I hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving. I took a little bit of a break to enjoy my holiday and the several days of shopping that followed (I’m a manager in retail so it’s been a fun last few days). To continue on with my Halloween invasion of Christmas, I have a short little thing from author CM Saunders to share with you.
Halloween Drabble: THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN (100 Words)
The doorbell rings. It’s Halloween, which probably means the Trick or Treaters are here. Living alone means I’ll be up and down a lot tonight.
I open the door, and sure enough I’m confronted with three kids. We have a witch, a comedy Frankenstein, and a vampire in a cape. I think. I offer the group a handful of candy, which is snapped up greedily. As I’m closing the door, comedy Frankenstein says, “Where did your friend get that demon mask? It’s so cool.”
I’m confused. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“Your friend behind you wearing the mask.”
(This story was first published in Every Day Fiction.)
Boo-graphy: Christian Saunders, a constant reader who writes fiction as C.M. Saunders, is a freelance journalist and editor from south Wales. His work has appeared in almost 100 magazines, ezines and anthologies worldwide including Fortean Times, the Literary Hatchet, ParABnormal, Fantastic Horror, Haunted MTL, Feverish Fiction and Crimson Streets, and he has held staff positions at several leading UK magazines ranging from Staff Writer to Associate Editor. His books have been both traditionally and independently published.
The fifth volume in my X series featuring ten (X, geddit?) slices of twisted horror and dark fiction plucked from the blood-soaked pages of ParABnormal magazine, Demonic Tome, Haunted MTL, Fantasia Diversity, and industry-defining anthologies including 100 Word Horrors, The Corona Book of Ghost Stories, DOA 3, and Trigger Warning: Body Horror.
Meet the local reporter on an assignment which takes him far beyond the realms of reality, join the fishing trip that goes sideways when a fish unlike any other is hooked, and find out the hidden cost of human trafficking in China. Along the way, meet the hiker who stumbles across something unexpected in the woods, the office worker who’s life is inexorably changed after a medical drug trial goes wrong, and many more.
Also features extensive notes, and original artwork by Stoker award-winning Greg Chapman.
Table of Contents: Demon Tree Revenge of the Toothfish Surzhai The Sharpest Tool Something Bad Down the Road Coming Around Where a Town Once Stood The Last Night Shift Subject #270374 Afterword
In the final part of CM Saunders’ five-part series, he talks about An American Werewolf in London. I hope you enjoyed this series as much as I did and please follow the link at the end so you can see some other movie reviews he’s done.
It’s been a long month. So far in our countdown of the top 5 Eighties Horror Flicks we’ve met vampires, ancient forest-dwelling spirits, vengeful ghosts, and all kinds of other nasties. A lot of blood has been spilled. It’s all been building up to this, the final instalment. Number one on the list, top of the pile, king of the hill. Some films you see during those impressionable childhood years make an indelible mark on you. Others scar you for life. For me, An American werewolf in London undoubtedly belongs in the latter category, and not just because I was obsessed with Jenny Agutter.
It should need no introduction, but for those unfamiliar with it, the film starts with a pair of American tourists David (Naughton) and Jack (Dunne) hiking across the Yorkshire Moors (this part was actually filmed on the Black Mountains in Wales). When night falls they take refuge in a charming little pub called the Slaughtered Lamb, where they find Rik Mayall having a game of darts and Brian Glover in a particularly prickly mood, but leave when things turn frosty with the words “Stay on the path!” ringing in their ears. Needless to say, they don’t heed the warning and and find themselves lost on the moors. As if that wasn’t bad enough, things take a huge downward turn when they are attacked and Jack is ripped to pieces by a huge wild animal, later revealed to be a werewolf. There’s no helping Jack, but a crowd from the pub arrive and kill the werewolf just in time to save David.
Some time later David wakes up in a hospital in London. We don’t know how he got there, or why he was taken there rather than somewhere closer as it’s about 200 miles from Yorkshire to the capital as the crow flies and you’d pass a few dozen hospitals on the way. But let’s not focus too much on pesky common sense and practicalities. It’s a werewolf film for fuck’s sake. Jack returns from the dead as either a ghost or a hallucination (we are never really told which) to warn his friend that next time there is a full moon, he too will turn into a werewolf. The banter between David and Dead Jack, fast, witty, and shot-through with humour, form some of my favourite parts of the film (example: “Have you ever talked to a corpse? It’s boring!”).
