The Lost Boys is a 1987 American supernatural horror vampire black comedy film directed by Joel Schumacher, produced by Harvey Bernhard with a screenplay written by Jeffrey Boam. Janice Fischer and James Jeremias wrote the film's story. The film's ensemble cast includes Corey Haim, Jason Patric, Kiefer Sutherland, Jami Gertz, Corey Feldman, Dianne Wiest, Edward Herrmann, Billy Wirth, Brooke McCarter, Alex Winter, Jamison Newlander, and Barnard Hughes.
The title is a reference to the Lost Boys in J. M. Barrie's stories about Peter Pan and Neverland, who, like the vampires, never grow up. Most of the film was shot in Santa Cruz, California.
The Lost Boys was released and produced by Warner Bros. Pictures on July 31, 1987 and was a critical and commercial success, grossing over $32 million against a production budget of $8.5 million. The success of the film has spawned a franchise with two sequels (Lost Boys: The Tribe and Lost Boys: The Thirst), and two comic book series.
Plot:
Michael Emerson and his younger brother Sam travel with their recently divorced mother Lucy to the small beach town of Santa Carla, California, to live with her eccentric father, Michael and Sam's Grandpa.
Michael and Sam begin hanging out at the boardwalk, which is plastered with flyers of missing people, while Lucy gets a job at a video store run by a bachelor, Max Lawrence. Michael becomes fascinated by Star, a beautiful young woman he spots on the boardwalk, though she seems to be in a relationship with the mysterious David, the leader of a young biker gang.
In the local comic book store, Sam meets brothers Edgar and Alan Frog, a pair of self-proclaimed vampire hunters, who give him horror comics to teach him about the threat they claim has infiltrated the town.
Michael finally talks to Star and is approached by David, who goads him into following them by motorcycle along the beach until they reach a dangerous cliff, which Michael almost goes over. At the gang's hangout, a sunken luxury hotel beneath the cliff, David initiates Michael into the group. Star warns Michael not to drink from an offered bottle, telling him it is blood, but Michael ignores her advice. Later on, David and the others, including Michael, head to a railroad bridge where they hang off the edge over a foggy gorge; one by one they fall, Michael falling after them.
Michael wakes up at home the next day, unaware of how he got there. His eyes are sensitive to sunlight and he develops a sudden thirst for blood, which leads him to impulsively attack Sam. Sam's dog, Nanook, retaliates, causing Sam to realize that Michael is turning into a vampire by his brother's semi-transparent reflection. Sam is initially terrified but Michael convinces him that he is not yet a vampire and that he desperately needs his help.
Michael begins to develop supernatural powers and asks Star for help, but has sex with her shortly afterwards. Sam deduces that, since Michael has not killed anyone, he is a half-vampire and his condition can be reversed upon the death of the head vampire. Sam and the Frog brothers test whether Max is the head vampire during a date with Lucy but Max passes every test and the boys decide to focus on David.
To provoke him into killing, David takes Michael to stalk a group of beach goers and instigates a feeding frenzy. Horrified, Michael escapes and returns home to Sam. Star then arrives and reveals herself as a half-vampire who is looking to be cured. It emerges that David had intended for Michael to be Star's first kill, sealing her fate as a vampire.
The next day, a weakening Michael leads Sam and the Frog brothers to the gang's lair. They impale one of the vampires, Marko, with a stake, awakening David and the two others but the boys escape, rescuing Star and Laddie, a half-vampire child and Star's companion.
That evening, while Lucy is on a date with Max and Grandpa goes out to a date with a widow, the teens arm themselves with holy-water-filled water guns, a longbow and stakes; barricading themselves in the house. When night falls, David's gang attack the house. The Frog brothers and Nanook manage to kill Paul by pushing him into a bathtub filled with garlic and holy water, dissolving him to the bone. Sam is attacked by Dwayne, another vampire, before he shoots an arrow through his heart and into the stereo behind him, electrocuting him and causing parts of his body to explode.
