The Lost Boys Weren’t Vampires
And other heresies from my Twitter
July 31 is the 32nd anniversary of the premiere of The Lost Boys; making it the “golden birthday+1” for that beloved piece of 80s teen homoerotic vampirism.
Transcribed, screenshotted, and annotated below is a hell of my own making, a tweetstorm advancing an incredibly unpopular theory as a way of highlighting one of the big recurring issue of this blog: how to define a vampire.
While The Lost Boys certainly had many of the surface-level characteristics of vampires: they burn in the sun, holy water is deadly, they have fangs. But that can describe a number of sinister mythological creatures. Do the Lost Boys meet the most basic defining principles of vampires?
I was sure to quickly state that every author is free to reinterpret the vampire. After all, save for their fashion sense, the best thing about vampires is their malleability.
The internet reacted as the internet does…
So the greater question became “At what point do we say ‘this archetype has been altered so much that it’s no longer the archetype, but something entirely different?’”
And what is that one thing, as I saw it?
And then, the blowback.
But, in a shocking departure from the way things usually work on the internet, the blowback was from people who actually know what they are talking about.
Like vampire podcaster and tour guide Rose Sinister:
Or, what’s this, a schooling from British professor Sam George, who convenes the Open Graves, Open Minds research project?
Rose Sinister wasn’t done with me yet:
That was a low blow. She knows LTROI is my favorite vampire movie. She knew how to hurt me and she used it.
But she didn’t sway me from my original thrust:
As if getting double-teamed by a professor of gothic studies and a podcaster extraordinaire weren’t enough to bloody me, THE Michelle Belanger, the Studs Terkel of the vampyre community and author of several books on the vampire codex, had to jump in for the finishing move.
If this mostly-screencapped blog feels like a rush job because I’d forgotten The Lost Boys’ birthday until the last minute… what are you, my aunt?
But hey, it’s good to see Alex Winter working again. Did you know that Sexy Sax Man is currently on tour supporting a new album? Now you do.
Happy Lost Boys Birthday! Stay Gold, LostBoy!
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Image Sources: someone who asked to be credited only as “Ben”, Twitter
