The Lost Boys paired vampire camp with real teenage fears
The Lost Boys’ poster made the prospect of becoming an undead creature of the night pretty attractive: “Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It’s fun to be a vampire.” But the movie’s story is full of teenage terrors: an older sibling in the grips of addiction, divorced parents, starting over in a strange new place, and contending with adults who won’t listen to your real, valid teenage problems.
Released in 1987, The Lost Boys isn’t particularly terrifying as a horror film. With its gaudily dressed vampires and long-flowing mullets — plus its iconic, extremely sweaty saxophone man — it reads more camp than straight horror three decades later. And despite its R rating, it’s fairly tame. Its single sex scene is pretty chaste and the film’s gore is limited to gushes of blood from dying vampires.
The Lost Boys succeeds as an enduring piece of vampire fiction because of its stars, with Kiefer Sutherland standing out as vampire gang leader David, and the strong bones of its story. In that story, recently divorced single mom Lucy (Dianne Wiest) moves to the fictional Southern California town of Santa Carla, “the murder capital of the world,” the film tells us, with her teenage sons, Michael (Jason Patric) and Sam (Corey Haim). The displaced family moves in with Lucy’s dad, an eccentric taxidermist known only as Grandpa.
As they settle into the town, which appears to consist primarily of a densely trafficked beach boardwalk, Lucy gets a job (and a potential boyfriend) at a video rental store, while Michael and Sam seek new friends — Michael’s comes in the form of a group of young vampires, while Sam bonds with comic book store geeks Edgar (Corey Feldman) and Alan Frog (Jamison Newlander). When Michael
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