A Film Canon

The Lost Boys consolidates the 80s inflection of vampire horror through parody, romantic comedy and teen subculture, presenting vampirism as an embodiment of MTV aesthetics. As such, the vampires that ravage the small coastal town of Santa Carla - led by David (Kiefer Sutherland) - are presented as stylistic cannibals, relentlessly co-opting a whole spectrum of subcultural signifiers that range from the 50s to the 80s, producing a streamlined alternative identity that perhaps explains why Sutherland's performance is so continually boring, anticlimactic and tired, and suggests kitsch as the cost of visibility. In fact, most of the vampires are relatively uninteresting as individuals - a fact that, combined with the dated special effects, means that they make most impact as a unified, ambient intensity; an extrapolation of the two spaces that anchor the film's aesthetic, and serve as synecdoches for Santa Carla itself - an impossibly sublime, neon-clad fairground, and a futuristic video store. Both form the basis for a recurrent, reticulated tracking-shot that combines the peculiar disorientations of roller coasters and fast-forwarding, and at times becomes sufficiently autonomous to produce something like films-within-the film; or, as its association with the haunting synth score might suggest, a series of music videos. It's a coolness that makes for an interesting contrast with the central narrative, in which a small family (Dianne Wiest, Jason Patric, Corey Feldman) returns to the town after a painful separation - and which, before Schumacher was cast as director, was aimed at a more Goodies-like aesthetic, perhaps explaining the comforting presence of Corey Haim and an unusual nostalgia for comic books. It's a contradictory, and at times atonal film - not quite scary or funny enough to be a consistent horror-comedy, nor extravagantly camp enough to really compensate - but only insofar as it gestures towards that connection between technology and the  nostalgia-image that  80s cinema feels so anxious to disavow.