the smartest bubble head you know

level 2: the lost boys follows a not uncommon horror movie trend where monstrous and villainous characters are associated with alt fashion or other counter-culture signifiers, which may also call to mind an association with queerness as it exists in conflict with cishet cultural norms. this, intentionally or unintentionally, helps to position queerness as an evil threat to the status quo in the minds of viewers. while a lot of queer people end up seeing themselves in these characters in a positive way, its inappropriate to talk about how cool gay vampires are without at least acknowledging the implications of this in relation to the long history of queer-coded villains in film.

level 3: the lost boys is actually all a clever subversion of the aforementioned trope; while on the surface michael is positioned as the classic disaffected youth, child of divorce (this and him being in the care of a single mother helping to introduce the idea that his vampirism ie latent homosexuality starts with this initial failure to uphold conservative family values), falling in with the wrong crowd who corrupt him and creates a rift between him and his family, the twist of the movie reveals that the vampire gang exists under the authority of the head vampire who himself has all the signifiers of the wholesome middle class all-american dad figure. this recontextualizes the queer-coding of the vampires from a gang of wild subversives to a group of kids who, like michael, were most likely struggling with some sort of instability in their home lives and were groomed into vampirehood by their sire, the symbol of the father they perhaps lacked. the precious but fragile unity that exists among these outsiders cannot survive, not because a more normative family structure has some special thing they lack, but because they are chasing an idea of family that despite their counter-cultural leanings hasnt been meaningfully disentangled from patriarchy, as embodied by their literal patriarch.

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