The Lost Boys
Teenage horror comedy couldn't decide what it was and is timeless for it
THE LOST BOYS (1987) is a horror thriller by a filmmaker who’d never directed horror thriller, never written horror thriller, and shows no sign of having watched much of either. Because of this, his film is both delightful and negligent, visionary and accidental. It sheds some of the conventions of the vampire movie, doing so with a world-class cast, narrative finesse, and taste that wildly alternates between sensual and lurid. It’s a vintage shirt we loved, then were too embarrassed to wear, and now is back in style again.
Janice Fischer was an actor who by 1984 had spent at least fifteen years on the outside looking in, as far as Hollywood was concerned. She’d played three characters over three seasons in three episodes of the television series Ironside. Ironically, Fischer’s ex-boyfriend Robert Englund had spent nearly as much time struggling to break out as an actor, until he was cast as a deformed serial killer named Fred Krueger in a 1984 horror movie titled A Nightmare on Elm Street. By that time, Fischer had turned her focus to screenwriting, co-creating a Christian program for children titled The Good Book that began airing on local television in 1982. Enrolled in a film studies course in Los Angeles, Fischer met a fellow screenwriter named James Jeremias. He’d grown up in the San Fernando Valley and worked as an electrical grip. Jeremias had read the Anne Rice novel Interview with the Vampire and was haunted by the character of Claudia, an immortal being trapped in the body of a child. This twist reminded him of J.M. Barrie’s novel and subsequent play, Peter Pan. Jeremias wondered: What if Peter Pan could fly and never aged because he was a vampire?
Beginning in the summer of 1984, Fischer & Jeremias spent five months collaborating on a screenplay. It was about two brothers, Michael, twelve, and John, eight, who move to a new town with their divorced mother, Wendy. Considering a location they thought would attract eternal children, the screenwriters chose Santa Cruz in Northern California, its seedy oceanfront amusement park strangely reminiscent of another Disney animated film, Pinocchio (1940). Michael and John are tempted by a gang of thirteen-year-old boys led by the enigmatic Peter, who offers them the chance to fly and never grow old, for a price. Fischer & Jeremias titled their script Lost Boys. Before it went to market, Nan Blitzman — their literary agent with J. Michael Bloom Ltd. — shared the script with her lawyer. He slipped it to Stephanie Brody, formerly an executive assistant to Michael Ovitz during the formative years of Creative Artists Agency. Brody worked as a negotiator for producers Mark Damon & John W. Hyde, co-founders of Producers Sales Organization. PSO had shifted from foreign sales to production, from selling American films overseas to raising money in the U.S. for their own slate of upcoming films: 8 Million Ways To Die (1986), Short Circuit (1986), Flight of the Navigator (1986). Damon & Hyde wanted in on Lost Boys. Blitzman told them that would be easy. All the producers had to do was make the highest bid. Putting $400,000 on the table, PSO completed the purchase of Lost Boys in January 1985.
James Jeremias recalled, “When we met with Mark Damon and John Hyde, I mentioned that I thought Richard Donner would be a good director for this script. Not only had he mastered flying on camera with Superman but there was a huge buzz about a movie he was doing at the time with Steven Spielberg called The Goonies, and Lost Boys, as Jan and I had written it, took place in that magical time where the kids were all between eight and twelve-years-old, before sex raises its ugly little head. We didn’t have to use all of those pages to tell a love story. That wasn’t what Lost Boys was about. It was by and large an adventure film, much like The Goonies, so we really wanted to send the script to Donner.” The director was looking for his next picture, liked Damon & Hyde, and agreed to read Lost Boys. Excited by the script right away, Donner went to Mark Canton, head of production at Warner Bros. Pictures, to let him know Lost Boys was something he’d like to direct. Canton liked the script too, and probably loved the idea of keeping the director of Ladyhawke (1985) and The Goonies (1985) in the Warners family. The studio agreed to put up half the financing for Lost Boys in exchange for U.S. distribution rights, with PSO covering the other half of the budget for international rights.
