The Immortal Youth of The Lost Boys (1987)

Fridays have a kind of mythical allure to them. Kick the shoes off, grab an old fashioned, and lean into freedom. For some people, okay, a lot of people, summer has the same allure. And I kind of get it, or rather, I remember feeling this way. When you’re young and you get essentially three months off of school, summer delivers something very real. But when that threshold into “adulthood” is crossed and the innocence that sees fun everywhere dissipates into the jadedness of necessity, disappointment, and nostalgia, well … let’s just say summer doesn’t hold the same appeal it did when getting up early for work wasn’t yet a thing.

So keep your hot girl summer (or whatever else you want to name it) and try to build this thing that’s legendarily awesome, eternally fulfilling, and consequence-free but never can be. Really. You can have my slice of the summer pie — it’s fine. Keep the humidity. Keep the mosquitoes. I’ll enjoy what I can, but man: I’m just trying to survive until Fall. For me, for my friends Blake, Caleb, and Trevor, and for folks like us, we tolerate summer. We are cut from the same cloth as Donald Hall, who writes in Seasons at Eagle Pond that:

Some of us … are darkness-lovers. We do not dislike the early and late daylight of June, whippoorwill’s graytime, but we cherish the gradually increasing dark of November, which we wrap around ourselves in the prosperous warmth of woodstove, oil, electric blanket, storm window, and insulation. We are partly tuber, partly bear. Inside our warmth we fold ourselves in the dark and its cold — around us, outside us, safely away from us; we tuck ourselves up in the long sleep and comfort of cold’s opposite, warming ourselves by thought of the cold, lighting ourselves by darkness’s idea.

So, in this spirit, as summer begins its final laps and as stores launch their Back to School campaigns, we four felt compelled to contribute to this moment and instill a strain of night into the season’s fading light. To help out our kindred darkness-lovers, we thought it’d be fun to highlight some spooky cinematic summer fun and, in this first installment, discussing the 1987 horror flick, The Lost Boys:

Blake: “Classic.”

Ian: Blake, just… I’ll get to you, ok? [composes himself] Boys, what does The Lost Boys mean to y’all?

Caleb: James Jeremias, one of The Lost Boys screenplay writers, said the title comes from a thought he had as a lifelong Peter Pan fan reading Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire: “What if the reason Peter Pan came out at night and never grew up and could fly was because he was a vampire?” That’s precisely the interpretative key you need, not only for watching this, but also for seeing just how it spawned so much of America’s nostalgia culture here in the 21st century.

Ian: I totally agree. Watching this again it feels to me, the entire way through, as if it was constructed as a living monument of a time that was passing and would be — not memorialized, maybe, but enshrined as an impossible ideal. It cuts two ways: it captures forever a time that never quite was, and yet it was distilled throughout the period, but in so doing kind of builds this idol.

Trevor: Somewhere in the carnival lights and beneath the overlaying, synth choral Ten Commandments opening, Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys is my childhood. As tactile as the comics Sam (Corey Haim) reads is the laminated VHS tape that I remember flipping in my hands at the local Blockbuster some time in the early 90s. How I ever convinced my mom to let my brother and me rent this one, an R-rated movie (which should have made it off-limits), I could not begin to reconstruct but rent it we did–again and again. And what strikes me still about this vampire flick is the analog nature of it, and, by that I mean its physicality or concreteness – from the taxidermized animals the grandpa keeps (a presage of the facsimile of life to come in the form of the adolescent, Kiefer Sutherland-led coven)—

Blake: [yawns]

Trevor: … to the garlic that Sam wears for protection against nightwalkers. This is a movie that oozes nostalgia, and, nostalgia, if nothing else, is the false promise that we stay young and innocent indefinitely. Paradoxically, such immortality is only rendered when we take risk, or to literalize a metaphor, when Michael (Jason Patric) jumps off a bridge because all of his friends did so too —

Blake: No.

Ian: What do you mean, “No”?

