The Lost Boys may well be Joel Schumacher’s quintessential film in terms of how beautifully and elegantly it adumbrates the core question of his career: how do we preserve the freedoms of alternative communities without becoming trapped in manufactured nostalgia, perpetual adolescence or corporate simulation? Schumacher doesn’t exactly answer that question so much as allow it to resonate across a panorama of characters who interact across three distinct spaces in the fictional seaside town of Santa Clara, California. At the heart of the film is divorced mother Lucy Emerson, played by Diane Wiest, who leaves the city with her two sons Michael, played by Jason Patric, and Sam, played by Corey Haim, to move in with her father, known only as “Grandpa,” played by Barnard Hughes. This is the first of the three core spaces in the film. Upon arriving in Santa Clara, Lucy gets a job in a video store situated in the fairground, which occupies a boardwalk along the ocean – the second core space. Each member of the family encounters a new community in the fairground – Lucy starts to date her boss Max, played by Edward Herrmann; Sam becomes friends with a pair of brothers who hang out at the fairground comic store, Edgar and Alan Frog, played by Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander; and Michael starts to spend time with a gang of rebels, headed by Kiefer Sutherland’s David, who turn out to be vampires. Their lair, buried in the ruins of a hotel on the remote cliffs of the town, is the third core space in the film and is where Michael meets David’s girlfriend Star, played by Jami Getz.

Across these three spaces, Schumacher builds a complex dialogue both between the countercultural impulses of the 1960s and the emergent MTV hyperreality of the 1980s and between the legacy of Stonewall-era gay liberation and the dawning of a more fluid form of queer politics. When Sam bursts into Grandpa’s house in the opening scene he’s dismayed to find there’s no TV because “no TV means no MTV” but that’s before he encounters the fairground, the space that embodies and exudes the new hyperreality of the 80s. Of the many exotic spectacular fields that percolate across Schumacher’s career, this might be the most extraordinary – a panoply of lights, surfaces and movements, pure image circulation that continually slips in and out of the jouissance of music video. The heart of this hyperspace is the video store, suffused with depthless neon and apparently endless banks of televisions, and it is from here that the vampires emanate, creatures of pure undead image that don’t age and don’t die but remain poised in postures of eternalised style. The fairground is thus different in kind from every other space in the film, and Schumacher signals this by continually approaching its boundaries in the opening scenes, as if to map its gradual encroachment upon the real. The vampires’ first victim is a security guard who is killed in the carpark of the fairground, at the very periphery of the boardwalk, while their next victims are a couple making out on a headland overlooking the neon-clad rides.

While the fairground goes some way to visualising this emergent hyperreality, Schumacher also evokes limits to that perception, suggesting that the hyperspace of the 80s is a whole-body experience that resists the comforting coordinates of a classical cinematic optic. To that end, he uses the fairground as the mere springboard for a preternaturally charged emptiness, a vertiginous and precarious void of space, like the very apex of a roller coaster, that takes the form of endless zooming and soaring, remarkable crane and helicopter work. A hypermediated circumambience starts to beset Santa Clara whose best approximation is the sky, but there are whole scenes, between Michael and the vampires, when the sky seems to be all around them, or beneath them, or even within them. Schumacher’s enormous pans from ocean to sky to neon, with their confounding of solid, liquid and gas, quickly exhaust the vocabulary of the camera to evoke this new (non) space, as does the memorable bike ride, Michael’s first encounter with David, where the vampires accelerate until space and time are no longer discernible, mere suspensions over an endless ocean.

Schumacher most magically represents this otherspace of the vampires through ritual – specifically their main initiation ritual, which involves hanging off the bottom of a rail bridge over a mystical fog. As a freight train rumbles over the top, last vestige of the old mechanical and material worlds, they let go, one by one, and drop to the murk, into a freeform texturality that reminded me of the skydiving scene in Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break. When Michael finally succumbs, he floats through the mist and then wakes up suspended in space, hanging upside down in his bedroom, before being sucked into the night sky outside, clinging onto the house for dear life to avoid becoming one with this hyperreal circumambience. It is at this point that Schumacher’s massive tracking-shots start to break apart and give way to montage sequences, as the trajectory from Michael’s descent from the bridge to the vortex outside his bedroom window exceeds any cinematic depiction. The hyperspaces of the 80s become textured voids, resonant emptiness, poised between sight and whole-body experience, like the roller coaster track that frames the fairground, a string of neon that leads us up and up into the blankness of the night sky.

