When The Lost Boys came out in the summer of 1987, I didn’t exactly clamor to see it, but there was something about the trailer that had me interested. My gentle curiosity intensified one afternoon while I was riding my bike through a park and spotted the name of the movie spray painted on a wall. Seeing this graffiti, written in the style seen on the movie poster (with some of the letters smaller than the others, giving the illusion of hanging bats), creeped me out in a way I was not expecting to feel that afternoon.
This admittedly mild display of antisocial behavior triggered something in my young mind, as I was now not only eager to see the movie but even more eager to know what kind of person would do something so bold as spray paint a wall. Although I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it at the time, this moment was one of many that would begin to turn my interests away from childhood conformity and toward something much more rebellious.
Years later, I found out that when director Joel Shcumacher and casting director Marion Dougherty were looking for the weirdest residents of Santa Cruz, California (the principal filming location for the fictitious Santa Clara) to serve as a visual backbone for his vampire-infested coastal tourist trap, they found just what they needed in the local underground punk, skateboarding, and burnout hippy community. As it turns out, members of one of my favorite bands, Bay Area punk rock stalwarts Swingin’ Utters (who I discovered in 1995, a full eight years after the film’s release), and their friends served as extras in the movie, which was shot while they were teenagers on their hometown’s famous boardwalk.
This coincidence might not amount to much in the grand scheme of things, but it does help solidify and reinforce, at least in my mind, the initial feelings I felt in the park 36 years ago. I’ve always been drawn to people and ideas that lie on the fringe of society, and I’ve always felt most at home with the freaks and the weirdos of our world. Outcasts make sense to me, and while it’s true that The Lost Boys was a major Hollywood production not unlike any other summer blockbuster, to me it still feels subversive. It’s cheesy, and it loses much of its bite by the end of a lean 98 minutes, but I still love each of its misfit characters from top to bottom.
And it’s the cast, more than anything else, that really makes The Lost Boys shine. In 1987, Keifer Sutherland was just off his stint in Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me, where he played Ace Merrill, who is easily one of my favorite villains of the entire 1980s. As Ace, Sutherland had a profound effect on me, and despite the character’s despicable behavior, I was enthralled by his “take no shit” attitude and complete disregard for all things decent and orderly. I saw Ace as a natural, if much more sinister, extension of another pair of movie hoods that had me scouring the back pages of Boy’s Life magazine for mail-order switchblade ads: C. Thomas Howell and Emilio Estevez as Pony Boy and Two-Bit in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders. Living on your own terms never looked so cool, and I was hooked for life.
It was this energy that Sutherland brought to The Lost Boys, and I ate it up once again. Where Ace played off The Outsider vibe, David, the bleached-blonde, dangling earring-wearing, black-clad vampire gang leader, played directly off Ace, albeit in a more supernatural and bloodthirsty way. David is a charismatic cult leader whose subjects follow his every whim, even if petty human morality interferes. And how does one combat this lack of humanity? You find a pair of comic book-obsessed stoics named the Frog Brothers and start staking every vampire you see, of course.
Without Edgar and Alan Frog (played by Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander, respectively), The Lost Boys may have still passed muster at the box office, but I doubt anyone would be talking about it today. These two were the first characters in my memory who were both geeks and badasses. They loved comic books and hated vampires, and everyone thought they were kooks, right up until their theories proved correct. Once on the hunt, the Frog Brothers were fearless one-liner machines that I’d put up against even the biggest action stars of the decade.
This duo also facilitated a cinematic milestone that will forever live in the hearts of ‘80s kids everywhere: it allowed the first ever onscreen pairing of Corey Haim and Corey Feldman, who would collectively forever be affectionately known as “The Coreys.” These two close friends would go on to appear in nine films together until Haim’s death in 2010, but they got their start hunting vampires in 1987.
Have there been better vampire movies made since Max Schreck first stepped out of the shadows as Count Orlok in F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu in 1922? Probably, but I would suggest that there aren’t as many as one might think, and certainly few with such a keen eye towards the rigors of adolescence and the need to find meaningful connections (human or otherwise).
With over one hundred years of Dracula retellings out there, not once have I identified with the count’s sob story or the elitist aristocracy he comes from (well, Werner Herzog’s 1979 Nosferatu the Vampyre is pretty great, but that’s the one and only exception), nor do I identify with the other usual cast of characters (Renfield, Johnathan Harker, Mina, Van Helsing, etc.). But I do identify with the Frog Brothers, David, Sam and Michael Emerson (Haim and Jason Patric), Star (Jami Gertz), and even Grandpa (Bernard Hughes) and that amazing sexy sax player (Tim Cappello). Bullshit Victorian nobility never stood a chance with me. (Queue the Echo & the Bunnymen cover of the classic Doors song “People Are Strange.”)
James is a writer, skateboarder, record collector, wrestling nerd, and tabletop gamer living with his family in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the North Carolina Film Critics Association, and contributes to The Daily Orca, Razorcake Magazine, Mountain Xpress, and Asheville Movies.