Trevor: He’s just being a trash panda. [refocuses] Anyway. It is the very same risk that sacrifices our purity because with it comes knowledge. Knowledge that higher purposes such as Edgar Frog’s (Corey Feldman) self-proclaimed “truth, justice, and the American way” are not so noble and often corrupted. Knowledge that consumerism like the buying of comics, the movie’s equivalent of Scripture, ultimately fails to direct Sam towards the head vampire. Knowledge that the family unit is prone to sin and decay and surrogate ones can be as leeching as that offered by Max (Edward Herrmann)—

Ian: Wow, spoiler. Gilmore Girls heads, beware. Blake, elaborate on that “no” you asserted a bit ago.

Trevor: Here we go…

Blake: The hip-gyrating sax symbol at the beginning of the movie says everything one needs to say about The Lost Boys. One views this film 36 years on and sees just how ridiculous it is. The hair, the Coreys, and the soundtrack that hails from no particular period of time at all becomes the celluloid version of a greased-up meathead with a sax performing at a fair. It makes very little sense. That is until you sit back and let the gyrations of those imitative Elvis hips lure you into the cave-like coffin of Santa Clara.

Ian: The prominence given this dude has always… um… fascinated? Frightened? It’s stuck with me, let’s say that.

Blake: There’s always power in the hips. 

Ian: …yes. I suppose.

Caleb: This is a movie about not growing up — whether you’re a literal vampire who never ages or just a couple of teen brothers who are adjusting to a new life in a new town with their newly divorced mom. Michael (Jason Patric) goes to gothy jazz-rock concerts while Sam (the late Corey Haim) goes longbox diving for Batman #14, each looking to be frozen in time on the eternally young nighttime boardwalk of Santa Carla, California.

Blake: I suppose it would be incumbent upon me to say that the film is beckoning towards some metaphor or allegory of coming of age, the teenage need to accost nonconformity and strip it of all of its feeble powers. Or perhaps there is some trendy erotic undertone beneath the already sexualized 1980s vampire to be had with a group of four young men constantly “hanging out” with each other. All of these and others could possibly be true, or not, but the only thing that really matters is those hips.

Ian: …what?

Blake: Once you let them in, you are powerless. Always remember this.

Trevor: [coughs]

Caleb: Amazingly, this movie and others like it (The Goonies, Fright Night, Monster Squad) have successfully cast their nostalgia spell on of us, even near 40 years later, leaving many from Gen X to Gen Z pining for a dark, smokey, neon world where friendship (and comics) are all you need to save the world.

Ian: Yes! That point really resonates with me: it’s a strain in all I do and in all I desire. I want those friends who, when we’re together, the darkness should actually be afraid of us. The Lost Boys took further a principle I had first learned from Salem’s Lot: that I could fight the monsters, too, even though I was just a kid. That the truly scary stuff wasn’t vampires or werewolves or whatever but things like aging, alcoholism, deferred hopes … The things adulthood routinely treats as givens.

Trevor: As a late 80s movie, all of this is prescient of the disillusionment and cynicism that would creep into our culture in the early 90s and that was incipient during the time of my initial viewing.

Caleb: This perfectly blends producer Richard Donner’s (Superman; Scrooged) scary, silly, and sentimental sides, while giving Joel Schumacher’s (Batman and Robin; The Phantom of the Opera) musical garishness somewhere to come out to play. If you long for the days of Stranger Things, then revisit its vampiric progenitor: The Lost Boys. But if you’re like me, and you’re ready to finally grow up, well … then keep looking elsewhere.

Ian: Savage, my guy. Trevor, what about you?

Trevor: This film remains as much an artifact of my childhood as the X-Men comic sitting across from me and seems as tangible too, like if I extend my hand, I could still reach out and grasp it. Those times though – of free-roaming adolescence – are over no matter how much I try to eternalize them. 

Ian: That is always the temptation, right? To try to resist the relentless pressure of time and preserve a moment, or a day, or a summer forever. And yeah, that’s the principal temptation towards vampirism in this movie.

Trevor: Who are the lost boys of the movie? They are you and I. They are all those who still reach back for the lost days of summer.

Ian: Blake, final thought?

Blake: No.

Well, thanks for tuning in, everyone! We hope it was fun revisiting this flick and all the memories of staying at the carnival waaay later than you were supposed to as well as the creepy walk home afterwards. Stay tuned for the next installment and in the meantime, enjoy the Summer of Night playlist!