However many people told Janice Fischer or James Jeremias that they loved their script, motion picture is a director's medium. The screenwriters were about to find out what that meant. Jeremias recalled, “The first note that Jan and I got from Dick Donner was that he wanted the boys to be a little older, and that he wanted the character of Star, who was originally one of the boys in our version, to be a girl. Specifically, he wanted the older brother Michael to be sixteen years old. I think the note he gave us was that he wanted them old enough to drive, but reading between the lines, what he really meant is that they had to be old enough to fuck! So our first revisions made Michael about 16½, and then we wrote a scene at the end of the movie where he gets a car on his sixteenth birthday. We really dragged our heels about making the boys older, but I felt it was a fair compromise. We gave him what he wanted to an extent.” Donner and Warner Bros. also agreed that the references to Peter Pan needed to be stripped. Steven Spielberg had announced his next film would be a live action retelling of Peter Pan, and the producers were wary of trespassing on the turf of the most successful director on the planet. The screenwriters agreed to rename “Wendy” as Lucy (a nod to Bram Stoker’s Dracula), while the vampire “Peter” became David.
After turning in a second draft, the writers heard nothing for three months. They took a commission from Paramount Pictures, and halfway through the job, received a call from Donner summoning them to his vacation home in Hawaii to begin a third draft. The director had screened Fright Night (1985), a crowd-pleasing hit occupying the teenage vampire territory Lost Boys was circling. He thought their film needed more work. Unavailable, Fischer & Jeremias were replaced by Jeffrey Boam, the screenwriter who’d punched up Innerspace (1987) at Warner Bros. Boam recalled, “The first conscious decision that was made when I came along—it wasn’t my idea, they told me they wanted to do this—was, ‘Let’s make everybody older.’ It was from Dick’s experience on The Goonies, where he had a bunch of pre-teen characters. He felt, first of all, that he had done that movie, and that it limits the film’s appeal—it becomes regarded as a kid’s movie. No one was over twelve years old and it was much more from a kid’s point of view. It was a pre-adolescent fantasy about vampires, which had some kind of symbolic metaphor for growing up. The kids wanted to stay innocent and young. They were reaching puberty, which is kind of represented by the vampires, and it had this children’s story quality to it, but it didn’t really have a good resolution. The original version, we felt, didn’t really advance the characters. They were basically all back where they started at the end of the story.” In addition to orienting the script around teenagers, Boam added the character of Grandpa, and changed the identity of the lead vampire. (The Writer’s Guild of America would award screenwriting credit to Janice Fischer & James Jeremias and Jeffrey Boam, story by Fischer & Jeremias.)
A kid at heart who found it difficult to sit still, Donner had grown impatient with the pace of the Lost Boys rewrites. Mark Canton, anticipating his director might be lured away by a rival, slipped Donner the next prized script Warner Bros. had acquired: Lethal Weapon by Shane Black. The director recalled, “Two things happened. Number one, I have this problem that if I’m in development on a movie for too long, I make the movie so many times in my head that I completely lose enthusiasm for it. Secondly, I was 100% committed to making Lethal Weapon. I made the decision to go ahead and direct that, with the agreement that I would stay on Lost Boys as an executive producer and help the studio find another director.” Canton interviewed candidates before settling on Richard Franklin, an Australian who’d directed the Hitchcockian thriller Road Games (1981). Franklin’s assignments in Hollywood had been well-received: a horror film (Psycho II in 1983) and a children’s adventure (Cloak & Dagger in 1984). Franklin huddled with Boam for several weeks on a rewrite. They imagined a straight horror movie set in the suburbs, but neither Donner nor Warner Bros. were thrilled with the results.
Donner was ready to give up on finding a suitable director for Lost Boys when his wife, producer Lauren Shuler, suggested the director of her latest picture, St. Elmo's Fire (1985), a synthesis of post-graduate malaise and soap opera. Someone in the press had coined the term 'Brat Pack' to describe its cast, which featured Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, and Ally Sheedy. Joel Schumacher had graduated from Parsons School of Design, and started in the film industry as a costume designer. He broke into screenwriting with Sparkle (1976) and Car Wash (1976), then made his directing debut with a TV movie Schumacher wrote and Shuler produced, Amateur Night at the Dixie Bar and Grill (1979). Canton recalled, “My colleague, Bruce Berman, who was vice-president of production, and I, already knew Joel and his work. I went to Terry Semel and Bob Daley, who ran Warner Bros., to convince them that we all believed he would be the right candidate for this movie. Joel had a unique sense of style, and I just knew that with his voice behind Lost Boys, he would make something that was completely in sync with that generation. After St. Elmo’s Fire, I felt as though there was an element of Joel that was very similar to John Hughes, and so my pitch to Terry and Bob was that Lost Boys could have the style of St. Elmo’s and the tone of The Breakfast Club. They were very supportive of that idea and so I arranged to meet with Joel to discuss it.”
