Roots and Beginnings: The Lost Boys (dir. Joel Schumacher)

Contra most of my writing about fantastic fiction as a rule-free zone, for whatever reason I always found the rules that governed vampires extraordinarily appealing as a storytelling device. I liked that there was an element of problem-solving that went along with tangling with these creatures, for them and for you; otherwise, with all their powers – transformation, telepathy, mind control, indestructibility, enhanced strength and senses, flight, intangibility, control over low animals, fangs – wouldn’t the game be over before it began?

I’m sure it helped that the first contemporary vampire movies I watched were The Monster Squad and (my very first R-rated movie) The Lost Boys, which made a lot out of the establishment of those rules in pop culture and what that would mean if you encountered vampires for real. To this day I find it super lazy for writers to have vampires walking around in the day (I know that’s a Hollywood convention and not part of the traditional lore, but it is what it is), particularly since The Lost Boys proves how much tension and suspense can be drawn out from dancing right up to the point of no return and then using one of the rules to pull you back from the brink.

Much of that tension, it must be said, is derived from how appealing David and his band of surf-punk-hair-metal vampires can be. Part of me retains a ten-year-old boy’s skepticism about sexy vampires, but the look and lifestyle (and even the sound – remember their laughs? remember Kiefer Sutherland’s sonorous growl of “How far you willing to go, Michael?”) of the Lost Boys does not seem like a fate worse than death. Only when the mask comes off and they descend, like a pack of predatory animals, on innocents, rending and maiming and feeding, does the horror reveal itself. “You never grow old, Michael. And you never die. But you must feed.” At times that seems like a small price to pay. It’s only the rules that save you.