The Lost Boys

Teenage brothers Michael and Sam move with their mother to their grandfather’s house in the Northern California hills above the small coastal town of Santa Carla. While the younger Sam meets a pair of kindred spirits in geeky comic-book nerds, and self-described vampire hunters, Edward and Alan Frog, Michael falls for a townie named Star, but she is in the thrall of David, the leader of a local gang of vampire delinquents. Now it’s up to Sam and the Frog brothers to save Michael and Star from the local pack of bloodsuckers.

Recently divorced, and now broke and unemployed, Lucy Emerson packs her family up—teenager Michael, his younger brother Sam, and their dog Nanook—to move from Phoenix, Arizona all the way up to the seaside town of Santa Carla, in Northern California.

The plan is a new place and a new start, while they live with Lucy's eccentric father in his rambling ranch house, a cluttered place, filled with taxidermy, and perched in the hills above the town and its rocky coast.

Santa Clara is a strange place, but then, the Emersons are strangers. There’s a lot of punks and weirdos crowding the town’s boardwalk and its seaside amusement park. The 1980s era Reagan Administration-caused poverty and explosion of the homelessness problem is apparent. Every surface is covered with flyers of people who are missing. The back of the billboard welcoming people to town labels Santa Clara as “The Murder Capital Of The World.”

After arriving at Grandpa‘s, and after the old man ”jokes” that he's dead on the porch, he explains The Rules of the House to Michael and Sam.

1. The Second shelf in the fridge is reserved solely for Grandpa’s root beers and double-thick Oreo cookies. Nobody is allowed to touch the second shelf except for Grandpa.
2. This one is a very important rule, so extra attention must be paid here… Don't touch anything. Everything is exactly where Grandpa wants it.
3. On Wednesdays, the mailman brings the TV Guide. On occasion, the address label may be curled up at the edges, which may seem like an invitation to some to simply tear the label off. Do not do this. Doing so only ever results in ripping the cover, and Grandpa does not like that. Now, the appearance of TV Guides in the house might lead one to the reasonable assumption that there is also a TV In the house. This is incorrect. TV Guides provide everything that a TV does, and thus, negates the necessity of actually owning a TV.
4. Finally, stay out of Grandpa’s taxidermy room.

When asked if it was true that Santa Carla was the murder capital of the world, Grandpa would only say this…

“Well, now, let me put it this way. If all the corpses buried around here were to stand up all at once, we'd have one hell of a population problem.”

And with that, the Emersons set about settling in…

On the Boardwalk, Lucy takes a job at a video store owned by a man named Max, who takes a romantic interest in her. At the local comic book store, Sam meets the Frog brothers, Edgar and Alan, the sons of the proprietors, store managers, and a couple of melodramatic super nerds. The trio circle each other, sizing each other up, testing each other’s comic book knowledge like gorillas in the wild beating their chests, but much, much… much nerdier.

You really wouldn’t think it was possible to see a bigger twerp than Edgar and Allen Frog, but then there’s Sam, walking around like it’s totally fine to be dressed like a Vaurnet store and a Mossimo store vomited all over him. But sensing a big twerp kinship, and impressed by Sam’s technobabble nonsense display of comic book knowledge, the pair reveal themselves to him as vampire hunters, and warn him that the town of Santa Clara is infested with the undead.

They then give him a comic book with their phone number on the back, and tell him to pray that he never has to use it. Sam is not impressed.

Meanwhile, Michael sees a hot girl on the Boardwalk. Her name is Star. Michael tries to impress her with his dirt bike, but unfortunately, Star apparently already has a boyfriend, and he and all of his friends have dirt bikes too.

The boyfriend’s name is David. He’s the leader of a local gang of dirt-bike riding delinquents and cool guys, Marko, Paul, and Dwayne, and he can see that Michael is from Phoenix, Arizona and therefore super uncool, so he doesn’t respect Michael at all, even though Michael has a dirt bike too.

David can also see that Michael wants to do it with Star, and while it’s unclear if this makes him more jealous of Michael or of Star, either way, he then challenges Michael to try to keep up with him and the rest of the dirt bike gang as they race their little two-stroke lawnmowers with delusion of grandeur across the beach to the deafening beat of synth-pop!

(Shouting) Say hello to the night! Lost in the shadows! Say hello to the night! Lost in the loneliness! Say hello to the night! Lost in the shadows! No one knows… (whispers) the lost boys...