Schumacher later admitted to being dismissive of the job and dubious about the draft he read, telling Canton Lost Boys was “Goonies Go Vampire.” Though charming, the script skewed very young. Not his material. Asked by his agent to reconsider, Schumacher did. On a trip to Europe, he’d discovered New Wave bands like Arcadia, a side project formed by Duran Duran. He pictured the Lost Boys as teenagers, just as Donner and Warner Bros. had, but with moussed hair and gypsy clothes, riding stripped-down motorcycles. If Donner had worked with Janice Fischer & James Jeremias to pedal away from their tale of childhood innocence lost, Schumacher put Boam at the controls and shot away from that version of the movie with torque. They removed all remnants of a suburban children’s film, injecting sex appeal, gore and humor.
To cast the character of Michael, Schumacher zeroed in on nineteen-year-old Jason Patric. The actor’s film debut had come in a boondoggle titled Solarbabies (1986) that had shot for four months in Spain. Two things were now true: Patric had no leverage to turn down work, and he was wary of starring in another silly movie. The actor agreed to interview for Lost Boys merely to meet Marion Dougherty, vice president of casting at Warner Bros. Dougherty had worked extensively with Clint Eastwood and Richard Donner casting their pictures at the studio. It took Schumacher six weeks of courting to convince Patric to star in his film. The director later admitted he had no backup, certainly not an actor as young as Patric with his talent and presence. To play the brother, now named Sam, fourteen-year-old Corey Haim came recommended to Schumacher by his agent. Haim was a child actor who’d played the title role in the little-seen Lucas (1986). To play Lucy, Schumacher shot for the moon with Dianne Wiest, a member of Woody Allen’s repertory. To Dougherty’s surprise, Wiest accepted the part. When it came to casting David, the lead vampire, Schumacher based his decision on a supporting performance Kiefer Sutherland had given in At Close Range (1986). Donner recalled, “Casting was definitely Joel’s forte. Everybody he selected was always perfect for his or her individual roles, and I never second-guessed anyone he picked. Kiefer was quite a find, and when Joel said he was going to be playing David, I got it right away. The kid had such a candor at that age that he could’ve played any of the young characters in the movie. I was thrilled with him.”
Donner had entertained the idea of casting Jeff Cohen—who’d played Chunk in The Goonies—as Edgar and Allan Frog, identical twins and Cub Scouts turned vampire hunters in the Fischer & Jeremias drafts. Schumacher cast Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander as what were now comic book clerks emulating Rambo. The director had been spinning his wheels casting Star, modeling her on Tinker Bell, a blonde waif with a pixie cut who lived on the beach. Patric suggested an actor he’d worked with on Solarbabies. They’d returned to L.A. to do a play together called Out of Gas On Lovers Leap, and Schumacher dragged himself to a performance. Of Jami Gertz, the director recalled, “She came in to talk to me despite the fact that I was convinced I wasn’t going to give her the role. However, as we were talking, it immediately struck me that Star would be much better and interesting as this wild, gypsy girl—which is exactly what Jami looked like! So really, Jami changed the concept of the character altogether, and the part was created in that moment. I have to credit Jason though. He drove me crazy to meet with Jami and to my delight, thank god he did because she was amazing.”
By virtue of their script, Fischer & Jeremias had given the director a world to work with. Arriving in Santa Cruz to scout locations, Schumacher recalled, “The minute I got there I said to myself, ‘This is exactly where I’d come to if I were a teenage vampire.’ There were runaways all over the place. Teenagers completely zoned out, selling Grateful Dead t-shirts on every corner. In the sixties, I had friends who went to Northern California to start a commune. They literally drove off in their van and I never saw them again. A lot of people drifted to Northern California back then, and many of them would start growing pot, and become very reactionary gun-toting drug dealers.” Instead of needing to create a teenage wasteland, Schumacher found one. Director of photography Michael Chapman, who’d lit Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980), recalled, “What you see in the opening credits is the real Santa Cruz. That was exactly how it was. We didn’t fake anything. I went out there and just photographed the real wacky and wonderful inhabitants of the town. I could point the camera in any direction and there was always somebody that looked, well to borrow a word from The Doors, 'strange.’” With the exception of the three principal cast members and a professional actor playing a gas station attendant, everyone in the opening credits is a Santa Cruzan.
