10 Most Inspirational Teen Movies Of All Time
8. The Lost Boys (1987)
“It was all going to be so perfect, Lucy. Just like one big, happy family. Your boys... and my boys.”
On the surface, The Lost Boys is an almost infinitely quotable essay of style over substance with a killer soundtrack and some strange wardrobe choices: the quintessential eighties cult classic, in fact.
If you look a little deeper though, you can see our old friend teenage agency cropping up yet again. David’s teenage motorcycle gang, the lost boys of the title, live in their own vampiric Neverland - sleep all day, party all night, never grow old, never die, you know the drill.
They’re every adolescent horror story in films of the fifties and sixties made hyperreal: a law unto themselves, removed from society, rebels without moral or ethical compunction. David, Marko, Dwayne and Paul are Reefer Madness and The Wild One with fangs and a body count.
Conversely, despite the big front he puts up, Michael is a good kid - the man of the family, now that their father is out of the picture. Even his cockatoo of a kid brother Sam is mature enough to step in to save Michael even after he begins to turn into a creature of the night.
The Lost Boys is a film in which adults are conspicuous by their absence at all the key moments. The film is careful to show that the young protagonists are left with responsibility over their own lives.
Head vampire Max is after Mike and Sam’s mother to add to his family, believing that he can drag David and the boys back onto the straight and narrow if he only gives them a mother figure, as if a lack of stable parenting is the reason for their delinquency. It’s Michael, the supposedly ‘angry teen from a broken home’, who shows that kids don’t need discipline and a full complement of parents, but just the space to make their own decisions, right or wrong.