For those of us that grew up in the 80s, the movie ‘The Lost Boys’ (released in 1987) was a staple of teenaged movie watching. For many, it was their first horror movie because until you saw it, it didn’t seem like a “horror” film at face value. Contemporaries ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street,’ ‘Halloween,’ and ‘Friday the 13th,’ were movies you could tell were obviously slasher films just by glancing at the posters. By comparison, ‘The Lost Boys’ poster just looked like a bunch of cool kids hanging out, I mean how could a film with “Ted” (played by Alex Winter in ‘Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure’) and “Mouth” (Corey Feldman in ‘The Goonies’) be anything but a fun romp? And yet, it’s pretty much anything but! In general, the movie is about a band of vampires who run amok doing the usual vampire things – drink blood, kill people, and get all sexy while kids our age (at the time) strive to save the city from the menace.
Among the film’s stars was Kiefer Sutherland, who discussed the film in a recent interview. He explained that there was a scene that he was particularly fond of and was disappointed that it didn’t make the final cut due to being too gory:
“There was a scene that actually didn’t make the movie that I was really, really excited about, mainly because it was just so violent I couldn’t believe that we were doing it. It’s sort of in the movie — they cut around it — but there was a guy on a beach and he was bald and they had made a prosthetic cast of his head. And the part of the scene that I loved the most was literally, it was like a cake: I ate the whole back of his head off and blood just went everywhere. I had been directed to just smile like a child having cake, and the two images were so frightening and scary.”
‘The Lost Boys’ introduced a lot of us to the horror genre and sparked our imaginations about how it included much more than just random slasher violence or weird multidimensional gore as in ‘Hellraiser.’ Sutherland’s character was also influential for changing the idea of vampires from being Transylvanian smooth-talkers to rock stars.
In the interview, Sutherland noted that his look in the film was inspired by none other than 1980s rock legend, Billy Idol:
“It’s actually a funny story. Joel Schumacher wanted me to have long hair, and I had long hair at the time and then he wanted it white, a timeless kind of thousand-year-old look. So I dyed it white and my hair was like normally long, like long everywhere. And I just looked like a wrestler! I hated it. And I just thought, ‘That’s awful.” And Billy Idol had just come out… and he looked cool. I mean, he just looked badass. And so I thought, ‘Well, he’s got white hair. That could look really cool. But Joel wanted my hair long. And so I actually think I might’ve been responsible, or at least partially responsible, for creating the mullet. And for that, I’ll apologize to the death.”
He went on to explain that he convinced the set stylist to cut the hair on the top of his head and leave the rest long. And the rest is history.
Source: Yahoo Entertainment