The anticipated change does indeed occur in a gut-wrenching yet iconic sequence which won an Academy Award for special effects (the man responsible, Rick Baker, went on to win six more from eleven nominations. A record.) and David goes on a bloody rampage across London’s West End. One of the defining scenes was set and filmed at Tottenham Court Road tube station, and anyone who has ever used that particular transport hub will surely agree that the only time you are likely to see it quite so empty is when there is a blood-crazed werewolf riding the escalator. Here’s the scene, in all its glory:
The next we see of David he’s waking up naked in the wolf enclosure of the local zoo, and as soon as he’s dressed again he sets about piecing together the events of the night before with the help of Alice (Agutter), a nurse who he somehow managed to pull whilst being laid up at the hospital. It has to be said that she takes all the “I’m a werewolf” stuff remarkably well, which was just one more reason to love the woman.
One of the most terrifying scenes ever committed to celluloid is the dream sequence where David witnesses his family being brutally slayed by a bunch of mutant Nazi demons brandishing machine guns in a home invasion. It’s as weird as it is shocking, and has been the cause of endless debate over the years. Was it included just for the shock factor? An extra element of controversy (as if it were needed)? Or is it a remnant of a sub-plot which was otherwise edited out?
It’s interesting to note that earlier on in proceedings, nurse Alice and her friend make what appears to be an off-hand Jewish remark dressed up as a dick joke, and the movie has been lauded in certain circles as a significant piece of Jewish cinema. A little digging reveals John Landis was born into a Jewish family, and with that kernel of knowledge, the sub-text swims into focus. David (the name of the first monarch of the Israelite tribes) is a walking allegory for Judaism itself. A displaced, wounded hero, a stranger in a strange land, struggling to come to terms with a tragic past. This article does a pretty good job of further exploring the Jewish connection, which I’d never even considered until I re-watched it recently and started wondering what the fuck those mutant Nazi demons with machine guns had to do with anything.
When it was released in 1981, An American Werewolf in London formed one third of a holy trinity of werewolf films, which all came out the same year, the others being Wolfen and The Howling (see number three on our list!). Director John Landis (who is more commonly associated with comedy having been involved with such seminal films as Animal House, The Blues Brothers, and Trading Places) claimed he was inspired to write the script after working on the film Kelly’s Heros in Yugoslavia. Whilst out driving, he stumbled across a group of gypsies performing a ritual on a corpse so it wouldn’t ‘rise again,’ which must have been quite the mindfuck.
At first he had trouble securing finances, with most would-be investors claiming the script was too frightening to be a comedy and too funny to be frightening, before PolyGram Pictures eventually put up the $10 million budget. Happily, their faith was repayed as the movie became a box office smash grossing over $62 million worldwide. It is now rightfully hailed as one of the greatest horror movies ever made.
In contrast, a 1997 sequel, An American Werewolf in Paris, which featured a completely different cast and crew, was a critical and commercial failure. As a curious postscript, in 2016 it was reported that John Landis’s son Max was writing and directing a remake. There’s been nothing but the sound of crickets ever since.
Trivia Corner:
Landis has expressed regret over cutting certain sequences from the final cut of the film in order to earn an R rating in the US. The sex scene between Alex and David was edited to be less explicit, and a scene showing the homeless men along the Thames being attacked was cut after a test audience reacted negatively to it. Yet another cut scene showed the undead Jack eating a piece of toast which falls out of a hole in his torn throat.
On the 13th of every month I put a fresh spin on a classic movie in my RetView series over at my blog. Go here to check out the archive:
Boo-graphy: Christian Saunders, a constant reader who writes fiction as C.M. Saunders, is a freelance journalist and editor from south Wales. His work has appeared in almost 100 magazines, ezines and anthologies worldwide including Fortean Times, the Literary Hatchet, ParABnormal, Fantastic Horror, Haunted MTL, Feverish Fiction and Crimson Streets, and he has held staff positions at several leading UK magazines ranging from Staff Writer to Associate Editor. His books have been both traditionally and independently published.
