My high school classmates and I scanned the dark San Lorenzo River from the trestle. It was midnight, and we were here to do the Lost Boys Leap.
We’d waited, as locals knew to do, for the right season when the water was high enough you won’t hit the bottom, but not raging so it drags you out into the waves.
“What are we looking for exactly?” I said.
“Shopping carts,” Collin said.
Used by vagrants living along the banks, they’d get mired in the silt and split by the elements into rusty morningstars.
Tommy was first to jump, our monkey cosmonaut careening into the unknown.
With our all-clear he dropped into the drink. Unlike for Kiefer Sutherland’s vamp gang, the fog was above us, not below, so we could see his splash.
Finally he surfaced, thumb held aloft.
As The Lost Boys’ tagline goes: “Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die.”
“I think it’s genetic,” Atlantis Fantasyworld’s Joe Ferrara says about our rite of passage. “You don’t even know you have to do it, you just have to do it.”
Of course, everyone who does it isn’t even reenacting on the right bridge. That’s in Santa Clarita, California. But canonically, it’s the bridge bordering the Boardwalk in “Santa Carla,” a beach town with a serious vampire problem.
That problem was a boon to Ferrara.
His comic shop not only appears as a set, but it’s where Corey Haim’s deuteragonist Sam receives his “survival manual” from pint-sized vampire killers, the Frog Brothers: a comic book.
The film conferred respect to an art that, prior to Marvel’s box office dominance was often a one-note joke in pop culture, and to its collectors, who are often shorthand for stunted geeks and worse – snobs.
“Worst…episode…ever,” Ferrara says in a perfect impression of The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy.
He names other offenders that “emphasize the stereotype.” Sex and The City. Unbreakable. Even The Big Bang Theory, which treats its emotional moron leads as geniuses, has contempt for Stuart, The Comic Center’s owner.
“Neil Gaiman [writer of DC/Vertigo comic The Sandman] was in his store, and he didn’t know who he was!”
Ferrara will be hosting Alan Frog, actor Jamison Newlander, for an in-store signing this Saturday, marking the 40th year since the film was shot on our shores, and the 50th in Atlantis’ existence. The Boardwalk launches its annual Friday Free Movies on the Beach series with a showing at 9pm. All weekend, fans can stop by The Blue Lagoon for bloody good drink specials and the best vampire cave decorations this side of Halloween.
Managing this “revamping” is Laurel Meissner, who, with collaborators Noel Valentine and DJ Last Minute, will be turning the Blue’s back room into a subterranean lair on a shoestring. This is not their first gothic rodeo.
The first time was in 2023 for the 24th anniversary of The Box, “an anarchic little kingdom” now one of California’s longest-running goth nights. Most props were built then, then exhumed each year.
Lost Boys has had many readings: as queer allegory, a drug addiction metaphor, a punk answer to the squaring of society by Reagan’s Moral Majority.
“I think it’s about the teen experience,” Newlander says, though he’s open to all of the above.
He sees it akin to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which also explored teendom in an “expressionistic way,” but for “at-risk teens.” Oliver Twist seems a likely inspiration.
“The ones that get lost. In the system, in drugs, in music.”
Newlander hopes to preserve the historic “Grandpa’s House,” the former Pogonip Clubhouse where the protagonists lived and he was slimed in glittery gore, as a museum for Lost Boys lore. Other than a shooting location map produced by the Santa Cruz County Film Commission, there’s little official recognition of the film’s significance by the city: no guided bus or walking tour.
Ferrara, who pushes a pin into his store’s world map whenever a fan visits because Lost Boys led them there, is grateful but uneasy being the only physical embodiment in town.
“You go to the Boardwalk and there’s a little plaque,” he says. “That’s all.”
Newlander points to the success of the current Broadway adaptation, which just garnered 12 Tony nominations. The trustfall my friends took is redone by actors dangling from a trestle bridge set who, one by one, drop and disappear into a fog-filled void.
“There’s too little Lost Boys love in Santa Cruz for how much love there is,” he says.
To show your Lost Boys love, the film plays this Friday on Main Beach in front of the Colonnade at 9pm. The Jamison Newlander signing is Saturday, 1-5pm at Atlantis Fantasyworld, 1020 Cedar St., followed by a ticketed dinner 6-8pm at Pono Hawaiian Grill, 120 Union St.
