Some Questions About Blade’s Iconic Blood Rave

Blade, the Wesley Snipes-led vampire movie that’s playing on SYFY this month, kicks off with one of the best opening scenes in action movie history. A hapless guy gets brought to an underground techno club by a hot girl, where he’s surrounded by clubbers raving to the music. But, then, he feels a drip of something on his hand. It’s blood, and when the beat drops, so do gallons of blood from the sprinklers, and all the ravers are revealed to be vampires. They’re dancing in bloody ecstasy, the hapless date is freaked out, and he flees right as Snipes’ titular vampire-hunter enters the club, ready to start slaying. 

It is an incredible scene that perfectly establishes the tone of the film. We know that these vampires have their own society that operates in the shadows of our own. We know they like to party and they like to play with their food. And, we know that they are aware of the Daywalker’s reputation, based on how they react when he enters the club. It’s extremely efficient storytelling. 

Nevertheless, we have some questions about the blood rave. 

Some of our many questions about Blade‘s opening blood rave

Where did the vampires get all that blood?

We did some looking around and somebody on Reddit crunched the numbers and estimated that 425 gallons of blood come out of the sprinklers. An average adult human has somewhere between 1.2 and 1.5 gallons of blood in their body, so the Redditor estimated that the blood of 283 adults came out of those sprinklers. Or maybe it was 40 cows, or 3,400 one-pint donations from blood banks. In any case, that is a lot of blood for this one rave. Where did the vampires obtained it? 

Does the blood come from the butcher?

We see the would-be vampire victim and his “date” walk through a meat locker to get to the rave. Are these butchers normal humans who don’t know what’s going on? Or are they vampires whose only job is to supply cow blood for the raves? We can assume that Blade’s vampires can’t survive on cow blood, so if the vampires are clubbing underneath sprinklers of cow blood, it’s truly just an aesthetic thing. That makes the question of “where do they get the blood?” easier to answer, but it seems kinda lame if it’s not “real” blood.  

Do they do blood raves like this often?

Was this a special occasion or do vampires have blood raves regularly? The clubbers reach their arms up in anticipation before the blood starts raining down, so either they were informed about what would happen ahead of time or they’ve done this before. If they’ve done this before, how frequently? Are these raves happening on a nightly basis? Weekly? Monthly? And is this club the only place that does blood raves or are these commonplace throughout the wider vampire world? The more common blood raves are, the more pressing our first question becomes: Where are they getting all this blood!?

Do they reuse the blood?

If they can capture and reuse most of the blood via drains on the club floor, that would mean they wouldn’t need to go through the exsanguination of almost 300 adults every single time they wanted to party. That brings up another question, though. 

How sanitary is this?

Are the vampires drinking the blood? Clearly it’s getting in their mouths, so yes, they are. But it’s more like getting sprayed with champagne than having a full sprinkler-based meal. If they are reusing the blood, we have some concerns about contamination, but maybe vampires don’t care about that. 

Do you need special sprinkler equipment to make them spray blood instead of water?

We’re no plumbers, but we feel like blood might get all dried out and sticky and could clog the pipes or nozzles or whatever. Just a concern; might be unfounded. 

Who is cleaning all this up?

Nobody cleans up after this particular blood rave because, well, Blade crashes the party and kills a bunch of them. But assuming this blood rave went as planned, you gotta assume somebody would’ve been down there with a ton of bleach. There wasn’t crimson-stained evidence of past blood raves, so if they’ve done this before (see Question 2) then they need to be really putting elbow grease into cleaning all this up. The rave floor probably does not look great under a blacklight, regardless. 

What about all the vampires’ clothes?

This is actually our biggest question about the whole blood rave endeavor. We see from the opening that the rave is taking place in a building in the city of Los Angeles. The entrance is hidden away, but it is very much taking place in one of the largest cities in America. There are dozens of vampires at the rave. If Blade hadn’t shown up… what was their plan? Were all of these vampires gonna just exit out onto the street while covered head-to-toe in blood? Wouldn’t that be a little conspicuous? Or do they all prepare for something like this and there are showers on the premises? Maybe they bring a change of clothes? It certainly seems like a lot of them are wearing nice clubbing outfits that are going to be utterly ruined by the blood shower. That’s not gonna come out in the wash!

Look, none of these questions should take away from how cool Blade’s opening scene is. The movie is great, and we clearly don’t have any firsthand experience with vampires or, uh, clubbing, if we’re being honest. These are just some things you might want to ponder while watching Blade, perhaps when it next airs on SYFY.