I recently rewatched ‘Lost Boys’, the clearly 80′s Schumacher flick featuring both Coreys, Bill of ‘Bill & Ted’, and a less gun-happy Keifer Sutherland. I sort of wonder how he feels about that movie-is it like a horrible high school picture that goes on for 90 minutes? Perhaps it’s secretly his personal favorite? These are questions I probably won’t get answered, or that some obsessive fan site has answered for me already. Cheesy as it is, I thorougly enjoy it, though I must have mentally blocked out this part:
because I sure as hell didn’t expect the thong & purple greasepaint-clad bodybuilder/sax player. Why were so many young people voluntarily watching this concert? Was there nothing else to do in Santa Carlos but see this guy or become a vampire? And why the hell were the vampires there? They can fly! They’re immortal! True, they dress like a bucket of bad ideas exploded near them, but come on.
I remember, in my youth, sitting in my older cousin’s room. On his walls were a poster of Wolverine and some sprayhaired pinup, clothes were everywhere, and my sisters and I were sitting on his bed watching him play ‘Duckhunt’, gun against the screen, bored look on his face. I picked up the Lost Boys VHS on his dresser and asked him what it was. Only the coolest movie out there, his favorite. As his impressionable younger cousin, I took this as fact, not opinion, and noted it on the Shoprite rental shelf every subsequent trip. This was the same cousin who would say things like ‘hey, come in here and check this out! It’s got kids your age in it!’ and when we ran in to where their large projection screen was played that scene from Children of the Corn III where the crucified little girl gets sucked into the ground by He That Walks Between The Rows. Man, I still remember that. Interestingly that didn’t scare me in the long term; his constant quoting of a certain line from ‘Prayer of the Rollerboys’ did. I only found out where this line came from years later; once I learned that it came from a post-apocalyptic rollerblading drug gang movie(seriously) starring Corey Haim(really), it lost its power to terrify.
For the 4 people out there reading this, what terrified you as a kid? Every time I get an answer to this it’s so oddly specific. It’s never just a monster or the dark, it’s some concrete terror. And, while I’m at it, what’s your favorite vampire movie? There’s just so goshdarn many of them.
