As we approach the best season of the year — because we all know Halloween lasts all month — we’re also approaching one of the best times of the year for revisiting old classics. Whether you’re a die-hard scary movie fan or just want to say hello to some of your favorite monsters, it’s time to start pulling out the DVDs (or VHS tapes, if you’re really old school), and, if you’re anything like me, Joel Schumacher’s seminal vampire classic The Lost Boys remains at the top of the stack every year.
The 1987 film helped to define a generation of monster movies, combining the glamorous excess of the ‘80s with the classic legend of the vampire for a bone-chilling tale of adventure and suspense. Stacked to the gills with a cast that includes heavy-hitters like Kiefer Sutherland, Jason Patric, Corey Feldman, and Corey Haim, the tale of blood-sucking demons haunting the California coast is now available on 4K Ultra HD, with a host of bonus features that give audiences an even better look at the genre mainstay, and how it brought some of cinema’s most memorable vampires to life.
Collider was lucky enough to sit down with star Alex Winter — also known for his roles in the Bill & Ted franchise, as well as his documentary work on projects like Zappa and Showbiz Kids — to chat a little bit about the film to celebrate its rerelease. During this interview, Winter discussed director Schumacher’s approach to telling a vampire story, as well as the horror films that influenced him as a child, the film’s legacy, and why he chose to go back to acting with his latest project, Destroy All Neighbors, coming to Shudder next year.
Check out the interview in the player above, or read a transcript down below, and be sure to pick up a copy of The Lost Boys on 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray.
COLLIDER: So nice to meet you, Alex. I'm so excited to talk to you about this movie, which has been formative for a lot of generations, myself included, as you can probably tell by the outfit.
ALEX WINTER: Yeah. I'm actually soaking in all the awesome art you have behind you, which is my whole world. Did you see Brett's movie [Moonage Daydream]?
I did, yeah! I reviewed it. It was incredible.
WINTER: So. Fricking. Good. I got to see it while he was just finishing the cut, and— oh, we’ve got limited time, so I don't want to just spin off, but I'm a Bowie fanatic, so I was like, "Brett, you could've literally just had a shot of his shoe for four hours, and I would've been happy." But what a great movie. Oh my God.
Same. Absolutely. But to kick into the questions here, I wanted to start off by kind of talking about how formative this film was for an entire generation of horror fans. I was curious, was there a horror film that was formative for you, either before you made Lost Boys, or something that has come along since, that changed the way that you look at the genre?
WINTER: Yeah. I mean, I came up…I was a cinephile, and I loved early…I loved James Whale, and Murnau, and all the sort of silents, and Dracula and Nosferatu, and Dreyer's Vampyr, and all that stuff, huge into all that. But I think Carpenter's The Thing was the big cultural game changer for most of me and my friends. I think as big a movie as Jaws was and Alien was, I think The Thing really sort of showed you the possibility of what you could do with the genre, and it really, I think, changed the game in a lot of ways, and certainly from a prosthetics and a practical makeup effects standpoint. It really spun the whole industry in a completely different direction, and certainly as a fan, it did that too.
You mentioned Nosferatu in there a little bit, and I wanted to know…Lost Boys kind of set the precedent for the sexy vampire trope, but when you're watching a monster film, whether it's vampires or something else, do you prefer when they're a little more human in that sense, or do you prefer when they're a little more Nosferatu, Salem's Lot kind of scary?
WINTER: I like both, because I think they're different. I really loved reading Dracula when I was a kid. I love the book. I love Polidori's Vampyre story, I loved old vampire stories. So, I don't think it's one thing or the other. I know there's a lot of now, and this isn't my world because I'm an older guy, but there's the Twilight vampire, or this vampire, people take to the street and fight this stuff out. But I like both.
But what I liked about Lost Boys when I read it was that Joel [Schumacher] was leaning in to a lot of where the vampire stories had come from, which were very erotic and kind of sexually ambiguous, and those things were not new. He married them to what was going on in that world in the '80s with fashion and music. But this idea of vampires being that, and to answer your question, you don't get that from Nosferatu, right? You get that a little bit from James Whale's stuff, because there was sexual stuff going on in the background of his movies, and I like that about Lost Boys. I like that Joel was leaning into that.
And that kind of thing has influenced, obviously a lot of contemporary horror now, particularly something like Stranger Things, where you get that same setup of, y’know, it's the young gang of kids that has to save the world, not necessarily the adults. And I was curious what it's like for you, someone who kind of set out and helped create that sort of subgenre of horror, what it's like to watch those projects be made now, specifically with such a nostalgic lens being cast on the '80s as a decade?
WINTER: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I think it's incredibly well made. I don't connect with it probably as much as other people do because it is one step removed from the source, which I literally lived. I didn't create it, I was just there. You know what I mean? So, there's a nostalgia distancing for me a little bit with those things, but I love that people are using the '80s now the way we used the '40s when I was young.
I think that in film is great, or storytelling, and I think Stranger Things is great because they kind of take that era, and they use it to speak about what's going on today, through this lens of the past, and that has tremendous value. I was also a really big Stephen King fan growing up, and I think that Stranger Things is probably, in my opinion, the best interpretation of what it felt like to live in King's world at that time. I've never really seen anything else that's plopped me down in the space the way Stranger Things does, in King's brain.
To kind of follow, I guess, Stephen King and the sort of general horror scene, you just wrapped on a movie called Destroy All Neighbors, which is coming to Shudder next year, and you've spent a lot of time in the last couple of years working on documentaries — you did The YouTube Effect, you did Zappa. Why the choice to go back to acting now, and why the choice specifically to go back to horror?
WINTER: I started training again about a decade ago, knowing that I wanted to do some more acting. We got [Bill and Ted Face the Music] off the ground. I got to get back in prosthetics, which I don't know what it says about me, but is one of my very favorite things in the world to do. And I come from theater, that's where I started, on Broadway, and I came up doing very crazy character work as kind of my sweet spot. I like cinema or storytelling's ability to be subversive, and I don't mean that necessarily thematically, just artistically, and horror and comedy have the ability to kind of punch through various areas of culture in a very powerful way, and in a very artistically liberating way.
So, when I did Freaked, that was kind of what we were going for with that, back in the early '90s. A lot of prosthetics, sort of a mix of horror and comedy. I knew I wanted to do something else that was a mix of horror and comedy, and so, when Jonah Ray Rodrigues and Josh Forbes came to me with Destroy a few years ago, I was like, "Yeah, I'll come on board. I'll play this character, I'll see if I can help us get it financed. I'll produce it with you guys." And it is a really, I'd say, a very fresh and inventive take on a physical effects driven horror comedy. There's a lot of really funny stuff in it, but there's a lot of gore too, so—and I'm buried in prosthetics, which is just awesome.
As somebody who is a massive fan of practical effects and special effects makeup, I am very glad to hear that. I love seeing practical effects. But I have one last question for you, and it's kind of a silly one, but since The Lost Boys is about vampire hunting, if you had to go up against one famous vampire in a fight, who do you think you could beat?
WINTER: Anyone from Twilight? I mean…
Yeah, that's fair.
WINTER: That's not really a fair fight. There wouldn't really be much of a fight. I think I would just go "Boo!", and they would all run away.
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for talking with me. It's been an honor.
WINTER: Great. Thanks, and I'm not giving my address for all the hate mail I'm now going to get. I'm only joking, I'm only joking. I'm joking. It's a great movie.
The Lost Boys is available on 4K Ultra HD and digital now.