Oh my god HELLO and welcome to Screen Time with Sarah Ruthless, a podcast about my #1

favorite activity: screen time! We are now balls deep in the premiere season, where I am sinking
my teeth into a genre I have avoided all my life… horror!

…And I’m kicking off the new year with a movie that I am SO EMBARRASSED I had never seen
until last week: the iconic 1987 cult classic vamp ick, The Lost Boys. This is one of those
movies that I legitimately just lied about watching for the last 29 years, because if you have ever
seen me in the esh or know anything about my aesthetic, I de nitely give off the kind of vibes
that would tell you this is a movie I should be obsessed with. Like when I’m not lying around in
sweatpants like an asshole during a global pandemic, I look like the kinda person who loved this
movie growing up, and I’m okay with that.

There are SO many people I know and like - people who’s opinions on lm and television I
generally thought I agreed with - who absolutely LOVE this movie. Which is why I am
TERRIFIED of releasing this episode, because I think there’s a good chance I might lose half of
my whopping 19 followers, because

I DID NOT CARE FOR THIS MOVIE. I AM SO SORRY. PLEASE DON’T HATE ME. That being
said: after doing a shit ton of re ecting and really diving into the cultural statements it was
making in the particular era in which it was released, I think I have a better understanding of
why it was so popular and why so many people love it so much… but I’m (genuinely) afraid to
say that it just wasn’t my cup of tea, and you better believe I am going to explain exactly why.

BUT I’m getting ahead of myself. First things rst, some trigger warnings for the lm and this
episode include: Vampires! Ronald Reagan! Being buried alive! Misogyny! Peter Pan! The myth
of the Bad Boy! Poop! Divorce and the nuclear family! And a whole lot of blood & violence.

Now, ICYMI, that quick-ish recap:

Dianne Wiest is just a cute single mom, leaving behind a messy divorce in Arizona which you
can tell because of all her cute turquoise jewelry and heading west with her teenage sons
Michael and Sam towards Santa Carla to live with her eccentric hillbilly father. Little do they
know that it’s the “murder capital of the world,” and home to hordes of weirdos, freaks, and

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 VAMPIRES! Almost immediately, Michael gets seduced on the boardwalk by a sexy young thing
named Star, but she seems to be entangled with a possessive biker gang leader played by
BABY JACK BAUER, aka Kiefer Sutherland with a BLEACHED MULLET! Michael low key joins
the gang to get closer to Star, but frankly has way more sexual chemistry with Baby Jack
Bauer? (And yes, if you haven’t noticed by now, I WILL be referring to Kiefer Sutherland, aka
David the vampire, as Baby Jack Bauer for the duration of this episode, you’re welcome.)

What starts out as a hot summer night lled with motorcycle racing and underage drinking
quickly turns into the weirdest vampire initiation ceremony I’ve ever seen on lm. Michael
awakes the next morning feeling… different. Luckily his little brother Sam - who I think is
supposed to be 14 but acts like he’s 10? - gures out exactly what’s going on: big bro has been
turned into a VAMPIRE! But not a WHOLE vampire, just a HALF vampire?? Because you’re not
a Whole Vamp until you make your rst kill… allegedly.

So with the help of two local hoodlum comic-peddlers slash vampire hunters he met on the
boardwalk, Sam and his new best friends Edgar and Allen (yup) team up to save Michael…
Which can apparently be accomplished by hunting and destroying “The Head Vampire?” At rst
they think it’s Dianne Wiest’s new boyfriend (PLAYED BY RICHARD GILMORE???? AKA ED
HERMANN) named Max, who is also her BOSS down at the video store?? Like no slut-shaming
here, but, c’mon Dianne, you just started working there. Anyway, they try all the usual tricks on
him: garlic, holy water, testing his re ection, and he appears to be human. So then they decide
to just kill ALL the vamps in Baby Jack Bauer’s gang - which honestly is so stupid because if
you had to guess who was the Head Vampire based solely on who was in the gang, wouldn’t it
so obviously be Baby Jack Bauer??

Anyway, they only manage to kill one of the side vamps - while they’re hanging upside down in
a cave sleeping like BATS, as you do - but then they wake up all the other vamps who get really
pissed off and declare WAR on Sam and the boys. This leads to a VERY dramatic face off at
Grandpa’s house, where Michael is now housing and protecting Star and this little homeless kid
(both of whom are still just Half Vamps too). The boys manage to kill pretty much all of them, but
of course it all ends with Michael and Baby Jack Bauer having ONE OF THE MOST
HOMOEROTIC FIGHT SCENES I’VE EVER WITNESSED, concluding with Baby Jack Bauer

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 getting impaled on some of Grandpa’s taxidermy antlers - which was, admittedly, pretty fucking
cool.

Just in time, Dianne Wiest and Max come home from their date and are like WTF? But actually
Max isn’t like “wtf” he’s more like “goddammit kids, you killed my boys!” BECAUSE HE WAS
THE HEAD VAMPIRE ALL ALONG!! I guess he’s just like such a Head Vamp that he ascended
all the normal vulnerabilities? Super unclear. Anyway, in a very Scooby-Doo ending like
monologue, he reveals that his plan ALL ALONG was to seduce Dianne Wiest by turning both
her sons into vampires so that they could all be one happy nuclear family: mother, father, lost
boys, and all. But just when we think all hope is lost and Max is gonna turn Dianne Wiest,
GRANDPA COMES HOME, driving through the fucking house with his Jeep and immediately
staking and killing the Head Vamp. Which now that I’m saying it, how did he know to do that? I
guess he could’ve actually liked parked, started coming in, heard what was going on, went back
out and got in the car, and THEN driven it into the house. Sure, we’ll go with that.

Then Grandpa gets out of the car which is now in the LIVING ROOM, he’s super chill, goes to
the fridge and grabs an ice cold root beer, while his daughter, grandsons, Star, and that random
homeless kid (who have now all returned back to their normal, Whole Human selves) look on,
and muses to himself: “The one thing I never could stomach about Santa Carla are all those
damned vampires.” WOMP WOMP THAT’S THE END.

OKAY SO I HAVE A LOT OF THINGS TO FUCKING SAY ABOUT THIS and for the sake of
those members in my audience who love and adore this lm, I am going to do my absolute
BEST to say them as kindly and gently as possible. We’re gonna start with the good, then we’re
gonna talk about the bad, and then I’m gonna try and tackle the “medium.” You know what time
it is… *it’s time for some info-dumping, yeah!

