Welcome to the Century of the Vampire, an ongoing weekly feature where Goonhammer managing editor Jonathan Bernhardt watches some piece of vampire media, probably a movie but maybe eventually television will get a spot in here too, and talks about it at some length in the context of both its own value as a piece of art and as a representation of the weird undead guys that dominate western pop culture who aren’t (usually) zombies.
Last time, Bernhardt reviewed the 2016 Anna Foerster film Underworld Blood Wars. Today, he looks at the 1987 Joel Schumacher film, The Lost Boys. This article will contain spoilers.
This is a fun one. Unlike Nadja or the animes or the real old Draculas or BloodRayne or four of five Underworlds, The Lost Boys falls in the silo of movies I’m not seeing for the first time here (though as with most other entries alongside it, it’s been awhile). It’s a classic and rightly so, though as we get farther down the road away from it, the vision of California it depicts — Santa Carla, “Murder Capital of the World” — recedes further and further into fantasy and the past, which is just a particularly powerful kind of fantasy.
The star here is unquestionably Kiefer Sutherland as David. Already blonde hair bleached blonder, grown out into a mullet, two piercing blue eyes over stubble and a smirk — he jumps off the screen the way no one else in the film does, certainly not our hero Michael (a perfectly acceptable Jason Patric) or any of the henchboy vampires (though a young Alex Winter is in here as Marko, the lowest level goomba in the gang). He’s older than most of the other actors here and is playing older, too, but there’s a maturity and command to the performance that’s just lacking everywhere else in the film; this is at least mostly by design. You’ve seen this dynamic before, especially in Eighties and Nineties mainstream Hollywood — David and Michael are allegedly fighting over a woman (Star, played by Jami Gertz, who isn’t asked to do much of anything in this movie but dance around and look concerned), but the core of the film is actually centered around their relationship. Point Break, which will come out a few years later, is one of the few films that comes to mind that foregrounds this even harder than The Lost Boys does.
By all rights, David should be the big bad of the film, much like Swayze’s Bodhi is in Point Break — the final confrontation should be a Michael and David showdown. It’s not. As much as this movie should be that movie, there’s a whole other ball of American anxieties rolling around in the film’s B-plot, which suddenly becomes the A-plot at the very end of the film. The conceit of The Lost Boys is that just-divorced mom Lucy (Dianne Wiest) is moving to Santa Carla with her two sons, Michael and Sam (Corey Haim), temporarily bunking up with her kooky retired Real American father while she gets back on her feet. It’s a telling sign of the cultural moment for divorce that the movie is very clear that she didn’t take her ex-husband to court for any of his money, but just took the kids, with an extremely loud, only barely-unstated, “You know, not like those other divorced women who just wanted a payday.” Santa Carla is going to hell; in the opening montage as our new American family drives into town, we get a look at all the punks, goths, freaks, junkies, and Mexican day laborers that populate the boardwalk, intercut with the iconic wall of Missing posters and juxtaposed with happy normal white children screaming with glee on the rollercoasters and amusement park rides this social detritus skulks around. It actually took me about ten to fifteen seconds to remember, “Oh, right, these people are all threatening and bad, I have to slip back into that Reagan mindset.”
The other film that’s going on here while Michael and David have their doomed rivalry-romance is, of course, Lucy’s; she gets a job at the local movie rental store while her kids run wild along the boardwalk and chafe under the strict “old school” rules of their Grandpa (Barnard Hughes), who doesn’t get any other name. Grandpa is both the comic relief and, perversely, moral core of the film; a combination war veteran and avid hunter who loves to taxidermy the game he takes and knows that something’s not right about Santa Carla. Schumacher very wisely leans into comedy and caricature with this guy rather than having him get preachy, which saves the whole enterprise; the way Grandpa communicates his disapproval for the burgeoning MTV generation is that he doesn’t have a TV, but he orders TV Guide every week and just reads that, because then he doesn’t have to watch all that TV. Sure. Once Michael wanders off into David and the lost boys’ orbit, this plot settles into comedy bits between Grandpa and Sam while Lucy navigates newly-single life and starts to date her boss Max (Ed Herrmann), who Sam, being a stupid kid who only knows vampires from comic books while Michael is becoming the real thing, thinks is the head vampire of Santa Carla; the problem here is that he’s correct, Max is the big bad, and this is actually the main plot of the movie. The climax is built around Lucy and Max instead of Michael and David, and Grandpa of all people gets the biggest, final kill of the film.
