1987 The Lost Boys

Two brothers move to a picturesque California coastal town and soon begin to realize that the local renegade band of bikers are more dead than alive.

One of many Lost Boys poster designs.

Plot

Michael Emerson and his younger brother, Sam, move with their just-divorced mother, Lucy, to Santa Carla a town plagued by gang activity and unexplained disappearances. The family moves in with Lucy's father, a cantankerous and eccentric old man who lives on the outskirts of town, and enjoys taxidermy as a hobby.

The center of town life is the boardwalk and amusement park, which is plastered with flyers of missing people. While Lucy gets a job at a local video store run by a conservative man named Max, Michael becomes fascinated by Star, a beautiful young woman who lives with the mysterious leader of the local gang, David. When Michael meets Star the next night, David provokes him into a motorcycle race, in which he is baited into almost going over the edge of a sea cliff.

David invites Michael to their lair, a once-luxurious hotel sunken by an earthquake, where he is put through an unsettling initiation that includes drinking blood from a wine bottle. He joins the gang in hanging from the underside of elevated train tracks, watching in horror as each willingly drops into a foggy gorge below. Unable to hold his grip any longer, Michael falls... waking up in his bed, groggy and disoriented.

Meanwhile, in the local comic book store, Sam meets brothers Edgar and Alan Frog, self-proclaimed vampire hunters who give Sam horror comics to teach him about vampires. Sam scoffs at them until Michael's developing vampirism becomes clear; his dog, Nanook, is forced to fend off Michael's bloodlust-driven attack on Sam, who notices that Michael's reflection has become transparent. After discovering that he can fly, Michael visits Star to question her about the physical changes he is experiencing, and the two finally consummate their relationship.

Sam turns to the Frog brothers for help, but refuses their advice to kill Michael. He turns their suspicions to Max, who has begun dating Lucy, suggesting that he is the head vampire whose death will free half-vampires such as Michael, who have not yet killed anyone. At a dinner party held by Lucy, they put Max through a series of tests (including the use of garlic and mirrors), which appear to indicate that he is normal, greatly embarrassing Lucy.

Michael resists joining David and the gang when they enter a feeding frenzy, attacking a group of Surf Nazis at a bonfire. Star reveals to Michael that she too is a half-vampire, and wants his help. It emerges that David had intended Michael to be Star's first kill, sealing her fate as a fully-fledged vampire. The next day, a weakening Michael leads Sam and the Frog brothers to the gang's lair, where they intend to kill the vampires in their sleep (The Frog brothers are stunned and terrified to discover that the vampires do not sleep in coffins, but hang from the ceiling like roosting bats.) The staking of one vampire (Marko) awakens David and the two others, and the boys barely escape with their lives, managing to rescue Star and Laddie, a recently abducted half-vampire child.

That evening, while Lucy is on a date with Max, and Grandpa is out of the house, the teens arm themselves with weapons based on traditional defenses against vampires. David and the gang attack, and are each killed in a spectacular fashion during the epic battle. Michael faces off with David, and ultimately impales him on a pair of mounted deer antlers. However, Michael does not transform back to normal with David's death, as they had hoped.

Max and Lucy then return home, and Max is revealed to be the head vampire after all, at which point he informs them that to invite a vampire into one's house (as Michael sarcastically invited Max in for Lucy's dinner date) renders one powerless, which explains why Sam and the Frog brothers' tests failed to work on him. Max's objective all along was to get Lucy to be a "mother" for his "lost boys". But his grand plan is thwarted when Grandpa crashes his jeep through the wall of the house, impaling Max on the wooden fence posts he is carrying and causes him to explode in the fireplace. Michael, Star, and Laddie then return to normal.

The film ends with Grandpa calmly retrieving a drink from the fridge, seemingly oblivious to the carnage around him. He then declares, "One thing about living in Santa Carla I never could stomach...all the damn vampires", revealing that he has known about the vampires all along.

Cannon Status

This is unquestioned as Cannon

GM Notes

• Maria is more than hinted as being a vampire, David's "sister" via Max and it is she who haunts the vampire hotel at the closing scene of the movie. In fact, she restarts the gang with none other than Greg and Shelly of the Surf Nazis

Read More

Scripts: Fischer Script, Boam Script, Shooting Script, Boam vs Movie, Fischer vs Boam
Here is the Places List, and the Cast List

Related Articles

Umm... all of them? haha naa. Here ya go:

• 1987 Novelization
• 1989 The Beginning
• 1990 Lost Boys 2
• 2005 Devil May Cry
• 2006 Return of the Frogs
• 2008 The Tribe
• 2010 The Thirst

External links

• "IMDB"
• "The Story Behind The Lost Boys"