So I’d like to begin by asking an uncomfortable question: Is this movie that you like good, or
does it just really pretty? Or in the case of Lost Boys, really “cool looking.” I myself was
confronted with the ugly answer to this query when I revisited The Shape of Water. I had this
cute idea of doing a little double feature for the pod with that and it’s origin story, Creature from
the Black Lagoon. But based on the fact that I don’t think anyone watched A Christmas Horror
Story or listened to the episode on it - it’s FINE I’m not BITTER, really it’s your loss, it was a fun

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 time - I got a little self-conscious about picking anymore obscure or potentially “boring” movies
for fear of jeopardizing my little baby listenership - because I freaking love and adore you all and
want to make you happy! But the bigger reason that I’m not giving those lms their own episode
(well, I still might include Creature, I don’t know yet) is because - and this REALLY BREAKS MY
HEART TO ADMIT - The Shape of Water isn’t… very… good??????? I remember watching it in
theaters and absolutely LOVING it. Like I was very aware that it was an aggressive rip off of
Amelie - like almost the exact same plot, but with a swamp monster? - but I am a longtime Del
Toro fan - Pan’s Labyrinth is in my Top 5 of all time, and I’m proud of it - and I recall enjoying it
and thinking it wasn’t as good as Pan and he was de nitely trying a little too hard to appeal to a
wider audience, but ultimately it was Just Fine and ticked enough boxes for me that I was
thrilled when it won Best Picture in 2017.

HOW-fucking-EVER: The re-watch was… dare I say it? Embarrassing. First of all, Octavia
Spencer’s character is downright racist. Not like she is racist obviously, but like, it’s racist
towards her. Like if you think about it, all the characters are actually really oversimpli ed, but
none are done so dirty as Spencer, who we all know deserves better. Seriously, I’m not over it!
She just monologues about how shitty her husband is the whole time? And I think it’s supposed
to be funny, but it’s actually just really depressing? Surely she had other shit to talk about???

Finally, it fucking aggressively fails the Bechdel Test, which is something I haven’t been talking
about and I really should be, and I’m de nitely gonna be from now on. For those of you who
don’t know, the Bechdel Test was developed by the awesome lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel
in 1985 and was coined as a term to measure female representation in stories. It only has ONE
RULE: two women - with names - must have a conversation together about something other
than a man. That’s it. That’s literally the only requirement. And once you start paying attention,
you will realize JUST HOW FEW STORIES PASS THAT TEST. It is actually astonishing.

So to conclude my rant on how disappointing The Shape of Water actually was - I’m sorry, I
really think I just needed to get it off my chest - it didn’t even pass The Bechdel Test

ANYWAY, ALL OF THIS IS TO SAY I still fucking LOVE Del Toro and I want to love all his
movies, but I am also capable of acknowledging the sometimes uncomfortable truth that movies
we think are good actually aren’t that good at all - they’re just really, really, ridiculously good-

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 looking. The Shape of Water was like all the Production Design dreams I’ve ever had got
together and made a perfect baby of everything I have ever visually adored. It was delicious. It
was aesthetically FLAWLESS. But that is all it was.

And may I humbly posit before the court: The Lost Boys, for me, was the same. Granted this is
a different experience for me to comment on because I have zero nostalgic or sentimental
feelings towards it, but in my opinion, it is objectively NOT a good movie - it is just really, really,
ridiculously good-looking. And I can prove it mathematically. That being said, much like Shape of
Water, I can speculate why the lm still means so much to so many people, and I’m gonna
break that down too.

Since we’re already on the subject, let’s start with the things in this movie that really did work for
me: THOSE AESTHETICS. *chef’s kiss* What a fucking cool looking movie. This is the part that
I really do get. If I was a teenager in 1987 I probably would’ve been obsessed with it too, and I
can appreciate how it managed to capture the hot, sweaty, angry, punk feeling of being a teen in
the summer in a place you fucking hate, feeling horny and pissed and out for blood.

And when I say “I get it,” like, I REALLY get it. My family moved to the Big Island of Hawaii when
I was 12 years old. I was a BABY GOTH on the BEACH, marooned on the most geographically
isolated place on the planet. And you could feel it. Can you even imagine how sweaty I was,
layering my ngerless gloves and shnets and combat boots with my ripped plaid skirt and
leather jacket? I was DRENCHED. But unlike Santa Carla, there were literally only like 7 other
goth kids on the whole damn island. AND WE ALL KNEW EACH OTHER. I’m not even kidding.
We would convene together once a year at the Hot Topic in the ONLY MALL ON THE ISLAND,
which was - I shitteth you not - a literal FOUR HOUR drive away. It was a rough time to be a
teenage goth.

All this to say, I can DEEPLY empathize with the situation that Michael and Sam nd themselves
in - and I also really get where Baby Jack Bauer’s Vamp Gang is coming from, because I
fucking remember the venom I used to feel towards tourists. There’s a weird thing that happens
when you live in a place that other people go to for vacation. I don’t know how to explain it, but it
sucks. The closest comparison I can make is that it’s kind of like working in a restaurant, or
maybe an airport - you watch people come in and get waited on, get served and fed and

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 nourished, or travel to destinations all over the world, and you’re right there, you’re so close -
but you don’t get waited on, you don’t get fed, you don’t get to go anywhere. You’re just stuck. I
really, really remember that feeling of being stuck. It’s not a fun feeling, especially when you’re a
hot, sweaty and horny teenager who just discovered punk music. Even if the place you’re
“stuck” in is really fucking cool - like Hawaii, or Santa Carla (which is literally just Santa Cruz, by
the way) - it’s still just kinda like working in a really cool, tropical themed restaurant that you
never get to actually leave

And oh my god was this movie ever so successful in capturing all that angst in the hair,
costumes, and constant visual bombardment of all things PUNK and ANGRY! So you know I
had to look up who the heck was responsible for the visual mastery here, and GUESS WHAT
THE FUCK I LEARNED: costumes were done by Susan Becker, who’s work you might know
from a little movie called TRUE ROMANCE?!??!?!?!??!? That’s right! The same genius who
gave us Clarence & Alabama’s LEGENDARY red Aloha shirt, cow-print skirt, and turquoise
cowboy boots - is ALSO responsible for Kiefer Sutherland’s ICONIC bleached mullet and ankle-
length leather jacket. Which, it bears mentioning, HAD to have been the inspiration for Spike
from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, right?!??! Like, they make jokes in the show that Billy Idol “stole
his look” from Spike, but I think Spike stole his look from Baby Jack Bauer?

Truly, ALL of the jackets in this lm are deeply lust-worthy, but they wouldn’t be nearly as
memorable if it weren’t for the equally detailed and incredible Production Design of none other
than a man named Bo Welch. If you follow me on social media, I couldn’t keep this fun fact a
secret, but: his name sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t remember why, so I looked it up…
And guess what else he’s famous for? Please, allow me to list them for you, while your mind
slowly explodes
- EDWARD FUCKING SCISSORHAND
- A LITTLE FUCKING PRINCES
- BATMAN FUCKING RETURN
- Net ix’s A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE FUCKING EVENTS, and…
- BEETLE FUCKING JUICE! Where he met his wife, CATHERINE FUCKING O’HARA!!!