Nevertheless, the fairground is offset by two different yet closely related spaces – Grandpa’s house and the vampires’ lair – both of which share certain commonalities: notably, they are cluttered with material objects where the fairground is predicated on emptiness and they exist at the two remotest points in the film from the boardwalk; Grandpa lives in a house far above the town and the lair is at the bottom of a crumbling cliff at the mouth of the harbour. Whereas the fair is a space of circulating images, the house and lair are spaces of accumulating objects, and between them they outline two possible destinies of the 1960s counterculture in the face of this emergent hypermedia sphere. First, the lair functions as a a vision of the counterculture sedimented into a refusal to engage with any future youth movements, much as the vampires themselves have a moratorium on perpetual adolescence. Situated in an abandoned hotel, a decaying fragment of an earlier Santa Clara, and centred on an enormous shrine to Jim Morrison, the frozen adolescence of the counterculture par excellence, the lair has stayed true to outsider worlds of the 60s but they have become undead, feeding on younger generations with a vision of resistance that is doomed to endlessly repeat itself, in a Boomer stranglehold on anti-authoritarianism.

Between the fairground and the lair then, a question emerges: to what extent is The Lost Boys a critique of the 60s counterculture and to what extent is it a critique of 80s hypermediation? On the one hand, there’s clearly a pro-60s reading here in which MTV aesthetics prey on the counterculture, turning it into an endless sequences of undead pastiches. This interpretation seems to favour, for example, the scene where Michael drinks blood for the first time, and his face dissolves into Jim Morrison, but accompanied with and colonised by an ultra-80s synth score. Likewise, the fairground is full of unkempt bodies that have been liberated from normative society only to be congealed once again in a regime of fungible images, performances without a stable reality or referent to anchor them. Yet there is also an element of the film that is more reparative to the 80s and sceptical of the 60s, as evinced in the sheer entrancement of Schumacher’s camera with the boardwalk, which through his eyes quivers with immanent and imminent metamorphoses, a transformative metaphysics of encounter the wafts across the film like a perfume you can’t place, but that speaks to a yearning you didn’t even know you possessed. From this perspective, the fairground at the very least revitalises a countercultural impulse that has grown stale with Boomer congealment. In any case, the question of which option to prefer is playfully moot, since the fairground has already started to colonise the lair, which often feels like the elaborately constructed set you might experience in one of the “worlds” or “experiences” at a major theme park, proof of concept for the film’s Disneyland adaptation.

Unlike Baudrillard, then, Schumacher doesn’t see hyperreality as an experience of loss but a condition of possibility – and it is here that the film’s queer yearning, and the thirdspace of Grandpa’s house, comes into play. Much as Schumacher holds back from bemoaning simulation to instead look for ways to creatively live within and through it, Grandpa’s house is neither quite a rejection of hyperreality nor a restoration of “reality” in the sense that it is understood by the countercultural metaphysics of the lair. Certainly, on the surface, Grandpa’s house resembles the lair: it is filled with cluttered eclectica, subsists on sedimented detrirus and prioritises memory over spectacle. Yet where the lair is a failed form of cultural inheritance, Grandpa’s house is a functional one, replacing the hermetic crypt of the vampires with an equally unconventional but sustainable domesticity embodied in the figure of Grandpa himself, who confounds any easy distinction between generations. Pushing seventy, Grandpa is clearly too old to be a Boomer, and yet he exhibits many countercultural sensibilities, including a commitment to eccentricity, individualism, anti-authoritarianism and living off grid whenever he can. Lest he be reducible to an ageing, domesticated hippie, however, Schumacher equally presents him as an eccentric roommate, or even a fellow adolescent, to Lucy and her boys – and critically, Schumacher never presents this as a broken family, or Grandpa as a restoration of the paternal authority left in the wake of Lucy’s separation from her husband; in the film’s logic, no substitute is needed.

Seen from that perspective, The Lost Boys’ three spaces resolve themselves into three different modes of queer awakening, reflecting the film’s own transitional position in 1987, a moment when the liberation movements of the 60s had been fractured by the AIDS epidemic but queer theory had not quite solidified yet as a popular and political discourse. The lair represents the liberationist impulse of the 60s, much as the vampires are “gay” in the classic sense in their scrupulous attempt to escape heteronormativity by forming isolationist communities that depend on alternative forms of kinship and that define themselves against conventional suburban and familial domesticity. By contrast, the fairground is “queer” in a more emergent sense, embracing a continuous becoming in which the lair’s effort to construct an “outside” to normativity doesn’t make sense because there is no longer any difference between inside and outside; rather a kind of Deleuzian encounter, a thousand plateaus of performative self-becoming, epitomised by the overdetermination of the muscular saxophone player who anchors the most hallucinatory sequence, at once hyper-heterosexual and hyper-homosexual, and possibly both at once. Just as the vampires cruise the fairground but must retreat to the lair each day, what starts as a clearly gay-coded attraction between Michael and David morphs into something more queerly emergent, a Sedgwickian overlap of desire and identification in which Michael wants David, to possess David, to be David, and only wants Star because of David.

