Of all the holidays celebrated worldwide, no single day is loved by the Substream staff more than Halloween. With October’s arrival, the time has finally come to begin rolling out a slew of special features we have prepared in celebration of our favorite day.
31 Days Of Halloween is a recurring column that will run throughout the month of October. The goal of this series is to supply every Substream reader with a daily horror (or Halloween-themed) movie recommendation that is guaranteed to amplify your All Hallows’ Eve festivities. We’ll be watching every film the day it’s featured, and we hope you will follow along at home. Reader, beware, you’re in for a… spooky good time!
Day 11: The Lost Boys (1987)
In 2017, we are visually spoilt with numerous CGI-heavy horror/thriller spectacles including the likes of Alien: Covenant and the Stephen King remake of the 1990 cult classic It. However, rewind 30 years and the film industry was playing a whole different ball game. Sure, there were epic and awe-inducing films in the horror genre, but many were awkwardly detailed by puffy prosthetics, questionable Foley sounds and anything you could get with your tiny budget. So, tragically, compared to films released post-millennium, some horror films haven’t retained their desirability.
This is not to disregard all horror; the era did have some diamonds like Nightmare on Elm Street, The Evil Dead and The Shining. It was also in the same era that one of the best vampire films hit the screen; of course, I’m talking about The Lost Boys.
It’s a film that saw the likes of brothers Michael and Sam moving to the small beach town of Santa Clara with their recently divorced mother. What possibly could go wrong? Well, a lot of things: Cue the biker gang, weird Chinese food antics, and of course, vampires.
The film unfolds to see this quiet beach town turn into the shady underbelly of all the things your parents warned you about when you were growing up. However, lucky for Sam and Michael, they had the help from the infamous Frog Brothers played by Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander, who (with thanks to their never-ending comic book knowledge) help the boys out, but not before Michael gets mixed up with the blood-sucking-gang in hopes to—you guessed it—get the girl.
Now it may not be the scariest of all films, but it surely is one of the better teenage-aimed horror flicks you’ll feast your eyes on. In a new-age world where we see vampires sparkle and fall in love with pretty brunettes, it’s refreshing even after all this time to revisit a film which portrayed vampires like you would want them to be; ugly, scary and slightly sarcastic. Thank you, Kiefer Sutherland. (“What, you don’t like rice? Tell me Michael, how could a billion Chinese people be wrong?”) It’s true, The Lost Boys did deliver all you want from a vampire film, but let’s just forget the cringe-inducing sequels that followed shall we?