So besides being married to Moira Rose, I didn’t realize until now that Bo Welch might be one of
my Production Design heroes?? And goddamn did he ever nail it with Lost Boys: not only is the

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 vampire sea cave the perfect combination of decadently grungy and effortlessly cool, but how
about Grandpa’s house?? A mountain-man, hoarder-hillbilly, antiques & taxidermy, maximalism
dream come TRUE! Every inch of this movie feels like a music video - which is something I
really like, in terms of aesthetics, and use of music… But, I’m afraid to say, that’s where my
short list of good things about this movie comes to screeching halt. First of all, the music really
was great, in theory, but Gerard McMahon’s original theme song “Cry Little Sister” is literally
used like half a dozen times or more in the lm, and damn what a way to kill a cool fucking
song. Like it’s a great song, but you can’t play your theme every single time something dramatic
happens in a very dramatic movie. I will spare you the experience of hearing it every time
something dramatic happens in this episode, because even thought that would be hilarious I do
not have the patience to gure out how to do that, but here’s a little clip for you just so it can get
stuck in your head too: *clip of song*

So the real list of things that did NOT work for me here pretty much boil down to the characters,
the plot, and the lore. Let’s get the rst two out of the way, because there’s really not that much
to say about them - which is essentially my problem.

First of all: this lm RADICALLY fails The Bechdel Test. Dianne Wiest, whom I normally worship
as the epitome of all moms sweet AND strong, comes across as so aloof it borders on farcical. I
know she’s trying to raise two teenage boys by herself, but she waf es between treating her
oldest like an adult roommate and her youngest like he’s still a child. Corey Haim’s character is
supposed to be 13 or 14, right? Then why does he act like he’s 9 or 10? He has to be babysat,
he takes bubble baths and sings in the tub, and he’s so scared of the vampires that he sleeps in
his mom’s bed??? Um????? I’m all for the innocence of boyhood, but this borders on fucking
weird

And speaking of the failed Bechdel Test, let’s talk about the only other female in this movie: Star.
Director Joel Schumacher originally wanted a blonde, blue-eyed, Baywatch- avored girl for the
role, but wisely ended up going with the dark, mysterious, and incredibly sexy Jami Gertz
instead, who is of proper Ashkenazi Jewish descent. Still white, but as a former bar patron once
put it after nding out that my genetic make up also includes some Jewish heritage: “Jews are
white, but they’re, like, spicy white.” And while that’s not nothing, it is the closest thing we get to
diversity in the lm, which for 1987 is unsurprising, but nevertheless, a bummer.

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 So my issue with Star is that SHE IS THE ONLY VAMPIRE WHO DOESN’T EVER GET VAMP
FACE??? And I do NOT understand why. Even the CHILD VAMPIRE gets to have vamp face. It
makes no sense - once Michael nds out that she’s a Half Vampire too, Star confesses that he
was supposed to be her rst kill, the one that made her a Whole Vampire, but she couldn’t do
it… And then she admits that it’s getting harder and harder to resist the violent urges. So how
come she doesn’t vamp out even once? Especially in the nal show down at the house when
they’re all surrounded by violence, so much so that Michael (who’s way more of a baby Half
Vamp than she is) and the CHILD both vamp out???

I mean, the answer is obvious: she’s not a character, she’s a plot device. The girl has ZERO
fucking agency. The closest we get to her exhibiting a single ounce of strength is that she has
taken it upon herself to protect and look out for the child vampire - which is actually a bummer,
because that means the only remotely “cool” thing she ever does (besides get on the back of a
motorcycle with Baby Jack Bauer) is basically become the Mom-Friend? Don’t get me wrong,
there is nothing wrong with the Mom-Friend, the Mom-Friend is rad as hell. But it doesn’t
actually have anything to do with her personality or her character, it’s literally just because she’s
the only girl vampire in the gang, and that’s pretty disappointing

And nally, let’s talk about the man of the hour himself: Baby Jack Bauer, 17 year old Kiefer
Sutherland, David the vampire. Let me quickly digress… Shortly after the new Star Wars movies
came out, and everyone was tearing them to shreds, I remember watching something on MTV I
think? Basically they got a bunch of comedians to comment on their thoughts and feelings
regarding the new movies, and the interviewers asked them this question: “Without describing
their costumes, physical appearance, or job title, describe the character.” I think they had a
modi er too that you couldn’t give any over-generalizing descriptors based on morality, so like
you couldn’t say “they’re a good guy” or “they’re a bad guy,” nothing about “good” or “evil.” And
then they’d give them the name of a character on a note card, and lm the comedians’ answers.

So it starts with the original - Princess Leia. And everyone answers: spunky, clever, spoiled,
strong, rebellious, de ant, passionate. Han Solo: scoundrel, arrogant, stubborn, asshole with a
heart of gold, etc. I mean Jesus, they even did Chewbacca: loyal, intelligent, sensitive; and
C3P0! Anxious, paranoid, pessimistic, sincere…

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 But then they moved onto the new lms, and slowly all the comedians were like, “Ohhhhh, I get
what you’re doing now.” Remember, you can’t describe their physical appearance or their job
title. So rst up is Queen Amadala, and… crickets. “Uhhh…. young? Bad taste in men?” Okay,
how about Anakin: “….Temperamental?” And nally, Jar-Jar Binks: the only not profane word
anyone could come up with was “annoying.”

That video lives rent-free in my head, and honestly it shaped a lot of my perceptions as a writer
and consumer of media, because it’s such a quick way to deduce whether or not the writing is
good. And you probably know by now where I’m headed with this: seriously, for a moment, if you
can, try to play this game with the characters in this movie… Let’s start with Baby Jack Bauer:
Without referencing his hair, his clothes, or his position in the gang, describe his character…

Yep. And that’s my problem. He doesn’t actually have any discernible characteristics! Is he
loyal? Does he care about his friends? Or is he just pissed when one of them dies because he’s
sel shly concerned that he might be next? VERY UNCLEAR. He’s a well-dressed cardboard
cutout of a villain with a heaping dose of sexy bad boy - but he actually doesn’t even have
enough depth to qualify as a real Bad Boy!

The archetype of Bad Boy has to be brash, rebellious, arrogant, doesn’t play by the rules: okay,
he’s got all those, but it’s not really based on any personality traits, it’s just because he’s a
vampire. The Bad Boy also has to have SOME set of morals, he has to have a code by which
he lives, even if it’s not a socially acceptable one… Does he though? I don’t think he does. He
has literally zero moral compass or code, and his actions don’t seem to be motivated by
anything except instinct. That doesn’t make him a villain, that just makes him… an animal. And
yeah like I get it, he’s a vampire, but surely he’s more than just that? Spike didn’t have a soul
either, and he still had layers.

There’s nothing even remotely redeemable about Baby Jack Bauer, except that he’s really good
looking. Traditionally, the Bad Boy has some kind of pitiable back story, often involving Daddy
Issues he can’t get over, that explains away his bad behavior. Once we discover that Max is the
Head Vampire and appears to be a kind of father gure to the Lost Boys, I can retroactively try

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 and ll in some blanks, but you don’t even nd out that information until the last 5 minutes of the
movie

We never get into his back story, and it’s a shame because it was probably a really interesting
one! We don’t even know if he actually has feelings for Star, or if he’s just possessive for the hell
of it. I mentioned this before, but he seriously has SO MUCH sexual energy towards Michael
that it’s bizarre to me they didn’t explore it more. I guess it was 1987 and the world wasn’t ready
for that, but I actually looked up some Lost Boys fun facts, and the name “Michael” is said
LITERALLY 118 TIMES IN THIS MOVIE, and I would wager that Baby Jack Bauer says
probably 100 of them. He legit spends the whole movie running around crying Michael’s name,
whispering into the darkness: “You’re one of us now, Michael.”