When he was planning to direct Lost Boys, Donner had hired Richard Edlund, a veteran of the Star Wars trilogy as visual effects supervisor. Edlund had launched his own company in 1983 rather than remain with Industrial Light & Magic. Schumacher turned to makeup artist Ve Neill, uncertain about the inherited choice. The two had met while Neill was dating the editor of Amateur Night at the Dixie Bar and Grill, and Schumacher had hired her to do makeup for his first feature, The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981). The director confided to Neill that he wanted prosthetic makeup for Lost Boys that would retain the sexual allure of his actors. Neill was unconvinced that Edlund was right for that job. She recalled, “When Joel and I discussed the film, we both had the same idea that the vampires in this movie had to be sexy, strong, pretty, lethal and frightening all rolled into one. I basically wanted every man and every woman to leave the theater thinking, ‘I want to fuck these guys!’ I then discovered that the studio had already hired Richard Edlund’s company, Boss Film, to design all of the vampire prosthetics, and that Steve Johnson was doing the designs over there. I said to Joel, ‘These things are going to turn out like monsters. They just did Fright Night. That’s Steve’s style. They’re not going to be beautiful like we talked about.’” The director rejected Johnson’s designs as being too similar to Fright Night.
Late in pre-production, at Neill’s suggestion, Schumacher brought in her friend Greg Cannom to create the prosthetics. In addition to makeup effects on The Incredible Shrinking Woman, Cannom had worked with Rob Bottin (on The Howling in 1981) and Rick Baker (on Michael Jackson’s Thriller in 1983). Though Lost Boys didn’t call for creature transformations, Cannom and his team wanted to try something new. He recalled, “When I started designing the prosthetics I knew that I wanted the eyes to be the real star of the makeup. I showed Joel the contact lenses I used on Grace Jones in Vamp, and he immediately lit up and said, ‘I want those!’ And I just said, ‘Well, you can’t have those, I just used them.’ He said he didn’t care and so I told him I would do new lenses that were even better. I painted the designs and sent them to the lens specialist, Nissles, in England. Right before I did the second makeup test on Kiefer, I flew to England on Friday, picked up the lenses and then came back to L.A. to do the test on Monday. They were these beautiful laminated lenses that I’d heard about from Rick Baker when he used them on Greystoke, and then I used them for the first time on Cocoon. They were nowhere near as bad as the old vacuum form lenses that we used on Thriller, but sure, they were still uncomfortable.”
Shortly before principal photography got underway in June 1986, Warner Bros. notified Schumacher they wanted to cut $2 million from his budget. Production designer Bo Welch—who was designing the vampire’s lair and described the overall look Schumacher was going for as “rustic Ralph Lauren”—found the art department’s budget cut by 35%. This led Welch to rethink his director’s concept that the vampires would occupy a hotel sunken by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. He built the set on rollers, as a theater group would, allowing Schumacher greater flexibility to get the shots he needed without sacrificing atmosphere. The studio also pressed the director to cut the number of extras by half. Finding the budget cuts arbitrary, Schumacher pushed back. “I did go to my great bosses at Warner Bros., Terry Semel and Bob Daley, and said that in order for us to take two million dollars off the budget, we would have to cut the bridge sequence, the concert scene, and the motorcycle chase on the beach. And they said, ‘Well, those are the best scenes in the movie!’ I told them we should cut the scenes, hypothetically, and that the dailies would be so good that I would earn those sequences back. I really had no idea what I was talking about, I just figured in my arrogance that I would get these sequences back if they called my bluff. I have to say, though, both Bob and Terry were sensational bosses. I can’t even put into words what they were like. Even if they were against a casting idea or just didn’t understand whatever crazy thing I wanted to do, they would eventually just say, ‘Okay,’ and let me take a chance.”
Lost Boys commenced filming on June 2, 1986, in Santa Cruz. The city’s mayor had gotten wind of what the movie was about, and bristled at her town being credited as “the murder capital of the world.” The filmmakers assured civil authorities that they’d change the name, which they did, to “Santa Clara.” Both the video store and the restaurant where Wiest and Edward Herrmann’s characters socialize were filmed on Municipal Wharf, where Clint Eastwood had shot the climax of Sudden Impact (1983). The comic book shop Atlantis Fantasy World was located several blocks inland and would be preserved on film before it was damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and torn down. The nearby Pogonip Polo Club, a historic lodge with hand-crafted wood exterior, was dressed to double for Grandpa’s house. Interiors would be shot on the Warner Bros. lot.
