The Lost Boys / Joel Schumacher (1987)
If zombie films reflect our fear of being consumed into the masses, vampires reflect something like the opposite. There's a seductive element to most vampire storytelling. A curiosity and a flirtatious interest in exploring what that might be like. Part of that difference might be as simple as people don't want to be eaten alive by another human(ish) creature, but having one's neck sucked can be viewed as generally pleasant. Sans blood.
In 1987, Joel Schumacher brought The Lost Boys to the world to illustrate this. The film is ostensibly about a family moving to the beach town of Santa Carla after a divorce and each of them trying to fit in. For Lucy (the always excellent Dianne Wiest) the challenge is finding work, being there for her two sons, adapting to life in her father's (Barnard Hughes) house and rediscovering a personal life of her own. Her sons Sam and Michael have a different challenge. Don't get turned into vampires. Only, Michael isn't sure being a vampire wouldn't be kind of cool.
The Lost Boys has strong coming of age elements building on other contemporaries, like The Outsiders, Stand by Me, River's Edge. Sam (Corey Haim) quickly finds new friends in the form of the Frog Brothers (Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander) who begin teaching him about life, death and undeath in Santa Carla. For Michael (Jason Patric), the older brother, it's a little more complicated. He meets Star (Jami Gertz) and the pack she runs with takes notice. Lead by Kiefer Sutherland's David, the gang begins testing Michael.
Michael wants time with Star, and he's not repelled by the guys she runs with. Over time, he learns more and more about what they are, until he realizes he's been playing chicken with a pack of vampires.
Michael Chapman's cinematography delivers a glossy, neon-and-fog aesthetic that looks like a 90-minute MTV music-video. The Santa Carla boardwalk is brought to life as a hyper-saturated carnival, bathed in neon designed to contrast with the heavily shadowed collapsed hotel where David and the vampires lurk away from the tourists, beneath the beach town. During action sequences, the camera moves wildly, swooping with predatory freedom. Creature work is competent and solid but not ground breaking.
The film isn't pure horror and has plenty of comedic elements. If David wasn't a vampire, and Lucy moved next to a mysterious man from Okinawa, this is the same plot as The Karate Kid. Haim, Patric and Sutherland were teen heart throbs (not to mention that sax player). The MTV style makes being a vampire look pretty cool, to be honest. Even when it goes full splatter, which it does.
"One thing about living in Santa Carla I never could stomach; all the damn vampires."
The Lost Boys is full of jolts, gross-out gags and gore (including "death by stereo" and "boiling holy water"), delivered with comic timing. Some of the films scares seem more campy today than frightening to contemporary audiences, though that adds to its charm. The Shining this is not. That doesn't make the film any less effective. It's fun, kinetic and in the third act practical-effects take over for whatever coy suggestion is made in Act I. The transformation effects and vampire design influenced Blade, Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Vampire Diaries TV series.
Ultimately, this is a movie about kids trying to fit in. Michael wants the girl, and has to win over her friends. Or, um, to kill them with stakes in the heart. Sam just wants to belong. Some of the interactions with the Frog Brothers hasn't aged well, but it's fine. You're not watching for Corey Feldman. You're watching for the showdown between a flying Kiefer Sutherland and Jason Patric, who refused to complete his partial transformation by killing a human. The vampires descend on the house, and are met with a suite of Kevin McCallister-like traps set by Sam and the Frog Brothers. Note: This predates the release of Home Alone by three years. The action amps up, 80s style, but the effects here are well done.
The film is walking several fine lines from its late 80s origin. The satanic panic and fear that suburban teens were running wild and joining gangs. The AIDS epidemic and fear of contaminated blood supply. Social mores and homosexuality. The decay of small town America. Schumacher threads the needle, hinting at but avoiding these directly. He both gets credit and presents something that feels slightly risky, but never commits to a point of view on any of these topics.
The Lost Boys resolves none of the cultural anxieties it flirts with, and doesn't even try. It's not a message movie. It's a hangout movie that happens to be about vampires on the boardwalk. Nearly forty years later, the hairstyles are different, the Frog Brothers are dated, but the neon fog and the Cry Little Sister needle drop still work exactly as well as they did in 1987. Some movies age. This one just got cooler.
Key scene
Spoilers below.
Michael's initiation. Michael is lured to the vampires' hotel lair and given a bottle of wine that turns out to be laced with blood. Everything about the scene is extremely sensual. The slow motion close-ups on his face as he drinks cutting to David watching him intently position the change as a seduction. It's hardly violence. This is the scene that illuminates the film's coming-of-age metaphor. Drinking the blood-wine is not an attack. Michael chooses it. It's more akin to a first sexual or drug experience.
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