The fifth volume in my X series featuring ten (X, geddit?) slices of twisted horror and dark fiction plucked from the blood-soaked pages of ParABnormal magazine, Demonic Tome, Haunted MTL, Fantasia Diversity, and industry-defining anthologies including 100 Word Horrors, The Corona Book of Ghost Stories, DOA 3, and Trigger Warning: Body Horror.
Meet the local reporter on an assignment which takes him far beyond the realms of reality, join the fishing trip that goes sideways when a fish unlike any other is hooked, and find out the hidden cost of human trafficking in China. Along the way, meet the hiker who stumbles across something unexpected in the woods, the office worker who’s life is inexorably changed after a medical drug trial goes wrong, and many more.
Also features extensive notes, and original artwork by Stoker award-winning Greg Chapman.
Table of Contents: Demon Tree Revenge of the Toothfish Surzhai The Sharpest Tool Something Bad Down the Road Coming Around Where a Town Once Stood The Last Night Shift Subject #270374 Afterword
I remember the first time I ever saw The Evil Dead. I was in my early teens, and my folks had gone on holiday leaving me home alone. I scared myself so much that I stayed awake the entire night with every light in the house switched on. Apart from an early encounter with An American Werewolf in London, that was my first experience of being absolutely shit scared by a film. During subsequent viewings, I learned to appreciate the crude humour as well as other aspects like the kick-ass script and innovative cinematography. But that first time, it was all about pure, unadulterated fear. I was absolutely terrified, and traumatised for weeks afterwards. At that tender age, I had no idea a piece of art could stir such visceral emotions. It was epic.
If I had to pin down the single most frightening aspect of the whole movie, it would be the trapdoor to the cellar. As innocuous as it probably sounds if you haven’t seen the movie, it still gives me chills thinking about it now. In my fevered imagination it came to represent the thin barrier between good and evil, or life and death. I’d love to live off-grid in a secluded log cabin in the woods. But if it has a trap door to the cellar, you can fucking keep it.
Wait a minute, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s rewind a little. If you haven’t seen it, (why?), The Evil Dead goes something like this…
Five college students go on vacation to a secluded log cabin in the woods. You know they’re going to have sex and take drugs, which is bad, obvs, so you know some terrible shit is going to befall them. As I mentioned, the cabin has a trapdoor leading to the cellar. You can probably attach any one of a dozen metaphor to not just the trapdoor, but the cellar. It could represent hell (the underworld), the subconscious mind, or any number of other things. But for the sake of argument, let’s just call it what it is. It’s a trapdoor. And as you can probably tell by the way I’m still obsessing over it, it scarred me for life.
Obviously, the students go exploring, and find some audio tapes made by a researcher who talks about something called the Book of the Dead, a book of spells and incantations bound in human flesh and written in human blood. Incidentally, the original script called for the characters to be smoking marijuana when they are first listening to the tape. The actors decided to try this for real, and the entire scene had to be later re-shot due to their uncontrollable behaviour.
The tapes summon a demonic entity (or entities) and one by one the students become possessed. The next thing you know, people are speaking in tongues and getting raped by trees left, right and centre. The scene where Cheryl (Sandweiss) initially falls under the influence, levitates, and stabs her friend through the ankle with a pencil before being locked in the cellar is utterly horrifying. She keeps pushing her hands through the gap in the trapdoor and making gurgling noises. Ew. As you can probably imagine, things deteriorate drastically from that point on and pretty soon Ash (Campbell in his defining role) is locked in a nightmarish battle for survival. Things don’t improve much when he realises the only defence against his group of possessed ex-friends is to dismember them with a chainsaw. Needless to say, it gets messy. Really messy.
The only thing letting the side down is the quality of the special effects, which though innovative for the time, sometimes come across as slightly cheap and tacky. But you have to remember The Evil Dead was made over forty years ago and cost around $350,000. Finances were such an issue that the crew consisted almost entirely of acquaintances of Raimi and Campbell, who had met at high school.
