Primal Screen: Father-Son Confusion in The Lost Boys

By virtue of their genre, vampire films guarantee their audiences a disturbing picture of the family because they invoke not only the specter of the father who is indistinguishable from the mother, but also that of the adult who is indistinguishable from the child. Joel Schumacher's 1987 teen film The Lost Boys exploits these aspects of the vampire family romance by introducing Dracula to Peter Pan. The dual horror—and corresponding attractiveness—of these two children who never grow old and who never assume adult responsibilities creates a narrative structure admirably suited to a discussion of anxieties relating to father-son rivalry and to the reluctance with which some men mature and assume the burdens of fatherhood, particularly where the children are boys. Such father-son rivalry is at the core of both the vampire narrative (as shaped by Bram Stoker and his successors) and Peter Pan. Indeed, the shared anxiety about the simultaneous danger and sexiness of immature fatherhood makes it possible to use one narrative to "tell" the other, as The Lost Boys shows.

Since the early nineteenth century vampirism has provided a convenient symbol—what James Twitchell calls a "transactional language"—for discussing deviant sexuality. The major project of films derived from this legend, generally via Stoker's Dracula, is to define and regulate anti-family, nonprocreative sexuality. One of the most interesting aspects of this transactional language is that it describes and condemns such a wide variety of perverse sexualities, keeping pace with changes in social mores. But specific sexual patterns, while important to the narratives that encase them, are not the ultimate project of the vampire trope. Vampire films do not merely condemn (or fail to condemn, like John Badham's Dracula [1979]) the sexually active woman or the homosexual. Rather, the sexual misbehavior of the day provides a pretext for the more general exploration of sexuality and families afforded by the film. That the vampire is sometimes more sympathetic than his hunters suggests that vampiric sexuality is recognized as simultaneously threatening and legitimate. The vampire does not simply menace but responds to the dysfunctional family, at once identifying the failure of the "normal" father that has caused the dysfunction and offering a species of corrective to it. It is the father into whose empty shoes the vampire slips for a time.

The Lost Boys explores the problem of families made up solely of children, which are thus powerless to stop the incursions of vampires. The film's action takes place in the Southern California community of Santa Carla (underscoring a basic textual perversion in the warping of "Santa Clara"), which is at once "the murder capital of the world," a town dedicated to adolescent culture, and "a haven for the undead." To this town come Lucy and her sons, the teenager Michael and Sam, who appears to be about twelve years old. The three have moved from Phoenix after Lucy's divorce in order to economize by living with her father—whose hobby, not coincidentally, is the creation of undead animals via taxidermy. Attracted by a mysterious young woman named Star, Michael comes under the sway of an apparently homosexual motorcycle gang of adolescent vampires led by a cherubic/demonic blond named David; Sam simultaneously falls into the orbit of his contemporaries Edgar and Allen Frog, who prove to be dedicated vampire killers. In her turn, Lucy becomes attracted to an apparently staid video-store owner named Max, who turns out to be the pedophile head vampire; he courts Lucy in part to have access to her sons.

Probably we can all predict where this plot will lead us. The subtext, however, rings interesting changes on traditional vampire themes. The first attack by the "Lost Boys" introduces father-son conflict into the narrative: their victim is a security guard who turns them away from the boardwalk. By removing the only paternal authority in the community (with the hidden exception of Max), the boys have established one of the guiding paradigms of the vampire genre—the absence of competent and vigorous adult males. This vacuum is filled instead by the icons of...