the farthest thing that could be in my
consciousness.” He was going to turn it down,
but then went for a run and a wave of ideas hit
him. Instead of a cave, he thought that the
vampires could live in an old Victorian hotel that
had crumbled into the San Andreas Fault during
the 1906 earthquake. They should be in their late
teens, and look like “a British gypsy band”, riding
stripped-down motorcycles. With cylinders
fi ring, and the greenlight to reconfi gure it all
with Boam, he took the job.
“I wanted to make a movie that I would want
to see,” Schumacher says. The whole vampire
thing was, he believed, an oral-sex metaphor
anyway. “Dracula dresses in dinner clothes,” he
explains. “Quite elegant. And he appears at the
windows of beautiful young women, where he
systematically sucks the fl uid from their bodies,
making them his slaves. What else could it be a
metaphor for? And vampires can be gorgeous.”
He wanted his vampires to be sexy, he says.
With Kiefer Sutherland (as vampire leader
David) and Jason Patric (as new guy Michael,
whom the gang ensnare) going toe to toe,
surrounded by the likes of Billy Wirth’s shirtless
vampire beefcake, the fi lm wouldn’t be short
of eye candy. “I thought, ‘I’m gonna put him in
a motorcycle jacket with no shirt on, and he is
gonna be a fabulous Lost Boy,’” says Schumacher
of Wirth. Patric suggested Jami Gertz for femalevampire Star. “I think he had a big crush on her,”
says Schumacher. “Well, who didn’t?” These
actors weren’t cast because they were pretty,
but it didn’t do any harm, the director maintains.
“I’ve been accused by journalists, right to my
face, of objectifying men and women sexually,”
he laughs. “And I say, ‘Do you have a problem
with that? What’s the bad part?! Why is that so
terrible?’”
Costume designer Susan Becker, meanwhile,
dressed the vampires in a mélange of clothes
from diff erent eras, hinting at their agelessness.
Make-up artist Ve Neill made their nails look
like razor-blades, for eff ective throat-slashing.
Sutherland had his hair cut on the sly, inspired
by Billy Idol’s peroxide spikes, which enraged
Schumacher at fi rst, but he came around to it.
“We all just opened up to the experience, we
embraced it,” he says. “Which is the only way
to make a movie. Don’t hold back.”
The studio wanted to hold back — just before
shooting, they got “cold feet”, claims Schumacher,
concerned that the cast were mostly unknowns,
and ordered a budget cut of $2 million. Most of
it came out of the art department, which meant
production designer Bo Welch had to be even
more creative, and corners were cut ingeniously.
A POV shot of a vampire shooting through the
clouds ended up being unused B-roll footage
Schumacher managed to wangle from Top Gun.
What’s more, the execs couldn’t understand what
sort of fi lm he was making. When they asked if it
was a horror or a comedy, he said, “Yes.”
Certain execs were also squirmy about the
genre element. “There was a bit of a shame factor
at Warner Bros.,” says Schumacher. “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.’” And so they did.SHOOTING BEGAN IN SANTA CRUZ
on 2 June 1986. “When I got there I thought, ‘This
is exactly where you would go if you were a teenage
vampire,’” Schumacher says. “Because you’ve got
the boardwalk, the beach, a lot of transient young
people, a lot of drug people and runaway kids all
over the place. Santa Cruz had more murders per
capita than anywhere else in the United States.
There was a murder outside of our hotel while
we were preparing the movie.” The Santa Cruz
authorities welcomed the crew, but didn’t want
to scare any more tourists away, so the town’s
on-screen name was changed to Santa Carla.
Shooting the boardwalk concert there,
for the sequence in which Michael meets the
vampires, was “a riot”, according to Schumacher,
hundreds of onlookers partying while topless
saxophonist Tim Cappello gyrated on stage.
The place stunk of pot. People clambered ❯Above: The louche Lost Boys: Paul (Brooke McCarter),
David (Kiefer Sutherland), Dwayne (Billy Wirth) and Marko
(Alex Winter). Joel Schumacher says that their look was
based on Duran Duran spin-off band Arcadia’s Election
Day video. Left: Schumacher with Jason Patric, Corey
Feldman, Corey Haim and Jamison Newlander.