Upon release, the film was met with a lot of controversy, mainly because Raimi had made it as gruesome as possible with neither interest in nor fear of censorship. Writer Bruce Kawin described The Evil Dead as one of the most notorious splatter films of its day, along with Cannibal Holocaust and I Spit on Your Grave. Largely as a result of an appearance at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival (where it was seen, and emphatically endorsed by one Stephen King) the movie did manage to generate around $2.6m, small potatoes in comparison with the $212m raked in by that year’s biggest hit Raiders of the Lost Ark.
In the UK, the film was trimmed by 49 seconds before it was granted an X certificate for cinema release. A campaign by pro-censorship organization NVLA led to it being labelled a “video nasty” and when the Video Recordings Act was passed in 1984, the video version was removed from circulation. In 1990, a further 66 seconds were trimmed from the already-censored version and it was eventually granted an 18 certificate for home video release. In 2000, the uncut version was finally released. In the US, the film received an immediate ‘X’ rating, which has since been converted to NC-17 for “substantial graphic horror violence and gore”. It remains banned either theatrically or on video in some countries.
Even the censored version is preferable to the 2013 big-budget re-boot, largely because of the unpolished, rough-and-ready approach. It’s no surprise, either, that none of the original cast with the exception of Campbell went on to have much of an impact on the Hollywood A-list.
Trivia Corner:
The cabin (near Morristown, Tennessee) used as the film’s set was also lodging for the 13 crew members, with several people sleeping in the same room. Living conditions were terrible, and the crew frequently argued. The cabin didn’t have plumbing, so the actors went days without showering, and fell ill frequently due to the freezing weather. By the end of production, they were burning furniture to stay warm. Ironically, the cabin didn’t have a cellar, most of the cellar scenes being filmed in a farmhouse owned by producer Rob Tapert’s family in Michigan.
On the 13th of every month I put a fresh spin on a classic movie in my RetView series over at my blog. Go here to check out the archive.
Boo-graphy: Christian Saunders, a constant reader who writes fiction as C.M. Saunders, is a freelance journalist and editor from south Wales. His work has appeared in almost 100 magazines, ezines and anthologies worldwide including Fortean Times, the Literary Hatchet, ParABnormal, Fantastic Horror, Haunted MTL, Feverish Fiction and Crimson Streets, and he has held staff positions at several leading UK magazines ranging from Staff Writer to Associate Editor. His books have been both traditionally and independently published.
The fifth volume in my X series featuring ten (X, geddit?) slices of twisted horror and dark fiction plucked from the blood-soaked pages of ParABnormal magazine, Demonic Tome, Haunted MTL, Fantasia Diversity, and industry-defining anthologies including 100 Word Horrors, The Corona Book of Ghost Stories, DOA 3, and Trigger Warning: Body Horror.
Meet the local reporter on an assignment which takes him far beyond the realms of reality, join the fishing trip that goes sideways when a fish unlike any other is hooked, and find out the hidden cost of human trafficking in China. Along the way, meet the hiker who stumbles across something unexpected in the woods, the office worker who’s life is inexorably changed after a medical drug trial goes wrong, and many more.
Also features extensive notes, and original artwork by Stoker award-winning Greg Chapman.
Table of Contents: Demon Tree Revenge of the Toothfish Surzhai The Sharpest Tool Something Bad Down the Road Coming Around Where a Town Once Stood The Last Night Shift Subject #270374 Afterword
Humour, often coupled with OTT excess, was a common staple in eighties horror movies. It was symptomatic of the times, when a large percentage of people had more money than they knew what to do with and many were off their tits on coke. It was a good time. This humour seems especially suited to werewolf movies as if someone way back in the day decided there was something knee-slappingly funny about people transforming into humungous wolf-like creatures and ripping innocent bystanders into bloody pieces.