What Schumacher offers through Grandpa’s house is something considerably more radical than either the desuetude of the lair or performativity of the fairground – a space where these queer modes can be reintegrated back into domestic life and where queer people can envisage a future beyond endless mutability or eternalised adolescence. Interestingly, Schumacher even suggests that the liberationist communities of the 60s can be restrictive in the same way as the nuclear family, since the closest we get to a traditional father figure, or to a restoration of the father function, is Herrmann’s Max, the head of the vampires, and the best contender for Lucy’s hand in marriage. Unlike the other vampires, Max spends almost no time in the lair (at least we never see him there) and is a middle class yuppie who proposes vampiric infection as a blended nuclear family by admitting to Lucy that “David and my boys misbehaved – like I told you, the boys need a mother.” His “family” quickly blends into his franchise, and his burgeoning video store empire, in a kind of Reaganesque absorption of the counterculture into professionalised domesticity. This, Schumacher warns us, is one possible outcome of a calcifying gay liberation movement – the gay Boomer transformed into “responsible” administrator of the hyperreal media sphere that contains the vital and restorative energies needed for the next generation of youths trying to find a way to live within the system; the countercultural “outside” turned into a revenue stream.

With Max we thus reach the outermost circle of the film’s spatial typology – the fairground morphs counterculture into hyperreality, the lair preserves counterculture as inert relic, and Max integrates the two into a corporate managerialism that revolves around seduction and control, rather than the dialogue, negotiation and messiness of Grandpa’s house. Where Max represents the worst of all possible worlds, absorbing the film’s queer exhilaration into an oppressive hyper-normality that promises undead suburban security for the rest of time, Lucy and her family are the best of all possible worlds, brokering both the energies of the fairground and lair into a vision of home that is primarily defined by what it is not – a line of flight from the other two spaces, and whose very essence lies in its fluidity. The funniest and most moving sequences in the film unfold in Grandpa’s house, which offers new forms of kinship that don’t require permanent exile from everyday life in the same way as the lair, right down to the ending, a one-liner every bit as memorable as Some Like It Hot or They Live, in which Grandpa off-handedly admits that he’s always known about the vampires. Rather than an epic showdown in which Grandpa reveals this legacy as a way of finally “graduating” into the “missing” paternal role, he remains comically marginal, a bit player to the end. Just as his taxidermy provides a beautiful counterpoint to the lair, in its commitment to preserving the traces of life without pretending life continues unchanged, Grandpa is an object lesson in post-countercultural ageing, a beacon for queer characters yearning for narratives that go beyond the perpetual youth of both lair and fairground.

There is, of course, one more distinctive space in the film – the comic store frequented by Edgar and Allan Frog. While this exists in the fairground, and as part of hyperreality, it’s also different in kind from the video store. Max uses the video store to executively manage the circulation of images and media, like a Gothic-postmodern aristocrat, but the Frogs’ store is driven by fandom, interpretation and ultimately by what Fredric Jameson described as “cognitive mapping” of the intersections between the real and hyperreal, the physical world we inhabit and a new virtual space shimmering at its edges. Like cultural critics within the film, the Frogs treat their environment as a semiotic system, a repository of (often opaque) signifiers, and are committed to close, scrupulous and frequently arcane readings, making them the only characters who mirror the way that we as the audience are invited to read the film’s trio of spaces as symbolic vehicles. Yet the final joke and pivot of The Lost Boys is that Schumacher never identifies whole with the Frogs either – their ponderings are exaggerated to the point of parody, their dialogue often feels as if it is relating an entirely different film and, despite the fact that they turn out to be right about nearly everything, they are never elevated to the position of conventional truth-tellers or voices of authority.

As much as he may sympathise with Jameson’s cognitive mapping, and as much of an affinity as he may feel with the Frogs’ efforts to read, rather than merely react to, the contours of the film’s liminal spaces, Schumacher is thus equally committed to what we might describe as a Sedgwickian reparative reading in which no single act of decoding can remove the possibilities for queer metamorphosis that remain inherent in the film’s aesthetic (and the Frogs are easily the stodgiest heterosexuals in the cast of characters, further than any others from the libidinal pull of the vampires as much as they may understand it in theory). And Schumacher leaves us poised on that tantalising threshold, a horizon of possibility encapsulated in my favourite scene; when Michael, Sam and Star crouch at the windows of Grandpa’s house, the nocturnal world transformed into a post-perceptual maelstrom of light and sound by the vampiric circumambience outside, and then, when the noise dies down, open the front door to discover the same old naturalistic coordinates – garden, path, trees, gate – but with a wind still whistling from somewhere unimaginably distant, wafting its barely visualisable possibilities to the audience in turn.