But that doesn’t even make any sense, because if we’re to believe Star’s confession, Michael
was supposed to be her rst kill? So why the fuck did Baby Jack Bauer turn him into a vampire
in the rst place, if they were just gonna use him as a murder victim?? Was that the original
plan, but then Baby Jack Bauer caught feelings? Or did he sense that Michael on some level
yearned for a sense of home or belonging? Which would’ve been 100% projected, because
Michael literally displays ZERO evidence of having ANY strong personality traits, let alone
FEELINGS, except for some Light Teen Angst. (And btw, I’m not even going to waste a perfectly
good rant on Michael because he is somehow the LEAST dynamic character out of
EVERYONE, which is almost more disappointing than Baby Jack Bauer.

Instead, I’d like to channel my ranty energy instead towards a Brief History of the Bad Boy,
because it’s such a crucial part of modern story-telling and, when done correctly, it can be
ICONIC. …And when done lazily, it just LOOKS iconic.

While watching this movie, I found myself asking this question a lot: WHY is Kiefer Sutherland
so good looking? I mean seriously, like WHY do we, on some instinctive level, nd leather
jackets and motorcycles and unconventional hair cuts attractive? To be clear, I have no desire of
dating someone like that - actually, if anything, my journey with gender expression has brought
me closer to the side of “I want to BE him” rather than “I want to be ON him” - but again, I’m
really stuck on the WHY of it all. Do we just nd leather and motorcycles sexually attractive

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 because we’ve been conditioned to? The short answer, I think, is yes. But let’s go a bit further
back:

The Bad Boy has existed since the dawn of storytelling, and his whole essence can pretty much
be summed up with one of Satan’s famous lines from Milton’s Paradise Lost: “Better to reign in
Hell than to serve in Heaven.” The Bad Boy as gone through a myriad of transitions, but it pretty
much always comes back to that core root. In the 30s and 40s, the Bad Boy was a gangster:
usually a criminal, he broke the law and broke hearts. But Hollywood studios were still fairly
puritanical back then, and adhered to a strict code of ethics - actions had to have
consequences. So the Bad Boy almost always got his comeuppance, and almost never got the
girl: think of Humphrey Boggart in Casablanca.

But by the 50s, people got a little tired of the black and white narrative of morality that
Hollywood’s brand of censorship was spinning, which is when we start to see the evolution of
the Bad Boy as more of a sympathetic, even tragic gure: like Marlon Brando in Streetcar
Named Desire, and James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause. It was during this time that the Bad
Boy started showed his soft side too, like Brando crying “Stella!”, or Dean crying “You’re tearing
me apart!

Fun fact: fashion historians site those movies in particular as starting the trend of the plain white
tee. Up until the 50s, a white t-shirt or tank was considered an undergarment. (And I’m calling it
a tank top because I REFUSE - as hard as it is - to perpetuate the practice of calling it a “wife
beater.” I know that’s what we all know them as, and I say it all the time without even thinking
about it, but that’s an ugly word! It is an UGLY thing to say. We GOTTA STOP SAYING IT. It’s
actually technically called an “a-shirt,” but that’s just the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, I’m not
doing that. It’s a tank top. I’m calling it a TANK TOP.) Some speculate that it was supposed to be
subconsciously indicative of their inner vulnerability, or perhaps just an outward example of how
they shirked societal norms and expectations. Regardless, by the 60s, the white shirt became
the iconic uniform for the Bad Boy.

But the 60s also gave us a different brand of the character: the Rat Pack Bad Boy, who liked
fast cars, fast women, and who was always the life of the party. Like Beatrice says in the 1960

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 lm Oceans 11, “You could never love a woman like you love danger.” I think it’s safe to say that
one of the central branches of the archetype - James Bond - also falls into this category.

The Bad Boy has endured across eras and styles, and every decade has their own versions of
him: the 80s had Dylan McCay in Beverly Hills, Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club, Han Solo
and Indiana Jones. The 90s gave us James Franco in Freaks & Geeks, Spike and Angel from
Buffy. In the 2000s it started with Tyler Durden in Fight Club, then became a bit more
mainstream with characters like Jess in Gilmore Girls, Chuck in Gossip Girl, and Barney in
HIMYM. And in the 2010s you have Fifty Shades of Grey, Twilight I guess, Hugh Laurie in
House… I could literally go on forever, but I think you get the idea.

So what are the key components? What are the crucial ingredients that must be present for a
character to universally qualify as an of cial Bad Boy? And more to the point, WHY do we nd
him attractive? Well, if you haven’t learned by now, it’s another both/and thing. I pretty much
said them all already, but the building blocks for the Bad Boy generally mean that he doesn’t
follow authority or social norms, he’s a deviant of some kind, he doesn’t care about the things
that “normal” people care about, he often looks like he doesn’t care about anything… But in my
opinion, the difference between the “Bad Boy” and the “bad guy” is that the Bad Boy really does
care about something - usually the girl, or his friends, sometimes it’s his job, or just “honor” in
general - but he has to give a shit about something. If he doesn’t, then he’s a Bad Guy, he’s the
villain, right? I mean these are REALLY overgeneralized, broad strokes, but you get the idea.
The Bad Boy is always revealed to actually have some kind of special interest - even if it’s
nihilistic or pretentious - but he’s almost always intelligent, and more importantly, he has a
moment where he gets to use that intelligence and all the strength he gets from his angst and
devil-may-care-attitude to save the day.

It’s impossible to talk about this without including what is perhaps the single most important
element of the Bad Boy: he absolutely has to be good looking. Why do we nd Bad Boys
attractive? BECAUSE THEY’RE CAST THAT WAY. He always starts out as being
misunderstood, or even perceived as evil, but he lures us in with eeting glimpses of a softer
side or something more, and we ultimately forgive him for everything BECAUSE HE IS
PRETTY. (And if you’re thinking back to how included Hugh Laurie from House in my list I am
KEEPING HIM THERE because I nd Hugh Laurie VERY ATTRACTIVE and I will NOT

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 apologize for it.) Like seriously, try to imagine for one second if James Bond was ugly. Again, I’m
using these really over-simpli ed terms like “pretty” and “ugly” which are super subjective, but
like, you know what I’m saying. If Jess from Gilmore Girls had been overweight and struggled
with acne, do you really think Rory would’ve left Dean for him? Fuck no. If Han Solo wasn’t a
hunk, Princess Leia probably would’ve ended up sleeping with her brother; and James Bond
would NEVER have gotten laid.

