August 1, 1987 | It may be a movie about teen-age vampires, but The Lost Boys isn’t kid stuff. Rather, it’s a hip and humorous comedy-thriller, fiendishly clever in its commingling of scariness, silliness and pop-culture savvy.
Directed by Joel Schumacher, the film is set in a quiet California community where the night belongs to a roving band of punkish bloodsuckers. A newly divorced mother (Dianne Wiest) returns to Santa Carla with her two sons, hoping to begin a new life. But Michael (Jason Patric), her oldest boy, may be cursed with an eternal life, unless Sam (Corey Haim), her younger son, can stake out the vampire gang led by the demonic David (Keifer Sutherland).
In preparing his film, Schumacher said this week in a telephone interview, “The goals were to have it be real enough for you to get involved. And funny enough not to take itself too seriously. And scary enough to work as a vampire movie.”
Much of the humor, Schumacher said, stems from the dedication of two would-be vampire slayers, Edgar and Alan Frog, teen-age brothers played by Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander.
“But these characters are dead serious. The things that they’re saying, which you and I might find amusing, they’re doing it for real. So, in other words, it’s their reality. They believe in what they do.
“When it was offered to me, the script was much more juvenile. When I took over the movie, I made everybody older, so it would have more of a young adult feeling than children’s feelings. But originally, the Frog Brothers were identical twins who were kind of heavy and cutesy. In the original script, they came into the cave, and saw the vampires, and sort of freaked out and ran.
“And it became clear as I was working on the script, and developing the movie, that that was no fun for the audience. That would be expected. But for these guys to march in there, in broad daylight, and without a blink just stake this vampire —that would be the unexpected thing.
“And it also sets the tone for the last half of the movie. Because by having them do that, that changes the stakes of the movie. Then, suddenly, it’s an eye for an eye. Or, several eyes for an eye. Or a heart for a heart. I wanted to show the audience that they weren’t kidding around.”
Before finding The Lost Boys, Schumacher was known best as the writer and director of St. Elmo’s Fire, a seriocomic tale of Yuppie angst. His other directorial credits include The Incredible Shrinking Woman (with Lily Tomlin and Charles Grodin) and D.C. Cab (Adam Baldwin, Gary Busey, Mr. T).
A New York native, Schumacher worked as a display artist and fashion designer before entering show business as an art director for commercials. He designed costumes for Interiors, The Last of Sheila and Bloom in Love, among other movies, then branched into scriptwriting with The Wiz and Sparkle. He made his directorial debut with a well-received TV-movie, Amateur Night at the Dixie Bar and Grill.
For The Lost Boys, Schumacher wanted to ground the fantasy elements of the script in a hard-edged reality. That’s part of the reason why he chose to film on location in Santa Cruz, a Northern California coastal community.
“Santa Cruz,” Schumacher said, “has a large runaway, homeless, transient kid population. And a lot of the kids you see in the movie, on the streets, are part of a real culture up there.
“As beautiful and as much fun as Northern California is, it also has the kind of dark, existential, brooding, scary part. It’s such a dramatic end to the country: It drops off into the sea. And it has such extremes, the Big Sur, and the weather. And there has been a history of a lot of violence in Santa Cruz. So there was some of that influence in the film.
“Actually, we decided we were making two movies. We were making a daytime movie, which was about a real family that had moved to a real town, and a real life. These were real people coming from Phoenix, and re-settling in Santa Carla, the fictional name we had to use for the town in the film. And at the same time, we were making a night movie. And as Jason Patric, who plays Michael, gets further and further into the vampires’ world, it becomes more and more surreal.”
Schumacher depicts the presence of vampirism in Santa Carla as a kind of troublesome social disorder, not unlike juvenile delinquency. “Or pollution,” he said. ”Or whatever the one thing you can’t stand about your home town is. It’s like, ‘The one thing I never could stomach about New York was all the traffic.’ OK, well, the one thing I never could never stomach about Santa Carla was all the vampires.
“In our movie, there are real people, in a real town. But there are also real vampires. So I’’s actually the story of how the average American family meets the average American vampire.”
While meeting the press to promote his film, Schumacher has found some journalists are interpreting The Lost Boys as a metaphor for a real-life concern: The growing underclass of runaway or abandoned children. Schumacher doesn’t quite agree with this reading, but he’s very much aware of the problem.
“For a long time, in the old parts of Hollywood Boulevard, in L.A., there were a lot of condemned hotels and buildings, about five years ago. And that’s where all these kids would be living. Every so often, they’d clean them out, and there’d be big stories on TV about how they raided these nests of runaway kids.
“There have always been bands of kids that have been on their own, whether they ran away or were abandoned, who have clustered together and become something like a unit, a family… Having grown up on the streets of New York as a poor kid myself, I know that there were always a certain amount of people on the street. But every time I come back to New York, the number seems to have doubled. There seems to be a certain amount of Marie Antoinette-ism in our culture, where the rich seem to be getting richer, and the homeless seem to be getting more homeless.
“You sense, when you see these kids, that you’re dealing with Dickensian kinds of lost souls. And you will see this if you ever go to Santa Cruz.”
Still, Schumacher insists that The Lost Boys should be viewed as enthralling entertainment, not enlightened social commentary.
“There were two things that we were very clear about. One was, we were definitely making a teen-age vampire movie. And we were not ashamed of it. And No. 2, the reason we were not ashamed of it was that we were going to die trying to do the best one we possibly could do.
“And so, every effort was made to entertain the audience, to seduce and amuse and frighten. And whether we succeeded is now in the hands of the audience. And as Woody Allen says, ‘The audience is never wrong.’”
