In Praise of ‘The Lost Boys,’ Everyone’s Favorite ’80s Vampire Movie
The late Joel Schumacher was relentlessly derided in life, but his 1987 vampire classic sums up everything good about his work
Joel Schumacher, the prolific filmmaker who died this week at 80 years old, was often treated by critics as a punchline. His 1985 film Saint Elmo’s Fire was a critical failure (though a box office hit), and, for ’90s kids, he was most notorious as the director of the universally panned Batman and Robin and Batman Forever. Schumacher’s sensibilities were no match for the grim and gritty cinema of the ’90s: Broad, loud, campy, with everything inexplicably doused in candy-colored neon lighting. His later “serious” movies — like his 2004 Phantom of the Opera adaptation, or 2007’s The Number 23, in which Jim Carrey is driven to madness by, well, the number after 22 — were somehow even sillier. Yet Schumacher, relentlessly derided as he was, has one undeniable classic in his arsenal: The Lost Boys, the 1987 vampire movie that helped put some of Hollywood’s most old-fashioned monsters back on the map, and summed up everything that was fun and lively and good about Schumacher’s work.
The Lost Boys isn’t the only vampire classic of the ’80s, nor was it the first: The Hunger, starring Catherine Deneuve and…