While far more subtle than some examples, the humour is still evident in Joe Dante’s classic The Howling. The script, adapted from Gary Brandner’s novel by screenwriter John Sayles who had previously worked with Dante on tongue-in-cheek classic Piranha, positively drips with satire (“You were raised in LA, the wildest thing you ever heard was Wolfman Jack.”) and the humour moves centre-stage right at the very end, as if the makers simply couldn’t contain themselves any longer. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The fact is that even now, over four decades after it was first released, The Howling is still a brutal, terrifying, and deeply disturbing journey into the dark heart of the lycanthrope legend which has long been considered a metaphor for the beast lurking inside all of us, something which is hinted at several times throughout the movie. If you’ve never seen it, that’s something you need to rectify.
Karen White (Scream Queen Dee Wallace, star of horror staples Cujo, the original Hills Have Eyes, and Critters, but probably best known for her role in E.T.) is a television news anchor in LA who thinks she is being stalked by a serial killer. In conjunction with the police and TV crews, she takes part in a sting operation, agreeing to meet the murderer in a sleazy porno cinema. In the ensuing kerfuffle, the serial killer is shot dead by cops, but Karen is left severely traumatised by it all and suffering from PTSD and amnesia. Her therapist (Macnee, that bloke off the Avengers) suggests she and her husband (Stone) spend some time at an exclusive retreat in the countryside to help her recovery, something they are only too happy to do. Big mistake. The Colony, as they call it, is full of colourful characters, one of them being a nymphomaniac called Marsha (Brooks) who tries to seduce Karen’s husband. When he rejects her advances, she follows him into the woods and scratches his arm, thereby ‘turning’ him. They later do it next to a bonfire (snigger) in one of those scenes that you probably rewound way too much as a horny teenager, before getting creeped out by the fact that by the time they finish shagging you are essentially watching a couple of Furries getting some in make up and monster suits.
Anyway, Karen soon begins to suspect that something sketchy is going on not just with her husband, but at the retreat as a whole, and calls in a little help from her friends. That’s when things get interesting, if they weren’t interesting enough before.
There’s no getting around it, by today’s standards The Howling comes across terribly dated in parts. But the script is extremely well-written, the cast is a who’s who acting talent and, though Rick Baker deservedly won an Oscar for his creature effects on An American Werewolf in London a year later, Rob Bottin’s work here is just as impressive. You can achieve quite a lot with tiny inflatable air bags under latex skin. He lets the side down somewhat in the climactic scene where Karen, now also changed, morphs into something resembling a cocker spaniel live on air which is more hilarious than frightening, but we’ll let that one slide. I prefer to think that particular scene (a late addition tagged on to the end while Wallace was filming Cujo) is meant as one of those era-defining tongue-in-cheek moments.
An earlier section where the werewolf attacks Karen’s friend at a secluded cabin in the woods is straight-up terrifying, as is the part where our heroine comes face to face with the monster for the first time and watches transfixed as it transforms in front of her. The suspense is maintained throughout, and the action rarely lets up. There’s also a fair bit of sex and nudity which led to some reviewers, somewhat unfairly, dubbing it ‘erotic horror’. Dante (who also directed Gremlins, Innerspace and Burying the Ex, amongst others) fits all the pieces together nicely, and shows neat little touches here and there, like having Little Red Riding Hood playing in the background at one point and naming many characters after directors who made other werewolf films, like George Waggner, who directed The Wolf Man (1941). In keeping with this theme, the consensus on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes (where it holds a respectable 74% approval rating) reads: “The Howling packs enough laughs into its lycanthropic carnage to distinguish it from other werewolf entries, with impressive visual effects adding some bite.”
Brilliant.
Unsurprisingly, due to its success, The Howling spawned a sequel (Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf) in 1985. What is surprising, however, is that despite the sequel being a total flop it then led to a bunch more, none of which were very good. The most recent was the eighth installment released in 2011. In January 2020 it was announced that Andy Muschietti, director of Mama (2013) and It (2017) had been hired to direct a remake for Netflix. That should be fine, as long as they don’t decide to remake the other seven.
Trivia Corner:
Dee Wallace and Christopher Stone were married in RL, having met on an episode of CHiPs before filming started on The Howling. They were together until his death from a werewolf bite (not really. It was a heart attack) in 1995.
