Joel Schumacher Had To Get Creative With The Lost Boys' Reduced Budget
The '80s was a pretty great time to be an undead bloodsucker. Writers and directors were clearly enjoying themselves playing with the old tropes; Tony Scott's "The Hunger" dispensed with fangs altogether and toyed with the idea of vampire immortality before turning into softcore erotica; Nicolas Cage lost the plot and munched live cockroaches in "Vampire's Kiss;" Kathryn Bigelow brought a Western theme to her mean and moody "Near Dark;" and "Lifeforce" even gave us vampires from outer space. To top it all off, Count Dracula teamed up with other classic Universal monsters like the Wolf Man and the Mummy in "The Monster Squad." These movies left behind the spooky castles and misty graveyards of Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee's iconic iterations of Bram Stoker's most famous creation, bringing the vampire myth right into the modern world.
All these films are now very much a product of their time, and no other vampire movie screams "1980s" more than "The Lost Boys." If you've seen the movie, even just reading that last sentence may well conjure up images of Corey Haim's eye-popping shirts or a well-oiled muscle man humping out a sax solo at a beach concert. While elements such as these stamp a date on Joel Schumacher's film, it still plays incredibly well today; a rambunctious blend of horror and comedy that followed the lead of "Fright Night" by giving us likable young protagonists battling blood-hungry undead in their own neighborhood. It's a nailed-on '80s classic that influenced the likes of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Twilight," but executives at Warner Bros. at the time were not convinced they were on a winner at all.
So what happens in The Lost Boys again?
Lucy Emerson (Dianne Wiest) is a divorced mother who decides to move her two teenage sons Michael (Jason Patric) and Sam (Corey Haim) from Phoenix to the down-at-heel seaside town Santa Clara to live with their cranky Grandpa (Bernard Hughes). The boys aren't too sure about their new home in the "murder capital of the world" at first, but they soon open up to the insalubrious pleasures of its raucous boardwalk populated by punks, hippies, weirdos, and delinquent trouble-makers.
One night at a beach concert, Michael is instantly smitten with a mysterious girl named Star (Jami Gertz), who runs with a wild biker gang headed by the sinister David (Kiefer Sutherland). Meanwhile, Lucy meets Max (Edward Hermann), a singleton around her age who owns a video store, and Sam encounters the Frog Brothers (Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander), two self-declared vampire hunters who run a comic book store on behalf of their comatose stoner parents. They give him a vampire comic, telling him that it might just save his life.
Pursuing Star, Michael is goaded into challenging David for her attention. The gang leads him to their lair in a ruined hotel where David pranks him with some mind-control tricks. Eager to fit in, Michael accepts David's offer of a drink; Star warns him it is blood, but he doesn't listen to her and chugs away.
Afterward, Michael starts showing vampire-like symptoms and Sam realizes his brother is turning into a bloodsucker. The Frog Brothers recommend staking him to death, but Sam has done his homework from the comic and comes up with a better idea: Hunt down the head vampire and kill him instead, freeing those in his power. Sam thinks he knows who to target; his mom's new date, Max.
Warner Bros. got cold feet on The Lost Boys
"The Lost Boys" was originally intended as a picture directed by Richard Donner, which makes total sense. With its focus on young protagonists and atmospheric seaside location, it has a lot in common with his 1985 hit, "The Goonies." Donner liked the script but wasn't so keen on the age of the characters, who were all pre-teen. He hired screenwriter Jeffrey Boam to rewrite it before jumping ship to direct "Lethal Weapon," but stuck around as an executive producer.
Directing duties fell to Joel Schumacher, fresh from capturing the '80s teen zeitgeist with Brat Pack classic "St. Elmo's Fire." Like Donner, he was initially put off by the family-friendly nature of the screenplay before seizing upon the idea of making the vampires sexy older teen rebels, with the very photogenic Jason Patric, Kiefer Sutherland, and Jami Gertz providing the eye candy to go along with their charismatic screen presences. Schumacher claimed that the studio got "cold feet" about the project, worried about his cast of largely unknown actors. He told Empire in 2019:
"There was a bit of a shame factor at Warner Bros. People in marketing would say, 'Well, it's not really a vampire movie, Joel, it's really an alienation movie, it's about the disenfranchised.' And I said, 'No. We absolutely are making a teenage vampire movie. Our job is to make the coolest vampire movie ever made.'"
The studio's jitters led to them slashing $2 million from the already fairly thrifty budget. The final film cost $8.5 million; for comparison with some movies that also came out in 1987, "The Running Man" cost $27 million, and even Mel Brooks' "Spaceballs" came in at $22.7 million. In retrospect, however, the budget limitations may have actually helped "The Lost Boys" become the film we know and love.
Joel Schumacher had to get creative
Faced with a budget cut, Joel Schumacher and his production team had to get creative with "The Lost Boys;" B-roll footage from "Top Gun" was even woven seamlessly into the film during a flying sequence (via Empire). Despite this, it certainly doesn't look like a movie strapped for cash. The vampire effects are used sparingly but effectively and the crisp cinematography from Oscar-nominee Michael Chapman ("Raging Bull," "The Fugitive") captures the seedy atmosphere of a slightly disreputable seaside town. You can really taste the salt in the air and smell the cotton candy and fried onions on the boardwalk.
Schumacher would later develop a reputation for bloated excess in his movies, such as the Day-Glo zaniness of "Batman Forever" and the gaudy extravagance of "The Phantom of the Opera." With "The Lost Boys," however, he directed with a real economy and verve, making the most of his energetic young cast. There is barely a dull moment as the movie rattles through a breezy 98 minutes, ending on a great punchline from the Emerson Brothers' eccentric granddad:
"One thing about living in Santa Carla I could never stomach: all the damn vampires."
The movie was supposed to end with a trip back to the vampire lair to reveal a mural depicting Max in the early 1900s recruiting the lost boys (via Cinema Blend). The cutbacks meant that the mural was never made and the scene was never shot, which sounds a bit too similar to the ending of "The Shining" for my liking. Instead, we got a neat kiss-off that was perfectly in keeping with the rest of the movie, proving that sometimes less is definitely more.