David and the dirt bike gang lead Michael to their clubhouse, which is underground in the remains of a former luxury hotel that was buried during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. This is when it becomes clear that this gang of dirt-bikers are all vampires, and they spend their nights doing vampire stuff like sitting around in their clubhouse, riding dirt bikes and woo-hooing, and yelling “Par-tay!” while doing rock fingers and sticking their tongues out all radical-like. They peer pressure Michael into eating Chinese food and drinking wine.

Michael is from a very white part of Arizona and has not only never had Chinese food before, but he’s clearly scared of the experience. And because David is a mean vampire who is jealous of Michael, he glamours Michael, making his rice appear as maggots, and his lo mein to appear as worms, most likely ruining Chinese food for Michael forever, which is a crime on par with murder, if you ask me. Then, before Michael drinks from the gang’s very suspect bottle of “wine” Star warns him that it contains blood, but Michael drinks anyway, because he doesn’t want to look more uncool than he already has in front of the dirt bike gang.

After that, Michael finds himself in the throes of an After School Special, as things get blurry and it’s heavily implied that there’s more dancing and woo-hooing, all of which leads to Michael and the dirt bike gang hanging beneath a railway bridge as a train goes overhead. The woo-hooing is out of control. Michael can only hold on for so long, and he finally drops into the fog of the ravine below him, and he keeps falling, down into the dangers of teenage drinking, just a boy, trying to be a man, lost in a fog of bad decisions and regret, only to land in his bed the next morning, groggy, and unsure of exactly what happened the night before.

Soon enough, we all know what happened… Michael is turning into a vampire. He becomes sensitive to sunlight, he finds normal food revolting, he craves blood, and even though he’s supposed to be babysitting Sam while Lucy is on a date with Max, he nearly attacks Sam while Sam is in the bath, only to be thwarted by Sam's trusty dog, Nanook.

That’s when they both notice that Michael’s reflection is fading.

After calling the Frog Brothers, Sam deduces that Michael is only mostly vampire, and his transformation won’t be complete until he actually feeds on human blood. Even better, the whole thing may be reversible if they kill the head vampire. Sam, Edgar, and Alan suspect that Max is the head vampire, but after they have dinner with Lucy and Max at Grandpa’s house, they notice that he not only has no issue with garlic or holy water, but he has a reflection too.

Meanwhile, David and the other dirt bike vampires attempt to push Michael into killing, and complete his transformation, by revealing to him their true monstrous visages, and eating a group of partygoers on the beach.

But Michael manages to resist the temptation to feed.

Later, Michael finds Star in the clubhouse. She confides in Michael that both she and Laddie—the weird child that hangs out with the gang, despite the fact that he doesn’t have a dirt bike of his own—are only partly transformed too, as they, too, have so far refused to kill. She then admits to Michael that David wanted her to kill Michael in order to complete her transformation.

Michael and Star then share a very “sexy synth-pop” afternoon together, doing it.

Determined to save Starr, now that he has given her his flower, Michael drives Sam and the Frog brothers to the dirt bike vampire’s clubhouse in Grandpa’s car, while is busy Grandpa putting fence posts in the ground upside down…

It’s during the day, so the vampires are all sleeping, hanging by their gross feet.

Sam and the Frog Brothers decide to take out the sleeping vampires while Michael gathers Star and Laddie. They choose to stake Marko first, presumably because his mullet is just an absolute crime against nature, and the whole endeavor is loud and messy. Marko’s screams awaken the others, and everyone narrowly escapes, as the sun forces David stay in the shadows, vowing to hunt them down that night.

Michael, Starr, and Laddie are too tired to do much during the day, so Sam and the Frog brothers prepare for the impending assault. They arm themselves with garlic, holy water, squirt guns, a bow and arrows, and stakes.

That night, the vampires attack Grandpa’s house. In the fight, Sam, Nanook, and the Frog brothers kill Paul and Dwayne, while Michael impales David on some of Grandpa's taxidermy. But despite David's death, Michael's transformation is not undone, and everyone realizes that David was not the head vampire. That’s when Lucy and Max return from their date, and it’s soon revealed that Max really is the head vampire. He had been able to dodge the boys’ tests because Michael made the mistake of inviting him into their home, rendering them all powerless against him. Max explains his desire to create a vampire family and that he sent David to turn Michael and Sam in order to compel Lucy to join the family as mother to the boys. To save Sam from being killed on the spot by Max, Lucy agrees to Max's demands.

And that’s when Grandpa crashes his truck through the wall, his old la cucaracha horn wheezing mightily, as he impales Max with a wooden fence post, causing him to explode. With Max's death, Michael, Star, and Laddie revert to normal. Grandpa seems strange though, and they follow him into the kitchen, asking if he's all right. Grandpa helps himself to a root beer from the second shelf in the fridge and says,

"One thing about living in Santa Carla I never could stomach… all the damn vampires."

