All the Damn Vampires: The Lost Boys and Fear of Generation X

Because Santa Cruz, California, is so small, it only took three killers to make it the Murder Capital of the US. Perhaps not the world, but certainly five murders by John Linley Frazier in 1970, six by Edmund Kemper in 1972 and 1973, and thirteen by Herbert Mullin in the same time frame skewed statistics. It lingered in pop culture enough to make the fictional Santa Carla similarly murder prone, but as anyone from Gen-X can tell you, the problem there is not serial killers. It’s vampires. Mostly young, sexy vampires, because Joel Schumacher was gonna Joel Schumacher. But underneath that particular fear was the projection of all the fears about the up and coming Gen X, before Boomers began fearing Millennials instead.

For those who have managed not to see it, The Lost Boys is the story of the Emerson family. Lucy (Dianne Weist, fresh off an Oscar win) has left her husband and is flat broke, so she is taking her sons Michael (Jason Patric) and Sam (Corey Haim) from Phoenix back to her hometown of Santa Carla, to live with her father (Barnard Hughes), who never gets a name. Michael is drifting, as there are, he is told, no legal jobs in town. Lucy ends up working for Max (Edward Herrmann), who runs the local video store. Sam falls in with the Frog brothers (Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander), whose parents own the local comic shop. And Michael falls in love with Star (Jami Gertz), bringing him in contact with David (Kiefer Sutherland).

Literally like all my friends my own age can quote this movie, even if it’s only “but you must feed” and “one thing I never could stomach about living in Santa Carla.” It’s a Gen X cult classic; most of us watched it, and any number of us probably watched it at slumber parties. But I was talking about it to my partner today and realized that it actually seems to be an allegory of the fear of what my generation could be getting up to and the anger we posed, not necessarily to ourselves but to our elders.

For one thing, the characters of the movie live in a world with substantially fewer parents than our elders. There are no stay-at-home parents here. The Emerson boys are from a “broken home,” and Lucy has to work to support them. I think a lot of the characters are supposed to be younger than the actors playing them, because there is much talk of school for Michael, but unless it was college, that’s not age-appropriate for Patric. But David and his band and the “surf Nazis” are probably intended to be teenager-coded and seem no older than eighteen, and they wander the boardwalk and beach alone, unsupervised.

. . . They wander the boardwalk and beach alone, unsupervised.

Our elders didn’t mean to neglect us, I’m sure, but they did. Then they were afraid of how a bunch of neglected children would turn out as young adults. Were we joining gangs, even if we were middle class white kids from the suburbs? Were we having riotous sex-and-drug parties? Were we becoming vampires? Boys need mothers, Max says, and a lot of boys were out there—girls, too—in single-parent households.

Sam, meanwhile, has long been speculated to be queer-coded intentionally. Schumacher was himself gay, after all, and there were gay kids, even in the ‘80s. But a lot of parents would definitely have feared that. (The movie is also a deeply masculine world; the only two important female characters are Lucy and Star.) Neither Sam nor Michael are telling Lucy important things—and, sure, she doesn’t believe Sam when he eventually tells her, but also how many parents would rather believe in mass Satanism rings than the idea that someone in the child’s life was hurting them?

There are missing children—we see Laddie (Chance Michael Corbitt) on the carton of milk in the family kitchen, and there are multiple fliers pinned up around town with the pictures of the disappeared on them. Sam seems to be going slightly bonkers without television and access to MTV—but neither can we trust the video store run by Max. Vampirism is easily a cult metaphor, come to that, not just gangs.

The hair. The earrings. The leather jackets. The whatever the hell Sam is wearing. Boomers were suspicious of the look. Could they remember the hubbub about long hair from when they themselves were young? Some of them. Not all. And long hair was nothing on Alex Winter (still credited as Alexander!) and his phenomenal curls, or the incredibly teased hair of Brook McCarter as Paul, with many of the other characters being similarly coiffed. It was weird that young men would spend so much time on their hair, right?

Seen through this lens, The Lost Boys takes on a very different perspective. The original fear may have spread from three men, all older Boomers themselves. But generational fear took hold as it so frequently does. We as a generation learned that we couldn’t rely on our parents, and we built our own families. That’s always an object of fear—see every fear of gangs ever no matter what generation is involved or how harmless the gang is. But it was more widespread with us than before. It wasn’t our fault, but had you considered that it was and we were really vampires?