I've seen both Blade movies now. The premise is that there are now two humanoid races in the world; humans and vampires. The vampires prey on the humans, and if a human gets bitten by a vampire, s/he becomes a vampire, if they don't die outright. Kind of an interspecies one-drop rule. Once you try Drac, you can never go back.
Vampires can only be out at night; they can't stand the bright light of day. But Blade is different. He's the son of a black mother who was bitten by a white vampire while she was pregnant. Blade's a vampire-human mulatto. Unlike a full blood (!) vampire, he can tolerate the both daylight and night. The vampires call him Day-Walker. Blade hates vampires and is trying to kill them all, and to destroy the vampire side of himself. He spends a lot of time trying to discover a serum that will suppress the vampire in him. He has to take the serum regularly, or the vampire side of him starts to break through. In the first film, "vampire" gets coded as "black" and "human" as "white." The film makes explicit jokes about Blade being an Uncle Tom; it's right there in the dialogue. The serum is administered intravenously, and Blade goes through a total junkie enactment when he self-administers the serum; ties a vein up, injects himself, has a bit of a fit, trembles and shakes, nods off for awhile. Made even more interesting by the fact that he's played by a black man, the junkie imagery being a popular way of portraying black men in film and television.
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