So when you really break it all down, the Bad Boy is actually a fucking terrible trope, and I think
it’s a good thing that we’re seeing him less and less - or at least, we’re beginning to see deeper
evolutions of his character. Because frankly, he’s just abusing the privilege of being attractive to
gas light audiences, which is as harmful to men as it is to women. Women can’t help being
socially conditioned to nd motorcycles and leather and stupid fucking earrings to be inherently
sexy, and men can’t help being inundated with the statistically disproven theory that “nice guys
nish last.” I can’t believe this is actually the rst time I’m saying this, but THANK GOD for
Schitt’s Creek, right?? Now there’s a show actually lled with “good guy” characters who don’t
nish last (and a sexy bad boy who DOES - remember Mutt? Yeah, no one does, screw that
guy). The men on that show develop and grow, and exist within a narrative that doesn’t assume
a relationship is a direct reward for good behavior.

But more to the point: maybe this is just my social conditioning talking, but I’d like to think that
there’s at least a little kernel of something good to the existence of this character too. If you
ignore the privilege and arrogance and not so subtle vigilantism, the Bad Boy can, in his
simplest form, challenge us to do the right thing even if no one else believes it’s right. Yes, the
Bad Boy almost always does this in the worst and often rudest way possible, and I absolutely
believe there’s always a way to behave with integrity and not be a dick about it, but it’s also nice
to be reminded that sometimes doing the “right thing” can actually suck, or be really hard, or
alienate you from the people you love, but it’s still worth doing. …And just to be clear, I am NOT
including “Batman Antics” in this. I have a whole rant about Batman and we don’t have time for
that today, but like, when I say “doing the right thing,” I don’t mean torturing and killing people
because cops “aren’t allowed” to do that, like that’s NOT what I mean.

ALL OF THIS TO SAY: Baby Jack Bauer isn’t actually a well-written character, he’s just a really
well-dressed one.

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)

 Okay, now there’s two more things I really want to dive into next: the vampire lore and the family
dynamics, and both are gonna touch on some of my general issues with the plot of this lm. For
starters, THE LORE! To be clear, I fully accept and even applaud when new vampire stories
expand on the traditional rules of vampirism. It would be totally boring if every single vamp story
had identical criteria, right? But I guess what bummed me out about this interpretation is that - if
you really think about it - if it weren’t for Edgar and Allen telling us at the beginning of the movie
that there are vampires everywhere, we really wouldn’t have known that Baby Jack Bauer and
his gang were vampires until about an hour into the movie. And obviously I know that good
lmmaking is more showing than telling, but like, what actually makes them vampires? We don’t
see a single fang until they “vamp out” a full 45 minutes in during that scene at the beach
bon re when they’re trying to get Michael to make his rst kill, and even then, they don’t even
bite anyone’s neck! For some reason, Baby Jack Bauer bites some guy’s HEAD?!

Which brings me to my next complaint, which is their whole interpretation of “turning” someone.
Traditionally, a vampire can sire a human by biting them, draining them of their blood, and then
the human drinks the vampire’s blood. Right? Those have pretty much always been the rules?
In The Lost Boys, Michael is NEVER bitten. They just bring him down to their cool seaside
dungeon mansion and offer him a bottle of “wine” which turns out to be Baby Jack Bauer’s
blood. So, okay, all you need to turn into a vampire is to drink a vampire’s blood - but that
doesn’t actually turn you into a vampire, it just turns you into a HALF VAMPIRE? Which is
something I have never fucking heard of? And if I’m being honest with myself, that part doesn’t
actually even bother me that much, because in theory, it’s kind of a cool, interesting new idea:
you don’t complete your transformation until you’ve murdered, and there’s something intriguing
about that, how the ritual isn’t complete until there’s been a sacri ce. Like that I can kind of start
to vibe with… But I have follow up questions: what if a Half Vampire never murders anyone? Do
they just live in weird, pre-vamp puberty purgatory for the rest of their lives? Or is there, like, an
expiration date on how long you can exist as a Half Vamp?

They KIND OF come up with an answer to this, because obviously they need Michael (and Star
and the child vampire) to be “cured” by the end of the movie. But the loophole they wrote makes
no fucking logistical sense. And YES I REALIZE this is literally categorized as a “horror comedy”
and it’s not supposed to make perfect sense, but it could make a LITTLE more sense. There are

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 PLENTY of horror/fantasy/sci- stories out there with equally whimsical creatures and
characters - vampires included - that manage to still somewhat exist between logic and
suspended disbelief. So the solution offered in the lm is that if you kill the Head Vampire, then
all the Half Vampires sired by him will stop being vampires. NOW I REALLY HAVE FOLLOW UP
QUESTIONS.

FIRST OF ALL: HOW THE FUCK DO YOU GET TO BE A HEAD VAMPIRE? What is the
criteria? Is there a council of vampires that nominates you after a certain number of kills? Once
you’ve gotten Vampire of the Month 12 times, then you get a promotion? Is there vampire
tenure??? And more to the point, the rule is that if the Head Vampire dies, then all the Half
Vampires he created cease to be Half Vampires anymore. But Max didn’t turn Michael and Star
and the kid into Half Vampires, Baby Jack Bauer did… They *sort of* get around that by
indicating that if you’ve invited a Head Vamp into your house, then all his sired vamps are, by
extension, invited too. So, okay, I’m actually ne with that, that makes sense. But then by the
same logic, once the Head Vamp dies, then ALL of the vampire sons he created - AND all the
Half Vamps that his vampire sons created - should also die, RIGHT!? It doesn’t make any sense
that when the Head Vamp dies, the Half Vamps return to their human state - according to the
premise they’ve set up, it would make way more sense if ALL the Half Vamps died along with
him. RIGHT?! This is why you shouldn’t have Half Vampires, the rules just get too confusing!!

Frankly I think their biggest error was introducing the concept of “If you kill the head, you kill the
body.” Lest ye forget, Game of Thrones also fell into this tricky little mire, and while it served for
some VERY cool visuals - SPOILER ALERT - when the Ice King died, all the White Walkers
died - but as awesome as that looked, everyone watching knew deep down that it didn’t actually
make any fucking sense. Like, okay, maybe it made sense that killing the King would kill ALL the
others, but they extended the rule so that if you killed ANY White Walker, then every single
White Walker that was created by the one you killed would also die. But by that logic, every time
you killed a White Walker, like 10,000 of them should also die. Right??

I keep asking if I’m right because the math part is obviously a bit lost on me, but one of my
favorite fun facts in the world of vampirism is that in 2006, a physics professor at the University
of Florida actually wrote a fucking paper arguing that it was mathematically impossible for
vampires to exist, based on exactly what I’m talking about, which is something called “geometric

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 progression.” Essentially, in the paper, this professor theorized that if the rst vampire had
appeared on January 1, 1600, and only fed ONCE a month (which we can all agree is pretty
low), and if every victim turned into a vampire, then within only TWO AND A HALF YEARS, the
entire human population would’ve become vampires.1 Obviously the most glaring aw in this
theory is that every vampire victim is sired, and I don’t think that’s realistic. From pretty much all
the lore we see, vampires kill a lot more than they sire. But still, I just low key love that someone
actually tried to use math to disprove vampires.