It’s not the part of the movie I’m interested in, but it is absolutely carried by Corey Haim, who plays a fantastic little self-assured shithead. Haim is sixteen years old here but Sam is something like twelve, and he manages to sell Sam as being still enough of a kid to have a lights-out bed time at 10 PM and an actual belief that he can learn to kill vampires from comic books while being mature enough to understate, for instance, Sam’s reaction to the Frog Brothers introducing themselves as vampire hunters at the comic shop, which has some nascent young Val Kilmer goofy-cool in it.
Anyway. What’s important here is David and Michael, and the process of becoming a vampire in the world of The Lost Boys, which is in fact male teen bonding. The film isn’t particularly subtle about its Peter Pan influences or its reconfiguration of Peter’s cadre of parentless boys with no bedtimes into a dirt bike gang run by a charismatic blonde heartthrob, but it’s worth emphasizing that vampirism is a ritual and a community relationship here, rather than an ancient curse or a bloodborne pathogen. Michael begins the process of being “turned” into a vampire by playing a game of motorcycle chicken to impress a girl he wants to sleep with (but who is dating the leader of the gang), being invited to their slump-teen bohemian hideout, and then drinking from a jewel-encrusted 40 oz malt liquor bottle. This is the inciting moment, rather than a bite or directly drinking from a vampire’s arm; David’s mixed blood in the fortified wine. The next step of the process is then him getting ritually hazed into the gang, from a train tracks chicken spot where they encourage him to jump into the misty canyon below and either die or learn to fly, to showing up to intimidate him at Grandpa’s house, to eventually trying to jump him into the gang fully with his first kill. In the movie’s configuration of vampirism, this is a sliding step process, and you’re not a “full” vampire until you’ve blooded in by killing a civilian. Conveniently neither Star nor Laddie (Chance Michael Corbitt), the token ten year old vampire running around with the gang, have fully made the jump either, so they can still be saved.
This attempted gang initiation is actually the high point of the movie for vampire goings-on; David and the lost boys brutally murder a bunch of suspiciously skinheaded and punked-out party-goers on the beach — in the original novel, these were the Surf Nazis, the vampires’ rival gang — with the guitar solo from Aerosmith/Run DMC’s Walk This Way playing through the carnage. We got some real good vampire-looking vampires here, there’s blood everywhere, David uses his fang like a can opener to pop open a skinhead’s bald dome, fun times.
Michael doesn’t join in, of course, and we start our progression to the finale. The last third of the movie has its charms — Grandpa’s comedy is funny enough, and the DIY way that Sam and the Frog Brothers take out the lost boy underlings is incredibly over the top and clearly an inspiration for a lot of what Kevin McAllister will get up to in a few years’ time in Home Alone, spiritually and emotionally if not directly spot-for-spot — but David is fully a movie monster making scary faces now and Max steps into the spotlight as the actual bad guy. Lot more Lucy than you’d want here, too; the character is simply written as the paper-thin two-dimensional supporting mom to her main character children, and neither the script nor the performance can bear the weight of having to carry the film over the finish line. At least Max is fun in the three minutes of screen time he gets as the mask-off villain of the picture before getting killed by Grandpa in his comedy milsurp wagon.
An auspicious start to the Eighties vampire movie collection; next week it’ll be something else from the list. I’m going to angle for Near Dark but we’ll see what Rob, this feature’s very own Jigsaw, has to say about the matter.
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