The production budget came in at roughly $8.5 million, pricier than what horror movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors ($3-4 million), Evil Dead II ($3.5 million) and Near Dark ($5 million) were costing. The studio started to get nervous. Schumacher recalled, “Bruce Berman was sent to the set by Bob Daley and Terry Semel to inform me that they were having trouble with the dailies. He said, ‘They want to know if you’re making a horror film or a comedy.’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ So he went back to Warner Bros. with that as my answer. Then suddenly Mark Canton came to me with the same question, and I gave him the same response. Mark then said that Bob and Terry did not believe these two genres would work for this film—so I turned to him and said, ‘Tell them to pray.’ Where I got the balls to say that, I have no idea.” It’s unlikely Schumacher let the studio know that he hadn’t settled on how to end the movie yet. The director admitted, “In the script it was originally Star that killed David. Then we changed it to Max right before we started shooting, and in both of these endings Michael was never a vampire. When you’re making movies and you progress through the shoot, it starts to become clearer exactly what you need at the end of the film—as I’ve said before, a lot of what we did was just made up during production. I remember that our script supervisor Jan Kemper, Michael Chapman, and [First Assistant Director] Bill Beasley—my intimates beside the camera—every morning, for weeks, we would discuss the ending.”
Meanwhile, Warner Bros. had unearthed a 1981 song that rock composer Jim Steinman had written for Meat Loaf titled “Lost Boys and Golden Girls.” Rather than put Steinman on the payroll, the studio pressed Schumacher to rethink their title. The director asked if sticking The in front of Lost Boys would keep anyone from getting sued. The movie became The Lost Boys. By any title, Schumacher wasn’t confident anyone at the studio believed the film would amount to anything. When he arrived for the first test screening in Long Beach, the director was surprised by what he saw. “When we drove up, there was a line of 750 people going all the way around the theater. It blew my mind because I thought, ‘How do they even know about this? There are no ads yet!’ We went and the place was completely packed. It was just like a rock concert! It was so wild and the energy in the audience was so insane. There was a row of surf punks, and in the scene where the boys fly from the tree and kill the Surf Nazis on the beach; they got so crazed with ecstasy that one of them tore open the seat cushion and they all started throwing stuffing around like confetti! People were cheering and hollering, and I can tell you, there were a lot of happy executives after that screening.”
The Lost Boys opened July 31, 1987 on 1,027 screens in the U.S. Most newspaper critics approached the picture as if they were unsure whether they could recommend it or not. Filing his report in the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert wrote, “There’s some good stuff in the movie, including a cast that’s good right down the line and a willingness to have some fun with teenage culture in the Mass Murder Capital. But when everything is all over, there’s nothing to leave the theater with—no real horrors, no real dread, no real imagination—just technique at the service of formula.” Ebert rated The Lost Boys 2½ stars out of 4. RogerEbert.com, perhaps appropriately, catalogs the picture as “Comedy.” In LA Weekly, Michael Dare seemed even more at odds with himself. “As anyone who’s seen St. Elmo’s Fire knows, director Joel Schumacher makes movies about great-looking guys who wear earrings. This film is no exception, though it’s a vast improvement over his earlier work. From the very opening, there are vivid hallucinations and music montages, so when things start getting weird, we’re never sure whether they’re really happening or not. Though the critic in the back of my head kept nagging me about the calculated slickness and the cooler-than-thou attitudes, the audience in my frontal lobes kept getting off on the sheer power of the technique. It’s big, loud, intense, scary, stupid, and a lot of fun.” Gene Siskel, film critic for the Chicago Tribune, admired the craft while being worn down by it. “Here’s a case where less would be more, because director Joel Schumacher packs his film with too many characters, as well as too many special effects, while leading up to a gory conclusion. There’s a technical polish to the film that’s impressive, and a couple of the kids do make an engaging impression, but at the end we’re mostly exhausted.” In print, Siskel also rated the film 2½ stars out of 4. On their syndicated television program, he gave The Lost Boys a marginal thumbs down, while Roger Ebert turned a reluctant thumbs up. The director answering “yes” to whether the movie was horror or comedy had been validated, even by critics who wouldn’t quite recommend the movie.