So really I guess it was just the whole Half Vampire / Head Vampire thing that bugs me about
their lore, and the fact that no one actually gets bitten in the neck, which weirdly gave me like
blue balls of the jugular? The rest was pretty par for the course - vampires don’t like garlic, they
can be burned by holy water and sunlight, and they don’t have re ections (or at least Half
Vampires have very translucent re ections). They had a few quirks thrown in there, which
weren’t necessarily brand new to the world, but they weren’t my favorite: namely, the vampires
in this world can y and eat food. I actually kind of had to check myself though, because I was
totally bitching about how stupid I thought it was that they could y, but then the next night I
watched What We Do In the Shadows (I’m obviously on a vampire kick right now) and the
vampires in that movie y too, and it doesn’t bother me, so I think I was just kind of annoyed that
they never SHOWED the vampires in The Lost Boys ying. Which admittedly isn’t fair, because
we all know they didn’t have good enough technology for that in 1987, and it was actually a
really smart idea to show the vamps ying from their perspective so that as an audience we
knew they were ying, but we were never actually taken out of the story by how jarring the poor
special effects would’ve been. And actually, it’s never disclosed if they y as humans or if they
transform into bats and then y - but I think we can assume they stay in human form, because
they’re able to like swoop down and pick up victims while ying, which would be really hard to
do in bat form? Also we later see them in the cave sleeping, hanging upside down like bats, in
human form. Which again, that was like a cute, quirky spin on vampirism, and I’ll allow it.

I do have mixed feelings about vampires eating food though, and I guess I’m really having to
confront the possibility that I’m a vampire purist? Which I hate, because I don’t want to be a
purist of anything, purists are the worst! I can be open minded! I guess what bothers about
vampires eating food - and I should actually digress here for a second and explain that if I really

1 Math vs. vampires: vampires lose, world-science.net, 25 October 2006.

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 think about it, I’m okay with vampires eating food in TV shows, because it’s just too long a
format for vampires to literally never eat food, right? And it can afford for some hilarious,
relatable, endearing moments - the one that comes to mind the strongest is, of course, Spike
and his love of the Blooming Onions at The Bronze in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Like it’s
hilarious that a vampire (who allegedly can’t eat garlic?) has a soft spot for a deep fried onion
(Which actually, now that I think about it, makes me wonder about the whole garlic thing? Are
they vulnerable to all nightshades or JUST garlic?? More on that in a minute…) But anyway, the
real reason that vampires eating food bothers is because of something that bothers me in ALL
movies, and it’s something I have avoided bringing up until now because I’m afraid the world is
going to think I’m a huge fucking weirdo for low key obsessing over this, but I think I can put it
off no longer:

If vampires can eat food, THEN THAT MEANS THEY MUST POOP. HOW DO THEY POOP?
WHERE DO THEY POOP? WHEN DO THEY POOP?

I am not proud of the fact that these are the kinds of questions that plague me when I lie in bed
at night, but they do. Watching the TV show Lost? WHERE DO THEY POOP? Anytime a
character is in prison somewhere, locked in a cage: WHERE DO THEY POOP? Kate and
Sawyer were in those polar bear cages for weeks! And then she snuck into his cage to fuck him!
WHERE WAS THE POOP? And speaking of Game of Thrones, Bran Stark was in a fucking
coma for a MONTH after being knocked out of the tower, lying in that big beautiful bed with all
the wolf skin blankies: WHERE DID HE POOP? And Jamie Lannister was literally chained to
that fucking pole in the Stark camp for like, 10 months: WAS HE JUST POOPING HIS PANTS?
And the question WE’VE ALL BEEN WONDERING, WHEN DID ADULT JACK BAUER POOP?
During the commercial breaks? I don’t think so! Because 99% of the time, he’s traveling
somewhere during the commercial breaks, and I never see him go to the bathroom at CTU! Part
of the reason I was inspired to watch The Lost Boys is because I just re-watched the rst
season of 24 because I hadn’t seen it since I watched it in REAL TIME - which by the way is
horrifying, because FUN FACT it came out the same year as 9/11, and they almost didn’t
release the show at all, because the PILOT EPISODE includes a woman (played by The L
Word’s Mia Kirshner) BLOWING UP A PLANE and the producers were like “We can’t fucking air
this show” and then the Execs were like “No, America needs this show right now” - and I’m
honestly just horri ed that my parents let me watch it at all (in their defense, I remember getting

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 kicked out of the TV room a lot, but still). Anyway, I actually only wanted to watch it because I
was talking to my partner about how I literally couldn’t think of any authentic or remotely realistic
portrayals of Autistic women characters in popular lm or television, but then I remembered
fucking CHLOE from 24! Who is TOTALLY Autistic!!! But I forgot she’s not actually in the show
until the 3rd season, so we watched the rst, then skipped to the 3rd, but frankly the whole show
now just feels a lot like the worst kind of Republican, pro-vigilante, ‘Murica- avored propaganda,
and we legit couldn’t stomach it, not even for Chloe.

BUT THE POINT IS!!! It just REALLY stresses me out when, in lm and television, I am
presented with a situation in which characters have limited or zero access to any facilities, and
it’s never addressed WHEN or WHERE THEY POOP. At least in Misery, when James Caan is
strapped to that bed, there’s a moment where he hands Annie Wilkes a little plastic bottle that
he’s been peeing into. I’M SORRY, I DON’T KNOW WHY I’M LIKE THIS, IT JUST REALLY
STRESSES ME OUT.

ERGO, by all this logic: if vampires can eat FOOD, and DIGEST IT? That means THEY MUST
POOP. And I for one have never seen that detail included in any vampire lore that allows for
creatures of the night to eat food. So, as funny as Spike’s love of Blooming Onions is, it just
seems a lot easier to have vampires not eat at all. But tbh I don’t hold that against The Lost
Boys because I fully realize this whole thing is really more of a “me problem.”

ANY FUCKING WAY, I would like now to take a little journey down the rabbit hole of “Where Did
All That Vampire Lore Come From?” Because the progression we’ve made across cultures and
eras is actually super fascinating!

Vampires have existed in folklore for literal CENTURIES. Almost every culture and country in
the world has some version of the vampire - in India it was the “vetalas,” a ghoulish being that
inhabited corpses. In Persia it was a blood sucking demon; in ancient Babylon and Assyria, she
was Lilitu, an extension of the myth of the baby-kidnapping Lilith from Hebrew demonology. The
Medieval era called them succubi; and modern Mexican folklore still calls it the “chupacabra,” a
creature that feeds on the blood of animals. But it really wasn’t until very recently in folkloric
history that we thought of vampires as being pale and gaunt and, well, goth. In the earliest
iterations of the vampire, they were thought to be ruddy and rosy-cheeked. But why?

