Hi all and welcome to week four of the 2026 So Desensitized Spooky Season Spooktacular! This week, we’re looking at some favorite eighties vamps, from when vampires briefly got to be grungy teenagers! Today, it’s my personal favorite, The Lost Boys! Happy reading, stay spooky, and go to the library!

The Lost Boys is a cultural staple, and for good reason. Its legacy has expanded far beyond the beaches and boardwalks of Santa Carla, California. From sequels to remakes to a new Broadway musical, the Santa Carla vampires left their mark on the genre for good. But why? What’s so special about these grungy eighties vampires when there were plenty more - From Dusk Till Dawn, Near Dark, Once Bitten - that didn’t achieve the same kind of icon status? What did they put in this movie that made people reproduce several of its frames over and over again for the sake of merch? What made people get tattoos of Chinese takeout boxes, inexplicable to anyone who hadn’t seen the movie? Why does the movie still have the kind of popularity required to create a hit musical out of it? The answer can be found, as usual, in the culture it was released into.

1987 was…a time. The AIDS Epidemic had been raging for seven years, hair was bigger than ever, and everyone (including several of these vampires) had a mullet. Teenagers had fully established their place as a social class, and the top song of the year was The Bangles’ Walk Like An Egyptian. This is the year that inspired this recent surge of nostalgia, the year that Stranger Things is mostly based on, even when it’s technically set earlier in the decade. 1987 is also the back half of the Golden Age of horror. Though Chucky has not yet slashed his way onto the silver screen, Freddy, Michael, Jason, and Leatherface, are all firmly established, with at least one sequel each, some with more. But while slashers were booming, vampires were…somewhat out of fashion. The AIDS epidemic didn’t do bloodsuckers the same favors it did slashers, with the creature’s distinctly homoerotic undertones tabboo, along with the idea of consuming blood itself. Teen vampires had made their debut in Fright Night, but the genre had just about petered out. This would not be the case for long. The Lost Boys was a success, with a worldwide gross of $32,565,631, and a cultural impact that is still felt today. Because these vampires were special, in a strange way that would also be seen in Katheryn Bigelow’s Near Dark later in 1987: they were grimy.

The teens of eighties horror movies were well-off in a vague sort of way. Both Nancy Thompson and Laurie Strode have distinctly nice houses and clothes, while final girls like Sally Hardesty and Alice (Friday the 13th) are marked by the way they offset the nature around them. This is not the case with Michael (Jason Patric) and Sam (Corey Haim). They arrive in Santa Carla already a little weird, with Michael’s broodiness and Sam’s nerdiness. Their clothes aren’t new. Their mother drives a worn-out car, gets a job on the boardwalk to support them (trailblazing), recently divorced their father (scandalous), and wears her hair short (surely this is the reason her eldest son falls in with the wrong crowd and becomes a vampire). They don’t have their own, nice, house. Rather, they live with their grandfather in a sort of run-down bungalow with weird bones all over it and a section of the fridge they’re not allowed to use. With Reganomics doing no one but the rich any favors, these characters stood out for their relatability, their sense of the commonplace. It could be that male characters were allowed these transgressions more than their female counterparts, but the point still stands that Sam and Michael represented an ordinary American teenager in the eighties that hadn’t really been seen before.

The staying power of The Lost Boys is also largely due to the way it builds on the pop culture of the time. It’s distinctly goth, heralding the coming wave of extremely goth movies of the nineties - The Craft, The Addams Family, Blade, Dracula, Beetlejuice, etc. - while also tying into the music and fashion of both the time and the specific subculture it inhabits. Filmed mainly on the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, The Lost Boys has an element of the real that was not lost on viewers. Not only that, but the film would not have had the cultural impact that it did without its design. The props, costumes, and hair of The Lost Boys are absolutely iconic, because they’re so tied to the characters. No one character has a costume or hair design indistinct from any other character. From the David to the Frog Brothers, The Lost Boys has some of the most immediately recognizable characters in any horror movie. As for the props, the eighties are all over this movie. Michael and Sam each have clear pop culture references decorating their rooms, establishing character more clearly than any exposition. The boardwalk is full of fascinating people and their motorcycles, and even the vampires’ den could not more clearly be from the eighties. But the most famous prop of the whole movie is perhaps the most important - and the key to its success.

Vampires Everywhere! Is a fake comic book sold to Sam by the Frog Brothers, Edgar (Corey Haim) and Alan (Jamison Newlander). It is, effectively, an instruction manual on how to deal with vampires, that serves the boys well during their time in Santa Carla. But it’s not just a useful plot device prop. Comics like that were, in fact, everywhere during that period of time. Under the Comics Code (censoring guidelines for comic books, similar to the Hayes Code), comics like it were strictly forbidden. Horror was the ultimate evil of the comic world, twisting young minds to…become vampires? The harm wasn’t clear because it wasn’t real, but, nevertheless, comics were aggressively censored throughout the fifties, sixties, and seventies, even into the eighties. Comics like Vampires Everywhere! Began to come back as the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF) went to bat for censored comics, for children and teens specifically. It was this more than anything that bolstered teen culture, leading to the kinds of kids we see in The Lost Boys: weird, adventurous, and a bit spooky.

Now, The Lost Boys’ lasting impact is credited to nostalgia. And that is some of the reason that the Santa Carla vampires have gained popularity and rewatch value over the last few years. But no one was nostalgic for the eighties in the eighties. The eighties had AIDS and the Cold War and a whole lot of child kidnapping. So if The Lost Boys is only popular now because of nostalgia, what made it popular then?

First of all, The Lost Boys isn’t only popular now because of nostalgia, it’s popular now for the same reason that it was popular then: because it’s really cool. Not only are the rock and roll vampires of Santa Carla with their edgy hair cuts, leather jackets, and motorcycles reflective of the time they came out in, they’re badass, just, like, baseline. Not just because no vampires had ever looked or talked like that before, but for the same reason bands that looked like them were popular. David (Kiefer Sutherland) isn’t just a metaphor for the corruption of youth and the larger cultural impacts of the AIDS epidemic and the effects of Reganomics on American teens - he’s also super hot, and makes Michael super hot with him. He has an equally hot girlfriend and a super cool lair with his friends that’s covered in silk or whatever it is. The aesthetic is a large part of what makes The Lost Boys, not because of nostalgia, but because it’s eternally cool. Even outside of the vampires, the younger stars are rough and tumble kids who create a vampire hunting team to go and kill the actual, real-life vampires that live in their town. And then, outside of the cool as hell characters, the cinematography of the movie itself is gorgeous. From the famous bridge scene to the first shot of the vampires on the boardwalk’s carousel, The Lost Boys is a fantastically beautiful eighties goth adventure, chock full of action, scares, and, yes, vampires.

It’s not for no reason that The Lost Boys was popular in 1987, and it’s not for no reason that it’s popular now. Recently, the prolonged success of too many good movies has been blamed on nostalgia, when really, those movies are just good enough for people to keep enjoying them for forty-odd years, or even more. I mean, do people still watch The Godfather for the nostalgia, or do they still watch The Godfather because it’s a good movie? Some people love The Lost Boys for its plot, others for its costumes and setting, still others for its writing, and many for hot vampire Kiefer Sutherland, the fact remains that it’s a brilliant movie. It’s representative of its time, and the greater cultural changes that were happening then, and it’s fantastically well-written, but it’s also a gory, colorful, fun little vampire movie with a banger soundtrack. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Thanks for reading, all! I hope you enjoyed, and look forward to hearing about Fright Night on Friday! Happy reading, stay spooky, and don’t stay up too late!