Fade to Black.

"It's like, mother fucker, I'm trying to watch The Lost Boys!" – Mr. Orange, Reservoir Dogs, 1992

In the years since The Lost Boys was released on July 31st, 1987, I’ve seen this movie a million-billion times, and in the time since, I have gone from identifying with Sam to identifying with Grandpa, as everything in my space is exactly where I like it, so don’t touch anything. Especially my root beers.

But no matter how much time has passed, and despite his insane mullet, I can only ever see Alex Winter as Bill S. Preston, Esq. of the band Wyld Stallyns, and it has always been impossible for me to accept him as Marko.

Also, while I know The Lost Boys was filmed in the coastal wastelands of Northern California, smack dab in the middle of Reagan’s America, I don’t understand why there are so many garbage can fires whenever they're on the Boardwalk at night. So many. Could small coastal towns not afford lightbulbs in public spaces in the ‘80s? Was that a thing?

My wife, meanwhile, had somehow never actually seen this movie before, and she was shocked by the sheer sexual audacity of Saxophone Guy.

The title of this film is obviously a reference to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan stories, the connection being that, much like Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, the vampires never grow old. Apparently first-time screenwriters Janice Fischer and James Jeremias were initially inspired by the eternal child vampire Claudia in Interview With A Vampire, and from that, they somehow made the leap to wondering: What if the reason Peter Pan only came at night, never grew old, and could fly, was because he was actually a vampire? The anti-authority punk rock nature of the vampires in this film, and the allure of being young and wild and free all stem from that. As does its vague theme of accepting responsibility. The film was originally intended to be a lot more obvious about it all too. David was going to be named Peter. Star was going to be named Wendy, blah, blah, blah, but the connection was otherwise too thin, and really didn’t otherwise have all that much to say, so it was mostly dropped during production.

And really, isn’t Michael more the Wendy here than Star?

Also, as the film was originally set to be directed by Richard Donner, and Fischer and Jeremias' original screenplay was closer in tone to Donner's film The Goonies, it was also originally envisioned as more of a kids vs kid vampires adventure, with 13 or 14-year-old vampires, while Sam and the Frog brothers were more 8 - 10 year old kids. But when Donner left to other projects, Joel Schumacher signed on and he decided the film needed to be all around “sexier and more adult“ and brought on screenwriter Jeffrey Boam rewrite the script that way.

The result was a bit of a new idea at the time, a mixture of comedy and horror in the perfect way that appealed to kids for many of the same reasons that kids watch shows about high schoolers. The Lost Boys is all about going out late at night and doing bad stuff without your parents knowing, and like... kissing, and looking cool, and riding dirt bikes, and everybody drinking from one single half-empty bottle of wine that came from who knows where, and who knows how long it's been opened or how many people’s lips have been on it, all while you’re hanging out in some potentially dangerous gravel pit out in the middle of nowhere.

In a word, it was a middle schooler's dream of being totally rad.

It was an idea that really seemed to confuse older critics too, with their firmly entrenched idea of what a vampire is and what it must be in stories (which was most likely just Bella Lugosi holding his cape up in front of face), so that meant that most of them missed the entire point of the movie at the time, which was to revamp the classic monster of the vampire for a whole new generation.

And that’s exactly what happened too.

The Lost Boys, along with other similarly toned films like Fright Night and Near Dark, ushered in an era of vampire reinvention. This eventually led to things like Buffy (especially in the vampire make-up, and of course the obvious David to Spike pipeline), as well as Blade, and What We Do In The Shadows, amongst others. It certainly didn’t hurt that the film came out at the height of the Time of the Coreys, and also featured a young Kiefer Sutherland, who was coming off an iconic role in Stand By Me too.

In the end, The Lost Boys was a pop culture earthquake, and such a ubiquitous presence of my early teens. And while it is an absolutely unmistakable time capsule of the 80s, at the same time, it doesn’t feel dated by this. For all of its day-glo hair metal synth-pop ridiculousness, the film somehow feels “real” despite its depiction of clearly fictional characters and ideas. Maybe that’s because of it also being set in the middle of the economic and social destruction that was America in the Reagan years. Either way, I think this “fantasy realism” is big part of why this film is such a classic. Well, this and it’s great soundtrack.

Anyway, I’m sure you’ve seen this film. You know how great it is.

It’s perfect for Halloween.