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 WELL in his book Vampires, Burial and Death, Paul Barber theorizes that beliefs in vampires
resulted from people of pre-industrial societies attempting to explain the natural, but to them
inexplicable, process of death and decomposition. Basically, we didn’t fucking know anything
about death, and we somehow knew even LESS about the human body!

So you know how when a body dies, there’s like gasses and shit that build up inside? All the
blood and bile inside of us rises to the surface - to our skin - and for a brief period right after
someone dies, their skin can actually appear rosy and very much alive. There have been cases
in history where vampirism was suspected because people who suffered from malnutrition and
had a gaunt or pale appearance actually looked healthier after they died. Which would
admittedly be very confusing. It’s also not uncommon for some of these gasses to release from
the corpse, resulting in a dead body that’s still burping and coughing. So yeah, if you didn’t
know anything about how the body worked, I can imagine how that would be really fucking
unsettling, and depending on the level of atulence from your dearly departed loved on, prompt
you think that maybe there was something still alive in there.

Along those lines - here’s a fun fact that blew my goddamn mind! I had always thought (and
stupidly never questioned!) the urban legend that after you die, your hair and ngernails keep
growing. Like, I didn’t even think that was an urban legend, I genuinely thought it was just a
weird fact. It fucking isn’t! It’s not true at all! What happens is that your gums and cuticles
recede, and your skin basically starts to shrink. Gross comparison, but think of how a dried
apple looks? The point is - after all the bloating and gas and blood comes to the surface, when a
body really starts to decompose - it contracts, which just gives the APPEARANCE of nails and
hair growing posthumously. Again, if you didn’t know anything about how bodies worked, I
actually sympathize with the fear that something evil was happening.

Because the fact of the matter is, death was a much bigger part of people’s lives back then than
it is today. Death was everywhere. People didn’t live very long, and they were constantly nd
new ways in which people could die. Ate the wrong plant? Dead. Went outside without a jacket?
Dead. Like, imagine fucking brain aneurisms back then. No wonder people were constantly
afraid of God smiting random sinners. Before any comprehensive understanding of medicine

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 and the body existed, we had nothing except experience and random guesses to base our
beliefs on.

On a related note, premature burial was also a thing that happened. People back in Game of
Thrones times didn’t know what a fucking coma was. I mean sure, they understood that if you
stopped breathing, you were dead, but imagine if you lived in a really rural part of the world,
super isolated, no doctor for miles, and someone slipped into a coma, or was unconscious for a
long period of time. Their breath would get really shallow, and sometimes, people would be
declared dead when they were very much alive. Now imagine that it’s winter, and the ground is
too cold to shovel, so you can only dig a very shallow grave. AND THEN IMAGINE that the
person in a coma fucking WOKE UP and DUG THEIR WAY OUT OF THEIR OWN SHALLOW
GRAVE! Yeah, that’s a fucking story that would probably be told for literal generations. Even
more terrifying, we know that people were accidentally buried alive because grave robbers
would sometimes open up a cof n and nd fucking SCRATCH MARKS on the inside of the lid!
OH MY GOD. And because of this exact very legitimate fear, it was actually not a super
uncommon thing in Victorian graveyards for a little bell to be fashioned above the tomb, with a
chain leading underground into the cof n! So just in case you accidentally got buried alive, you
could ring a little bell and be like “Hey! I’m not dead yet! Help!”

Some historians even speculate that some of the lore surrounding wooden stakes killing
vampires can be traced back to some of these small, cold, rural towns, where it would get too
cold to dig a proper grave, and if you were super unlucky, the rainy season would come, and
wash up your shallow grave, and then you’d wander around town and be like “oh shit, that’s my
dead dad’s leg.” So it wasn’t uncommon for some folks to actually stake a dead body into the
ground with a wooden or metal pole of some kind, so that even if their grave was washed up,
the dead body wouldn’t go anywhere.

Of course, for a lot of superstitious folks, they would do that anyway, just for fun! People were so
afraid of their loved ones returning as demon-possessed vampires that they would build little
cages around the grave site, bury them upside down, or in some really weird cases, scatter a
bunch of seeds or rice around the grave because some people thought that demons had
something called “arithmomania,” which means they were like, really obsessed with counting
shit? And would be incapable of stopping themselves and have to compulsively count every

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 single grain or seed before going on their way to kill people or something. I don’t know where
the idea of vampires liking counting came from, but… Holy fuck, is that where Sesame Street
got the idea??!??!?!?!?!?!?

Now for the whole garlic thing, there’s actually a really sad but logical explanation. Historians
have speculated that another reason why people believed in vampires for so long was because
of contagious diseases. Again, people did not fucking understand how germs worked (I mean,
people NOW don’t even understand how they work…) like we didn’t even know about our own
circulatory systems until like VERY recently in history, so I can imagine how a super infectious
disease would feel like the end of the world. Both the Bubonic Plague and Tuberculosis can
make people cough up blood, which de nitely didn’t help with the whole fear of demon-
possession thing. But there’s one infectious disease in particular that’s responsible for a lot of
vampire folklore, and when you think about it, it actually makes a lot of sense: rabies. Rabies
makes you sensitive to light, it disrupts your normal sleep patterns, it makes you snarl and foam
at the mouth, and if it goes on long enough, it starts to give you brain damage which can result
in previously uncharacteristic hyper-sexuality. Rabies also gives you a deep aversion to
GARLIC and a fear of water, and I wonder if that contributed to the whole Holy Water thing? And
what are the animals that are most commonly associated with spreading rabies - wolves and
bats, the same animals that are ALSO pretty unanimously culturally associated with vampires.

The ONE thing that has always bugged me about vampire lore that doesn’t make any sense is
the perpetuation of the myth that they have no re ections in mirrors. The reason why this whole
belief started is that old mirrors were traditionally backed with silver, which was a pure metal;
and it was commonly believed that any dark or demonic creature would have an aversion to
pure metals, because they were impure or something? I guess now that I think about it it doesn’t
actually have a lot to stand on, because vampires like virgins who are pure, so it doesn’t make
sense that they would be okay with that but then take issue with pure metals? BUT!!!! Modern
mirrors are actually backed with ALUMINUM! Which is NOT a pure metal!! Which means that
theoretically, vampires should be able to see themselves in a modern mirror.

I have several more vampire movies on my list so I don’t wanna blow all my fun facts in this
episode, but there’s a light little introduction for you on the wonderful world of Vampirism.

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 And now, if all you die-hard Lost Boys fans haven’t given up on me and turned this podcast off
by now, I would like to conclude with the part of this story that while it still isn’t my favorite, I
actually do really appreciate: the family dynamic. It honestly should’ve been more obvious to me
going into this, but The Lost Boys is essentially a re-telling of Peter Pan. Like that’s where the
name comes from, Peter’s tribe of rascals in Neverland called themselves The Lost Boys. And
actually in the original screenplay, the story centered on a bunch of “Goonies-type 5th and 6th
grade kid vampires,” and the vampire hunting brothers were 8 year old cub scouts. The
inspiration started with how Peter Pan could y and never got old, and the writers were like
“okay, so Peter’s a vampire,” and then just went from there. And in the original Peter Pan story,
Peter actually KILLS any of The Lost Boys who try to leave Neverland, which is super fucking
dark, so the whole parallel between Peter Pan and vampires actually makes total sense to me.
In the rst draft, David’s name was actually Peter. Obviously a lot more changes were made,
most signi cantly that director Joel Schumacher thought it would “sexier and more interesting” if
they were all teenagers instead.

