It may have opened in theaters 35 years ago by our calendars, but The Lost Boys is eternally youthful. That's because new generations keep discovering Joel Schumacher's 1987 vampire picture — newly available in a 4K UHD release from Warner Bros. — and drinking up its kooky blend of gonzo storytelling, goth fashion and barely-latent homoeroticism. (Who can forget that shirtless sax player?) And Lost Boys co-star, Alex Winter, confirms that those are the essential ingredients that contribute to the movie's eternal success.
"We were all on the same page," the actor tells Yahoo Entertainment when asked if the cast and crew were aware they were making a horror movie that openly flirted with LGBTQ themes. "Everyone was very aware of what Joel was doing and very supportive of it." (Watch our video interview above.)
Having gotten his start in the acting business by treading the Broadway boards in the early ’80s, Winter remembers being exposed to New York City's vibrant gay culture scene well before he showed up on The Lost Boys set to play vampire gang member Marko. "It wasn't necessarily my world — I'm straight — but it was a lovely community, and they were the closest family I had," he remembers. "And Joel had an enormous reputation preceding Lost Boys as a New York fashion icon. So it was not subtext. It was really evident what he was mashing up and how he was doing it, and to me it's a beautiful part of the movie."
Winter also notes that it's only within recent years that the rest of pop culture has finally caught up to where The Lost Boys was nearly four decades ago. "Now we have RuPaul, and we have all these things where gender fluidity is more open. But there was gender fluidity in the ’80s ... I had friends who were trans. Joel's attitude was: 'Let's swing for the fences on with this movie.'" (Schumacher died in 2020, after a long career as one of Hollywood's most prominent out gay directors.)
Speaking of swinging, head Lost Boy, Kiefer Sutherland, remembers spending lots of time doing just that, from a harness, while shooting the movie's grand climax. In a Yahoo Entertainment interview for the release of the action thriller, The Contractor, earlier this year, the actor described that sequence taking two days, while his bloodsucking alter ego, David Powers, battled the movie's almost-vampish hero, Michael Emerson (played by Sutherland's real-life friend, Jason Patric).
"It was the most intense kind of stunt work that Jason and I had done," Sutherland says, laughing. "We were in these harnesses, and if it looked like we collided at 40 miles an hour. It's because we actually collided at 40 miles an hour! I was hung by four strings and he was hung by three, and as we would collide they would get tangled. And those strings were sharp! They were so thin... you could cut your hand off."
The Lost Boys was filmed before CGI revolutionized cinematic special effects, but there is a bit of digital trickery that happens after David meets his end on the pointy side of a set of antlers. "For half of the shot going into the antlers, I had a beard," says Sutherland. "And as I died, I went back to being a young boy before the vampires got me. My beard was gone and my hair started to change. It was the early days of those kinds of effects, and I remember thinking that it was going to look cool."
Unfortunately, there were no digital assists when it came to David's vampire appearance, which required Sutherland to wear oversized contact lenses that could have done some real damage. "They were actually very dangerous," he says now. "We were only allowed to wear them for about five minutes, because they sucked out all the oxygen from your eyes and they would dry up. So they were awful, but you know [make-up artists] Ve Neill and Greg Cannom did that movie, and they went on to win Oscars. I was 18 at the time and didn't know how lucky I was to be working with those artist. So I'm grateful in hindsight, but when I was 18, I was complaining a lot."