Michael is then attacked by David, forcing him to use his vampire powers. He manages to overpower David and impales him on a set of antlers. However, Michael, Star and Laddie do not transform back to normal as they had hoped. Lucy then returns home with Max, who is revealed to be the head vampire. He informs the boys that to invite a vampire into one's house renders one powerless over said vampire, leaving them unable to exploit any weaknesses that the vampire has while there, explaining why their earlier assumption appeared to be incorrect. Max reveals he had instructed David to turn Sam and Michael into vampires so that Lucy could not refuse to be transformed herself, as his objective had been to get Lucy to be a mother for his lost boys.
As Max pulls Lucy to him, preparing to transform her, he is killed when Grandpa crashes his jeep through the wall of the house and impales Max on a wooden fence post, causing him to explode. Michael, Star and Laddie then return to normal. Amongst this carnage and debris, Grandpa casually retrieves a drink from the refrigerator and declares: "One thing about living in Santa Carla I never could stomach: all the damn vampires."
Production:
A March 5, 1985 Variety news item announced that the independent production company Producers Sales Organization (PSO) bought first-time screenwriters Janice Fischer and James Jeremias's Lost Boys script for $400,000 on February 20, 1986. PSO announced their acquisition of the project at American Film Market 1985. Later Warner Bros. joined the project, taking over domestic distribution and some foreign territories.
The film's title is a reference to the characters featured in J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan stories, who – like vampires – never grow old. According to Day, the central theme of The Lost Boys, "organised around loose allusions to Peter Pan", is the tension surrounding the Emerson family and the world of contemporary adolescence. The film was originally set to be directed by Richard Donner and the screenplay, written by Janice Fischer and James Jeremias, was modelled on Donner's recent hit The Goonies (1985). In this way the film was envisioned as more of a juvenile vampire adventure with 13 or 14 year old vampires, while the Frog brothers were "chubby 8 year-old Cub Scouts" and the character of Star was a young boy. When Donner committed to other projects, Joel Schumacher was approached to direct the film although Donner eventually received credit as an executive producer. He insisted on making the film sexier and more adult, bringing on screenwriter Jeffrey Boam to retool the script and raise the ages of the characters.
Casting:
Director Joel Schumacher said he had "one of the greatest casts in the world. They are what make the film." Most of the younger cast members were relatively unknown. Schumacher and Marion Dougherty met with many candidates. Jason Patric was approached early on by Schumacher to play Michael, but Patric had no interest in doing a vampire film and turned it down "many times". Eventually he was won over by Schumacher's vision and his promise to allow the cast a lot of "creative input" in making the film. According to Kiefer Sutherland, Patric "was really instrumental" in adapting the script with Schumacher and shaping the film.
Schumacher envisioned the character of Star as being a waifish blonde, similar to Meg Ryan, but he was convinced by Jason Patric to consider Jami Gertz, who had just worked with Patric in Solarbabies (1986). Schumacher was impressed, but only at Patric's insistence did he finally cast Gertz. Schumacher was surprised when his first choice for the role of Lucy, Dianne Wiest, accepted the role, as she had just recently won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Hannah and Her Sisters (1986).
After seeing Kiefer Sutherland's portrayal of Tim in At Close Range, Schumacher arranged a reading with him at which they got on very well. Sutherland had just completed work on Stand by Me when he was offered the role of David. Schumacher said Sutherland "can do almost anything. He's a born character actor. You can see it in The Lost Boys. He has the least amount of dialogue in the movie, but his presence is extraordinary."
Filming:
Most of the film was shot in Santa Cruz, California; locations include the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, the Pogonip open space preserve, and the surrounding Santa Cruz Mountains. Other locations included a cliffside on the Palos Verdes Peninsula in Los Angeles County, used for the entrance to the vampire cave, and a valley in Santa Clarita near Magic Mountain, where introductory shots were shot for the scene where Michael and the Lost Boys hang from a railway bridge. Stage sets included the vampire cave, built on Stage 12 of the Warner Bros. lot, and a recreation of the interior and exterior of the Pogonip clubhouse on Stage 15, which stood in for Grandpa's house.