On the 13th of every month I put a fresh spin on a classic movie in my RetView series over at my blog. Go here to check out the archive.
Boo-graphy: Christian Saunders, a constant reader who writes fiction as C.M. Saunders, is a freelance journalist and editor from south Wales. His work has appeared in almost 100 magazines, ezines and anthologies worldwide including Fortean Times, the Literary Hatchet, ParABnormal, Fantastic Horror, Haunted MTL, Feverish Fiction and Crimson Streets, and he has held staff positions at several leading UK magazines ranging from Staff Writer to Associate Editor. His books have been both traditionally and independently published.
The fifth volume in my X series featuring ten (X, geddit?) slices of twisted horror and dark fiction plucked from the blood-soaked pages of ParABnormal magazine, Demonic Tome, Haunted MTL, Fantasia Diversity, and industry-defining anthologies including 100 Word Horrors, The Corona Book of Ghost Stories, DOA 3, and Trigger Warning: Body Horror.
Meet the local reporter on an assignment which takes him far beyond the realms of reality, join the fishing trip that goes sideways when a fish unlike any other is hooked, and find out the hidden cost of human trafficking in China. Along the way, meet the hiker who stumbles across something unexpected in the woods, the office worker who’s life is inexorably changed after a medical drug trial goes wrong, and many more.
Also features extensive notes, and original artwork by Stoker award-winning Greg Chapman.
Table of Contents: Demon Tree Revenge of the Toothfish Surzhai The Sharpest Tool Something Bad Down the Road Coming Around Where a Town Once Stood The Last Night Shift Subject #270374 Afterword
Number Four in our countdown of eighties horror flicks is something that typifies the entire decade; cool, sassy, and slick, but with a dark, dangerous edge. It’s a conversation which comes up every so often. There you are, semi-drunk with a group of colleagues, or on one of those awkward Tinder dates, when in an effort to lift the tension and find some common ground, somebody asks, “So, what’s your favourite film?”
Obviously, there’s no right or wrong answer. It’s entirely subjective. But it’s still a bit of a loaded question. Say the wrong thing, and it could cloud someone’s opinion of you forever. What would your peers and prospective lovers think if you gave the accolade to Human Centipede 2? Or even worse, the Adam Sandler disaster Jack and Jill? For me, there are a few contenders (neither Human Centipede 2 or Jack and Jill is among them, you’ll be glad to know). But for a long period in my formative years, my answer was The Lost Boys.
It wasn’t always a popular choice. Horror hounds and 80’s film buffs might nod with appreciation, while others, especially the younger crowd, invariably frown and say ‘You what?’
Given that The Lost Boys came out over 35 years ago, I suppose that’s an acceptable reaction. Upon release it was a modest hit but was no Top Gun or Dirty Dancing, and has since passed into the ranks of ‘cult classic.’ That said, it has certainly aged better than most 80’s movies. Have you seen Weird Science recently? Don’t bother.
Anyway, directed by Joel Schumacher and made on a budget of just $8.5 million, the Lost Boys was a triumph of style over substance, in many ways encapsulating the decadence of the decade. It was big, brash, gaudy, and ever-so-slightly camp. Yet by the same token funny, slick, and immeasurably cool. In the case of Kiefer Sutherland, it might also be one of the very few times a lead character rocks a mullet and gets away with it.
For the uninitiated, The Lost Boys is the story of two brothers, Sam (Haim) and Michael (Patric) who move with their recently-divorced mother (Wiest) to stay with her eccentric father in Santa Carla, California. Cue lashings of teen angst and despair about feeling isolated and not fitting in and stuff. At a local comic book store, Sam bumps into the Frog Brothers (Feldman and Newlander) who warn him that the town has become overrun with vampires and give him comics to educate him about the threat, while big brother Michael falls in love with Star (Gertz) who happens to be in a relationship with a local gang leader called David (the aforementioned mullet-sporting Sutherland). Yup, you guessed it, David’s gang is actually made up of the very same vampires that have been terrorizing the town and making people disappear, and they want the star-struck (sorry) Michael to join their ranks. Don’t forget, this was back when vampires were glitter-free and legitimately scary. The story builds to an epic showdown between good and evil featuring some fantastically creative kill scenes (“Death by stereo!”) and even better one-liners.