Joel Schumacher’s take on the teenage vampire tale arrived the same weekend that the new James Bond, Timothy Dalton, debuted in The Living Daylights, which opened #1. The Lost Boys was #2, but sold half as many tickets. It would be overwhelmed by Stakeout, which Disney opened the following weekend and appealed to a broader audience by pairing Richard Dreyfuss and Emilio Estevez. The action-comedy spent nearly thirteen weekends among the top ten grossing films in the country. By contrast, The Lost Boys disappeared after one month. Mark Canton would offer his post-mortem. “I felt as though the marketing materials for The Lost Boys were very good, but I also believed they struggled to sell the combination of genres—which is probably reflective of the box office. The movie didn’t do anywhere near as well as we all had hoped. I think it did somewhere in the region of thirty-two million dollars over a ten-week run. We did good, but we didn’t do great, and I’ve never really had an answer as to why this one didn’t hit, because it is still one of my favorite movies that I’ve developed. Sometimes shit just happens.” The studio didn’t see an $8.5 million movie that had grossed $32 million domestically. Given a director on an upward swing and the enthusiastic test screenings, Warner Bros. saw The Lost Boys as leaving more on the table than it earned.
Nobody bet the house on The Lost Boys, and the movie both suffers from that lack of faith and transcends it. At 97 minutes, the filmmakers pack fourteen characters and two dogs into what today would warrant a seven-episode streaming mini-series. There was a deeper and more unsettling tale here than anyone making it fully realized. Let’s start with Lucy, tenderly grounded by Dianne Wiest. Lucy isn’t a widow, she’s a divorcée. Details remain unspoken, but whatever happened with Michael and Sam’s father, it’s bad enough for a woman with zero career opportunities to move in with her dad in the “Murder Capital of the World.” There’s a B-story about abandonment that could’ve been explored here as Lucy and Michael are seduced into a dark belonging. Wiest and Jason Patric warranted more screen time, but there isn’t the space. Patric and Corey Haim generate believable chemistry as brothers, and while their characters aren’t written with much complexity, they are given more to do, Michael coveting a girl not from the other side of the tracks but the other side of the living, while Sam discovers that vampires are everywhere and his brother may be one of them. Fright Night has the tighter and more propulsive script. The Lost Boys lathers up the excess: more characters, more storylines, more atmosphere, more mystique.
There were plenty of ’80s movies that tackled their creative problems with money. The Lost Boys is better off for not doing that. Rather than allow the studio to talk him into trusting the special effects to Boss Film, Joel Schumacher wanted to work with Ve Neill again. The vampires themselves aren’t necessarily sexy, but there’s less snarling or flying or transforming, and more left to the imagination. Neill, who’d start collecting Academy Awards for Best Make-Up with Beetlejuice (1988), Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) and Ed Wood (1994), could have handled a vampire epic, but given larger resources, her vampires might’ve overwhelmed a crowded picture. The same can be said of Bo Welch. With only three scenes in the vampire’s lair, visual opulence was unnecessary from his art department. What the film did need was fifteen minutes to give its best resource, its cast, more to do with their characters. In particular, Kiefer Sutherland — who radiated when playing a hoodlum in Stand By Me (1986) and disappeared when promoted to a poor man’s Steve McQueen in movies like Young Guns (1988) — adds palpable menace as the leader of the Lost Boys.
One thing Jeffrey Boam lost from Janice Fischer & James Jeremias’ script was the concept of the Lost Boys as 100-year-old killers trapped in the bodies of children. There’s a whole movie left to our imagination about how long the vampires have been lurking around Santa Clara and who they were before. Like Dianne Wiest, Jami Gertz has a character much more complicated than the running time allows her. How Star and the boy in her care came to be initiated into the gang—which has no other women or children in it—rather than serve as food is another episode left unexplored. Joel Schumacher, who’d written an ensemble with Car Wash and co-written and directed two more in D.C. Cab (1983) and St. Elmo’s Fire, leveled up with The Lost Boys, not only casting and balancing a more talented group of actors, but getting the wardrobe, hair, makeup and lighting close to perfect. Schumacher made one bad call: vocalist and saxophone player Tim Cappello as the act for the concert scene. An acceptable performer, Cappello’s topless and oiled-up act was all wrong for the beach bums in Santa Clara, who were more likely to be thirsting for rockers like Aerosmith. Cappello’s beefcake antics nearly derail the best scene in the film, Michael and Star laying eyes on each other for the first time. Time hasn’t given The Lost Boys anything to apologize for. It’s aged the best of any vampire movie of its generation and never settles for being a guilty pleasure. There’s too much on the table and underneath it. When undercover cop Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) rehearses his cover story in Reservoir Dogs (1992), the line is “Motherfucker! I’m trying to watch The Lost Boys!” and like all the references in Quentin Tarantino’s debut, it was earned.
Video rental category: Horror (allegedly)
Special interest: Kids On Bikes
The production history in this article is sourced to Paul Davis’ magnificent oral and pictorial history Lost In the Shadows: The Story of the Lost Boys, published in 2017.