Sutherland broke his right wrist while doing a wheelie on his motorcycle and had to wear gloves on camera to conceal the cast. His motorcycle for the movie was adapted so he could operate it with his left hand only.
Box Office:
The Lost Boys opened at #2 during its opening weekend, with a domestic gross of over $5.2 million. It went on to gross a domestic total of over $32.2 million against an $8.5 million budget.
Cultural Influence:
The mythographer A. Asbjørn Jøn wrote that The Lost Boys helped shift popular culture depictions of vampires. The film is often credited with bringing a more youthful appeal to the vampire genre by making the vampires themselves sexy and young. This inspired subsequent films like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The scene in which David transforms noodles into worms was directly referenced in the 2014 vampire mockumentary film What We Do in the Shadows. The film inspired the song of the same name by the Finnish gothic rock band The 69 Eyes. Gunship's 2018 Dark All Day music video and lyrics reference the themes and practical effects, on top of collaborating with Tim Cappello.
The music video for "Into the Summer", a song released by American rock band Incubus on August 23, 2019, pays homage to the film.
Event organizers Monopoly Events created "the biggest Lost Boys reunion ever" in 2019 at their annual horror fan convention, For the Love of Horror, which included Kiefer Sutherland, Jason Patric, Alex Winter, Jamison Newlander, and Billy Wirth along with musicians from the film, G Tom Mac, and Tim Cappello, who all appeared at the event and were reunited for the first time in over 30 years. Both G Tom Mac and Tim Cappello performed separate live music sets on the event stage to a vast crowd of fans on both days of the event, while Cappello performed a third time at the event after-party. All of the celebrities posed together for photographs in a purpose-built "cave" set modeled on the vampire cave seen in The Lost Boys original movie which was complete with a poster of Jim Morrison, a bottle of fake blood and David the vampire's wheelchair.
The Frog Brothers make a (non-canonical) cameo in Jenny Colgan's 2001 novel, Looking For Andrew McCarthy, in which they are now police officers and make brief, ominous reference to their past work with "the supernatural".
FUN FACT: Kiefer Sutherland's character, David, was impaled on antlers but does not explode or dissolve as do the other vampires. He was intended to have survived, which would be picked up in a sequel, The Lost Girls. Scripts for this and other sequels circulated over the years; Joel Schumacher made several attempts at a sequel during the 1990s, but nothing came to fruition. {That's kinda sad, I reckon that would've been a cool sequel idea}.
My Review:
Me personally, I love 80s films; how original and basic the plots are, the cheesy acting, the effects aren't as good but I still like how they dealt with them, the soundtracks... oh my the soundtracks are amazing no matter the genre.
I watched this movie last week with my Mother, my Dad didn't watch because he doesn't like vampires. It wasn't what I was expecting, but at the same time it was all that I hoped it would be. Even though it's not labelled as a Comedy, we found moments in this so funny - even though I don't think they were supposed to be.
The design of the vampires, when they 'Vamped out' look exactly like the ones from the television series Buffy The Vampire Slayer (Sarah Michelle Gellar). That and the whole third act went from 0 to 100 real quick - it was so over dramatic and fast paced, it felt a little rushed, but it was hilarious at the same time. {I'll be honest though, Kiefer Sutherland vampire is hotter than any of the ones from the Twilight series}.
However, I would consider this to be one of the best movies of all time, of the 80s. Incredible fashion. Outstanding acting. Amazing directing and an incredible script. Best soundtrack of all time. It's a classic 80's horror and vampire film that was incredibly funny and still iconic to this day. As a young girl who has grown up in the new generation I believe it's totally underrated and definitely not spoken about enough. Everyone no matter who you are should watch this movie. This film has no flaws. This movie will remain legendary forever.
Plus, I like how there really isn't an explanation for anything, everything just happens and we just have to go along with it and it sure is fun!
I, along with my Mother, was so entertained by this movie. I couldn't believe I didn't know about this movie till now. And I don't regret watching it at all. It's now on my list of my favourite movies of all time; a whopping 10/10 - this movie is GREAT - a bloody masterpiece!
Comments