At the time, Lost Boys represented something of a gamble by Warner Bros. Horror comedies aimed specifically at younger audiences were an unexplored genre, and a largely untapped well. It was a constant battle with the censors to sneak in as much gore as possible without falling foul of an ‘adults only’ rating that would severely limit your cinema-going audience. To make things even more problematic, the main cast was comprised mainly of unknowns (even if one of them had a famous dad) and even director Joel Schumacher was a largely unknown quantity with only The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981) and St Elmo’s Fire (1985) on his resume.
Even with the benefit of having 35 years to think about it, it’s hard to pinpoint what makes Lost Boys work so well. The plot itself is a little thin with not many surprises, but the script is sharp and witty and the performances are a cut above. Given Corey Haim’s untimely end, this is how most people remember him. A piece of marketing genius, the slogan (sleep all day, party all night, never grow old, never die. It’s fun to be a vampire) captured both the imagination and the mood of a generation, while the shiny MTV-style visuals are positively spellbinding, Kiefer Sutherland made the coolest villain ever, and Jami Gertz sent pulses racing. The haunting rock-infused soundtrack, an essential component of any 80’s movie, was also a contributing factor. Even Nanook the dog deserves praise for several show-stealing scenes.
However, despite all this, Lost Boys was much more than the sum of its parts, making an undeniable impression on the Generation X psyche and paving the way for everything from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the Twilight saga. The movie spawned two low-key sequels; Lost Boys: the Tribe (2008) and Lost Boys: the Thirst (2010) but neither set the world on fire, and a rumoured proper sequel, the Lost Girls, also directed by Joel Schumacher and which sounds pretty amazing, failed to materialize. The enduring legacy of Lost Boys ties in neatly with the source of the title, J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan who, just like vampires, never grew up. To my knowledge he didn’t end up dissolving in a bath of garlic or being impaled on a fence post, either, so there’s that.
Trivia corner:
The producers originally wanted to call the town where Lost Boys is set Santa Cruz, because during the 1970s Santa Cruz gained a reputation as being “the Murder Capital of the World” after three infamous serial killers (Kemper, Mullin, and Carpenter, aka the Trailside Killer) hunted victims there. However, the Santa Cruz council ‘strongly objected’ to the town being portrayed in such a negative manner and allegedly withheld filming permits, forcing the producers to change the name to Santa Carla. Spoilsports.
On the 13th of every month I put a fresh spin on a classic movie in my RetView series over at my blog. Go here to check out the archive.
Boo-graphy: Christian Saunders, a constant reader who writes fiction as C.M. Saunders, is a freelance journalist and editor from south Wales. His work has appeared in almost 100 magazines, ezines and anthologies worldwide including Fortean Times, the Literary Hatchet, ParABnormal, Fantastic Horror, Haunted MTL, Feverish Fiction and Crimson Streets, and he has held staff positions at several leading UK magazines ranging from Staff Writer to Associate Editor. His books have been both traditionally and independently published.
The fifth volume in my X series featuring ten (X, geddit?) slices of twisted horror and dark fiction plucked from the blood-soaked pages of ParABnormal magazine, Demonic Tome, Haunted MTL, Fantasia Diversity, and industry-defining anthologies including 100 Word Horrors, The Corona Book of Ghost Stories, DOA 3, and Trigger Warning: Body Horror.
Meet the local reporter on an assignment which takes him far beyond the realms of reality, join the fishing trip that goes sideways when a fish unlike any other is hooked, and find out the hidden cost of human trafficking in China. Along the way, meet the hiker who stumbles across something unexpected in the woods, the office worker who’s life is inexorably changed after a medical drug trial goes wrong, and many more.
Also features extensive notes, and original artwork by Stoker award-winning Greg Chapman.
Table of Contents: Demon Tree Revenge of the Toothfish Surzhai The Sharpest Tool Something Bad Down the Road Coming Around Where a Town Once Stood The Last Night Shift Subject #270374 Afterword
Meghan's House of Books 