(LOST) BOYS N the 'HOOD

Sunday, June 14, 2026

(LOST) BOYS N the 'HOOD

40 years ago, Hollywood came to Santa Cruz

Forty years ago, this month, when Hollywood came to town to shoot a teenage vampire movie, nobody had any idea that The Lost Boys would become a cult phenomenon.

Sure, we locals loved it. The production crew was here for a couple of weeks, pouring Hollywood revenue into our hotels and restaurants, and employing hundreds of locals as extras. We loved seeing landmarks like Pogonip, the Boardwalk, and the train trestle over the river mouth up on the big screen.

What nobody could have predicted, was (fittingly enough, for a vampire movie) the extensive afterlife the movie would have beyond its original theatrical release — from midnight shows, revivals, and the advent of streaming, with its 24/7 access, all the way to Broadway, where an original stage musical adaptation just won four Tony Awards.

Little did we know, back in June 1986, when the movie was shot, what a cultural touchpoint it would become, not only in the annals of both vampire and teen angst movie genres, but as a snapshot of a very particular sort of hip 80s vibe. In which respect, director Joel Schumacher, cinematographer Michael Chapman, and production designer Bo Welch discovered that Santa Cruz was so ready for her close-up.

In the story, a recently divorced mom and her two teenage sons move from urban Phoenix to a sleepy California beach town to start a new life. Restless, 17-year-old Michael falls for a girl who runs with a seductive, yet sinister crowd of (literally) drop-dead cool kids who haunt the beachfront Boardwalk at night — and who turn out to be vampires. 14-year-old Sam starts hanging out at the local comic book store, where the owners' two tween sons try to convince him that vampires are running amok in the town, and enlist his aid in stamping out the bloodsucking menace.

Although the town is called Santa Carla in the movie, it taps into our early-'70s reputation as the "Murder Capital of the World," and the program of plastering the faces of missing children on milk cartons, to create a sense of real danger beneath the movie's teen comedy overtones. The plot turns on the scheming of glamorous alpha vampire, David, to induct Michael into their biker gang. The tagline — "Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It's fun to be a vampire." — references Peter Pan, from which the movie gets its title.

And if David is the Peter Pan figure in the movie, Santa Cruz is the Neverland.

From the first montage of Mom and the boys driving into town, with "People Are Strange," on the soundtrack, the fabled weirdness of our little burgh is on full display — drummers, dancers, street musicians, at least one snake-handler, surfers, punks, Goths, spikey Mohawks, and a panorama of jeans, leather, wetsuits, granny dresses, combat boots, and other items of trashy gypsy hipster chic. For a pivotal scene during a nighttime rock concert at the bandstand on the beach, the hundreds of locals hired as extras didn't even have to go through wardrobe and makeup — they already looked perfect!

Night scenes on the Boardwalk are shot around rippling tongues of flame, as if bonfires were lit just out of camera range. Life in Santa Carla is one long, non-stop party, framed in torchlight and neon, and powered by jangly calliope music and scorching rock 'n' roll.

One particular thing the filmmakers loved about shooting in Santa Cruz was they didn't have to build a comic bookshop from scratch. Enter Atlantis Fantasyworld, operated by co-owners Joe Ferrara and my Art Boy, James Aschbacher. Their original, pre-quake building on Lower Pacific was cavernous; it had been a grocery store in the 1920s, with solid wood plank floors and a two-story high ceiling. When the crew folded back the giant accordion doors out front, they could roll the klieg lights right inside. The huge, freestanding shelving units in the middle of the room could be rolled aside to accommodate the lights, camera, and action of dozens of crew members loitering around the periphery on any given shot.

The only problem was that Atlantis was not actually located on the Boardwalk, as the store in the movie is supposed to be. The solution was to build a replica section of the Boardwalk on the sidewalk in front of Atlantis, a plywood tunnel painted faded Boardwalk yellow, and complete with green benches, and the uber-eerie Laughing Sal automaton chortling right outside the door. When Schumacher decided there should be some graffiti on the wall outside the shop, he wielded the spray can himself. On the first day of shooting in the shop, production designer Welch marveled, "This is a monumental set to put up. You wouldn't even do this in TV!"

For three consecutive weekends, the faux Boardwalk facade was erected out on the sidewalk while the crew shot interiors inside the store. James and Joe auditioned to play the shop proprietors, but they didn't get the parts; Schumacher wanted a burnt-out hippie couple who slumped in front of the TV all day, instead of, you know, actually running the shop. But the two of them do appear in the movie for about six seconds, playing pinball in the background as Sam walks into the store. And the three of us got to hang out on set all three weekends, to discourage people from standing or walking on, or rolling equipment over the merchandise — and also ring up sales to crew members, who spend most of their time on movie sets waiting around to set up the next shot.

Forty years on, watching the movie again, I was surprised at how short it is (89 minutes), how remarkably uncomplicated by any multiple plot threads, and what a conventional horror-movie finale it has — especially if you buy into the subtext of youth yearning to make community with their found tribe. Still, it captures as evocative moment when Santa Cruz was (or was pereceived as) a fun and funky little beach town Neverland, with no delusions of metropolitan glamour. Those were the days, all right.