of their campy weaknesses. It had fun, and it had fangs.

Where to watch Blade

Where to watch Batman and Robin