The Lost Boys Find a New Fan
Today the weather took a turn to wet and drab, and Eva the moody movie-reviewing teen came home from her grandparents with a cold. We used the downtime to watch another film for Billy Crash. The family took a vote and opted for 1987’s The Lost Boys.
I first saw this film in school at my daughter’s age. Yes, in school. Imagine our delight as we learned we would get to watch an R-rated movie with every popular teen idol of the day. My mom wouldn’t ever let me watch an R-rated movie! Our collective enthusiasm dissipated when Miss Dankel started explaining how we would analyze the film and write several pages on the cinematography, symbolism, and themes.
If you haven’t heard of Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys, two teen brothers, the elder Michael (Jason Patric) and Sam (Corey Haim), and their mother, Lucy (Dianne Wiest) move to Santa Carla, California, “the murder capital of the world,” to live with their taxidermist grandfather. Michael falls into the wrong crowd (the vampire gang) and Sam meets the Frog brothers, Edgar (Corey Feldman) and Alan (Jamison Newlander) who work in a comic shop as cover for their vampire hunting gig. I suppose their names could be cornier. They could be Van and Helsing.
Eva immediately critiqued the phones and the special effects, but she didn’t notice that Michael never required a bite to turn into a vampire. She very quickly developed empathy for Sam (Corey Haim), probably due to her age, declaring, “I feel for this kid.” She also labeled the vampire death scenes as “overkill.” I guess she doesn’t appreciate blood gushing from every pipe in the house or cascading waterfalls of guts. Though she kept asking, when the final battle brought death and destruction into the home, how the brothers would ever explain this mess to their family.
The Lost Boys story puts a 1980’s spin on the Dracula legend. The vampire mythology remains consistent with Stoker’s and with the early film adaption by Tod Browning featuring Bela Lugosi. In all three, there is one main vampire who surrounds himself with vampires of his own creation. In all three, the death of the head vampire will restore their victims to a full human state, as long as they haven’t surrendered to the thirst for blood. The vampires in all can be awake and moving during daylight hours but experience a loss of powers, a weakened state.
And perhaps this is a stretch, but Dracula lives in an old dilapidated castle in Transylvania and in a ruined abbey in England. In The Lost Boys, the vampires reside in an abandoned luxury hotel that fell into a cave during an earthquake.
I, of course, noticed the heavy family theme (“We gotta stick together, bro”) and how it’s always the new kids in town who find themselves struggling to fit in. Eva did appreciate the power of family in the film as well, thanks in part to the scene where Michael protests to Sam that he can’t go into the vampire nest:
“This isn’t a comic book, these guys are brutal killers,” Michael says. “I can’t protect you.”
“This time, I protect you,” Sam replies.
Eva gave a hearty, “aww.”
The character of the grandfather (Barnard Hughes) provides apt comic relief and contributes to the story’s resolution. When the boys steal the car and are caught sneaking two semi-comatose, half-vampires into the house, he quips, “Do you know the rule about filling the car with gas when you take it without asking?”
So far, in our preliminary horror film experience, Eva has noted that the good guy always wins. She hopes at some point we find a film where that might not be the case.
Coming soon on our horror review duet, Eva and I will watch Near Dark, which parallels the coming-of-age, good versus evil themes of The Lost Boys (even down to the appearance of the child vampire) but in more gruesome and sexual ways without much comic relief at all.
The Plot Sickens: Get more from Angel Ackerman and Eva Parry by checking out their review of Nosferatu!
Crash Palace Support Team
Angel Ackerman and Eva Parry
After a fifteen-year career in print journalism, Angel Ackerman has studied world history, (specifically post-colonial Francophone Africa, Muslim relations, and contemporary Western politics) and traveled several continents. Her recent publications include the poem This Paris in StepAway magazine, an essay on the weather and travel on the Horn of Africa in Rum Punch Press, academic encyclopedia entries on Djibouti, a review in Global Studies South on a book examining famine in Somalia, book reviews from eons ago for Hippocampus Magazine and an upcoming essay on chickens. Follow her on Twitter.
Eva Parry will enter high school this fall but has already spent a season in the low brass section of the marching band carrying a sousaphone. When not irritating her mother by piling as many clothes and candy wrappers as possible on her bedroom floor, she explores various writing forms and antagonizes her cats. She has known Billy Crash most of her life and never stops making noise or talking, which once resulted in her missing a catch and taking a Frisbee in the mouth.
(Still photo from Dracula via TCM.)