This reflected Guillermo’s desire to present a vampire unlike anything seen before. He’d been mulling over this notion since his childhood in Mexico, watching films and reading about vampires in legends and folktales from around the world, including the strigoi of eastern Europe. From the first, Guillermo displayed a morbid fascination with the biological minutiae of how the vampire actually functioned—how it infects, how it feeds, how it survives—peering closely at what others might avoid or gloss over.

In his twenties, the ideas developed further, as he fashioned Cronos around a most unlikely vampire. “The vampires in Blade II came from me figuring out vampirism for Cronos, and also for a pitch that was not successful for I Am Legend,” Guillermo explains. This was years before the 2007 version that was ultimately produced starring Will Smith.

“I went to Warners,” Guillermo recalls of his I Am Legend pitch, “and I met with a junior executive, first of all, which means that no one else ever heard the pitch. It didn’t travel on. He said, ‘Arnold [Schwarzenegger] is attached as a star.’ And for me, that is the opposite of the novel because Richard Matheson makes his hero the everyman, makes a point of making him a common man, because that’s the monster. He is the monster to the vampire race because he could be any man. He’s not meant to be extraordinary. And Arnold is, in every way, extraordinary. So I am a guy who just did a movie called Cronos, a twenty-eight-year-old twerp from Mexico, and I do a pitch for I Am Legend, and I say, ‘I don’t think Arnold is right.’ Not exactly the way to get the job.”

Fortunately for Guillermo, the work he did to develop a new kind of vampire for I Am Legend was exactly what he needed to bring a fresh take—and monster—to Blade II. Guillermo saw the challenge of the Reapers in Blade II as a series of surprises. “You think you know the Reapers. You know what they look like, and then the jaw opens. It’s a completely new shock. Then when we see them in the sewers, they’re upside down. Every time, they evolve. I think that it’s very important not to make the creatures a single entity, but have aspects of them that you discover. You need to really play with perspective and have layers that open and reveal something else.”

At that first meeting with Goyer and Snipes, Guillermo laid his cards on the table. “I said to Wesley Snipes, ‘I don’t understand Blade at all because, if I met those vampires, I would like them. You take care of Blade; I’ll take care of the vampires.’ And that’s the way the movie was shot. I never told Wesley what Blade would do or not do, because I didn’t know. I was like, ‘Whatever makes you tick. I don’t understand you.’ But Nomak, Luke Goss’s character, I directed with all the love I could, as sort of a Frankenstein’s monster, tragic. For me, Nomak is the hero of that movie.”

Unlike Mimic, where he submerged key aspects of his nature to try to dance to Hollywood’s tune, Guillermo deliberately made Blade II into the kind of film that would have delighted his teenage self. And so Blade II is exuberant, vivid, unrestrained. Feelings are intense, actions full-out, colors comic-book lurid.

The same goes for his Blade II notebook. A pasteboard of youthful enthusiasm, these pages chart the evolution of the Reapers from their earliest incarnation many years before into a spectacular, near-final design for Blade II. Also featured are snatches of dialogue, discarded vampire guard uniforms, colorful tattoos, Gothic architecture, drawings of the Prague sewers, suggested action sequences, and thoughts for composing shots.

In the end, only the smallest percentage of what Guillermo had in mind was put into Blade II. But seven years later, he and Chuck Hogan collaborated on The Strain trilogy of novels, painting a grim vision of the vampire apocalypse Guillermo had been meditating on for decades. “I’m very surprised and happy that they were successful,” Guillermo says of the books, “because I wrote them with Chuck, I wrote them for our own pleasure, and I wrote them because I wanted to put all that stuff on paper.”

^{Concepts illustrating how a Reaper disintegrates when hit with silver nitrate- and garlic-infused bullets by Mike Mignola.}

^{Concepts of Nomak’s fight with the security guards by Mike Mignola.}

^{Caliban Industries autopsy doctor concept by Mike Mignola.}

^{Storyboards by del Toro.}

^{Wesley Snipes as Blade in a publicity photo for the movie.}

^{NOTEBOOK3, PAGE 24A}

–When Nyssa enters the lair in Blade, her temperature is -30° and she avoids UV damage to her eyes thanks to the fact that she wears special goggles with mechanical irises that close shut to keep it from reaching her retinas. Blade turns on a UV reflector strong enough to light up an entire stadium and the camera receives the “flow” full on. They’re silhouettes fighting with 100% backlight.

Sometimes life offers us “tragedies” so that we might learn from them. God sends us the message hut never the dictionary.

Long, narrow teeth

“Scud” gives Whistler a set of false teeth, with two silver and two gold teeth. After this kind gesture, the old man develops a certain affection for the young man. The film depicts Blade’s enlightenment

• GDT: When I went into Blade II, I was very afraid. I was very afraid because I’m not a hip guy. I’m not a guy that is aware of the latest MTV music or whatever. The way that I find I’m very current is in manga, anime, and video games. I went to Mike De Luca and I said, “You realize I’m the most unhip motherfucker you can hire?” And he said, “That’s fine.” He said, “We want you to bring other stuff, not that.”

I started to think I needed to make this movie different than the rest, because the movies I’ve done, they can either be movies that look like they’re signed by an eight-year-old director or by an eighty-year-old director. I think Cronos is my oldest guy movie. It’s the point of view of a very old guy. Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, sort of in the same way. They have that sense. Hellboy is like an eight-year-old movie, and Hellboy II is the same thing. It’s me at a very young age.

On Blade II, I said, “I need to be a teenager, so this needs to be a six-pack-and-a-pizza kind of movie.” Like the kind of thing I would have loved to see when I was that age—almost like a musical of violence. I started ciphering some stuff that comes from manga and saying, “Well, I want the iris glasses,” which will eventually also find their way into Abe Sapien, and a really fetishistic rubber suit. For example, when you see the design of the suit on the right [opposite], it has a center that is rolled silk with a center medallion that is very Japanese.