by Jane Roser
“Sleep all day, party all night. never grow old. Never die. It’s fun to be a vampire.”
This sounds like a creepy recruitment ad, but it’s really just the tag line of one of the greatest guilty pleasure vampire flicks of the 80s (or possibly, ever, sorry Twilight). I remember seeing The Lost Boys when it was released in 1987 and was all the rage amongst my high school friends. However, since I was still too young to see an R-rated movie, I had to go with my dad. Yes, it was mortifying and he thought it was ridiculous, but I thought it was super cool and the rocking soundtrack stayed in my head for days.
The music perfectly captures the haunting mood of the film, illustrating the scenes to perfection. The movie opens with Michael, Sam and their mom driving to Santa Carla and making note of all the weird people and signs they see along the way. Echo and the Bunnymen’s cover of The Doors’ “People Are Strange” is the perfect segue into what’s to come. It’s also interesting to note that the vampire’s den has a large poster of Jim Morrison propped against the wall and there’s an Echo and the Bunnymen poster subtly placed in Sam’s room.
“Cry Little Sister” is the main theme and always makes it onto my Halloween mixes. It’s a darkly evocative tune with gothic undertones and a droning organ that sends chills up your bones, it’s exactly what I would expect to hear if I was ever stuck in an old Bela Lugosi film. I love blasting Lou Gramm’s (Foreigner) “Lost In The Shadows (the Lost Boys)” on long road trips; it’s a silly stuck-in-the-80s number, but a great one to rock out to (until the finale with the insane heaving breathing and the chorus that never ends).
INXS contributes two fun songs: “Good Times” and “Laying Down The Law”, both with guest vocalist Jimmy Barnes and The Who’s Roger Daltry does a kick ass version of Elton John’s “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me”. To this day, however, I still think the one minute merry-go-round carnival themed track “To The Shock of Miss Louise” is an odd way to end the album. I get that a lot of the film was set around a boardwalk carnival, but it just seems like a square peg in a round hole.
“The Lost Boys” harkens back to a time when teenage angst just consisted of your grandpa having no TV in his creepy, taxidermy laden house and your local comic book store was not merchandising its product properly. Throw in a few leather clad, long-haired, motorcycle-riding vamps who trick you into drinking their blood and you’re having one hell of a summer. This is the perfect 80s throwback album to listen to and forget all your worries and woes; just be glad that your brother is not “a goddamn, shit-sucking vampire”, because boy, “just wait til mom finds out, buddy.”