And he wasn’t really wrong, it is de nitely sexier… But here’s the thing: I don’t like Peter Pan. I
never liked Peter Pan. Even as a kid, I just didn’t get it. I wasn’t into it. I hated being a kid. I
didn’t like other kids when I was a kid. I hated being at the kid’s table, I wanted to be at the
adult’s table. I was the kid who desperately wanted to grow up. So the whole concept of Peter
Pan was really lost on me. The idea of staying a child forever sounded like torture. For better or
for worse, I was a Wendy, not a Peter. And I think the people who liked Peter Pan are the same
people who like The Lost Boys. And that’s okay! Absolutely no shade; I’m not trying to yuck
anyone’s yum here.

But I do think that’s a really interesting parallel and I want to explore that a bit. Mostly: why do
some people like Peter Pan so fucking much? Like it’s really kind of a personality trait, don’t you
think? The people who like Peter Pan are kinda like the people who like the color purple; like
they never do it in a chill way. And maybe I’m just over generalizing or projecting my own
agenda here, but I also feel like you can kind of divide the most common reactions of having a
shitty childhood into two camps: Peter or Wendy. And let me be clear, when I say “trauma” I’m
not just talking about getting molested or something. The de ning characteristic of PTSD is that
there was an event that made a lasting, devastating impression on you. That could mean getting
molested, but it could also mean moving around a lot. The death of a parent. The death of a pet.

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 For a lot of kids, myself included, it was Religious Trauma, which is a very real and lasting
experience. The point is, trauma happens to everyone, and when it happens to you at a very
young age in a way that really affects your childhood experience, I think there tends to be two
kind of major reactions to that: one, you’re pissed that your childhood got taken away from you,
and you want it back. So you grow up constantly yearning for and clinging to the childhood
experience that you missed out on. And I think the second is that you realize at a very young
age that shit is fucked up, and you’re like, “Okay, if this is how the fuck things are, then I don’t
want any part of it, I want to stop being a child immediately, get me away from this place where
bad things happen, I just want to be an adult so I have some agency.” And related to that, at
least for me, was also a sense of “I need to grow up so I can take care of all the other people in
my family who are also struggling from all this trauma.”

I, obviously, am in the second camp, Team Wendy. But Team Peter is totally valid too, and is not
synonymous with being immature or emotionally stunted. It just means you want what was
taken from you, and I actually totally respect that. And to be fair, I probably have more of Team
Peter in me than I really let on… The point is, I get it. I don’t personally fuck with “it,” but I can
wholeheartedly fuck with people who fuck with “it.”

TO CONCLUDE I want to read an excerpt from this really incredible article that came out a few
years ago on the 30 year anniversary of the lm, called “The Lost Boys’ Subtly Radical Vision of
Family: The 1987 vampire horror-comedy debuted at a time when America was preoccupied
with the evolution of traditional kinship bonds” by Brandon Tensley for The Atlantic, because he
sums it all up better than I can:

“Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys—which turns 30 years old this week—has, in some
respects, the very things you’d want from a 1980s horror-comedy: big-haired vampires, noisy
motorcycles, big-haired vampires riding noisy motorcycles, Corey Feldman. …But The Lost
Boys offers much more than style, nostalgia, and genre thrills. At its core, Schumacher’s lm is
a remarkably prescient tale that mines the complexities of kinship. The movie’s portrayal of a
seemingly wayward mother and her adolescent sons debuted at a time when many Americans
feared the deterioration of traditional dynamics in the home—between parent and child,
husband and wife. More so than the other lms of its era, The Lost Boys subtly challenged
dominant cultural expectations that saw the nuclear family as a social and moral ideal.

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 While the story might sound straightforward enough, it’s worth adding a bit of historical
context. The Lost Boys was released amid a new wave of American conservatism that had
begun gaining momentum near the end of the ’70s. …The Lost Boys offers a vision at odds with
the prevailing socio-political narratives of the Reagan era. …The embattled Michael is caught in
a tug-of-war between his biological (or “blood”) family and the sort of “chosen” family that has
formed around the lead vampire David and his ilk. The lm’s title, which is a reference to
characters in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, de es clear interpretation. Are the lost boys supposed to
be Michael and Sam? Or the vampires? And if it’s the latter, what precisely makes them lost? Is
it their status as undead beings—or the fact that they don’t conform to a conventional family
arrangement?

The Lost Boys hinges on repudiations and reversals of the nuclear family structure, with
perhaps the best example coming from the character of Max. Tall and bookish, he’s Lucy’s love
interest, favorably observing throughout the lm that Lucy has a “generous nature” and is a
“protecting mother.” Later on, during the nal balletic, bloody showdown, it’s revealed why Max
has been laying on the gendered remarks so thick: He’s the head vampire, on the hunt for that
primordial symbol of domesticity—a mother for his boys. …Many elements of the plot, including
Lucy’s search for a father-like partner, may seem more conventional. But The Lost Boys is too
clever to buy fully into this genre trapping, even if the plot seems to operate in one register.
Consider how absurdly the vampire kingpin Max is taken out: impaled on a wooden fence post
when Grandpa’s truck careens into the house. Max is comedically blown to smithereens—as is,
the lm implies, his power as the gang’s father gure.

Thirty years after The Lost Boys’ release, it’s easy to take the movie’s forward-thinking vision of
kinship for granted. After all, the look of American families has changed dramatically over the
decades—there isn’t even an overarching family type anymore. Yet the lm questions many of
the moral assumptions attached to ideas that endure today, including the belief that the “stable
two parent family” is still the best arrangement for children. While The Lost Boys might not be

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 the most popular vampire tale in the canon, its bracing brew of quiet commentary and genre
reinvention certainly puts it among the most memorable.”2

…And for those reasons, I now have a deeper appreciation for the lm. It’s a movie about
Found Family, and despite my other grievances, that’s something I can de nitely fuck with. That,
of course, and Kiefer Sutherland’s bleached mullet.

WELL SHIT these episodes just keep getting longer and longer, don’t they? Turns out I have a
lot of fucking things to say! If you also have things to say, you should tell them to me! You can
always email me at screentimewithsarahruthless@gmail.com, or hit me up on Instagram
@screentimewithsarahruthless or on Twitter at @ruthlessscreen. As always, that is Sarah with
an H, spelled correctly… And I, as always, am your humble host, and that is all folks

2 Tensley, Brandon. “The Lost Boys’ Subtly Radical Vision of Family: The 1987 vampire horror-
comedy debuted at a time when America was preoccupied with the evolution of traditional
kinship bonds.” TheAtlantic.com. Aug. 2, 2017.

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