Podcasts
Celebrating 150 Episodes With ‘The Lost Boys’! [Horror Queers Podcast]
The Sex Scene Can Stay.
After heading back to Haddonfield to discuss David Gordon Green’s 2018 sequel Halloween, we discussed everyone’s favorite vampire-killing Marvel superhero Blade before spending Halloween shacking up with the colorful characters in Clue. Now we’re kicking off November with our 150th episode and a discussion of a seminal queer vampire text in Joel Schumacher‘s The Lost Boys!
In the film, teenage brothers Michael (Jason Patric) and Sam (Corey Haim) move with their mother (Dianne Wiest) to a small town in northern California. While the younger Sam meets a pair of kindred spirits in geeky comic-book nerds Edward (Corey Feldman) and Alan (Jamison Newlander), the angst-ridden Michael soon falls for Star (Jami Gertz) — who turns out to be in thrall to David (Kiefer Sutherland), leader of a local gang of vampires. Sam and his new friends must save Michael and Star from the undead.
Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get a new episode every Wednesday. You can subscribe on iTunes/Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, iHeartRadio, SoundCloud, TuneIn, Amazon Music, Acast, Google Podcasts, and RSS.
Episode 150 – The Lost Boys (1987)
Grab your leather jackets and shape up your mullet because we’re celebrating our 150th episode with a seminal queer vampire text in Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys (1987)! Joining us for the discussion is Marisa Mirabal, a co-host of the Black Magic Coven podcast!
After taking a look at the historical context of the film’s release (height of the Reagan era, AIDS crisis, the Moral Majority), we’ll go all-in on this time capsule of the ’80s, which originated as a sort of “Goonies Go Vampire” before Schumacher stepped in and sexified everything up.
Plus, “Cry Little Sister” (a lot), vampirism as a metaphor for oral sex, Kiefer Sutherland’s “dance bars,” a late-in-the-episode discussion of the film’s two sequels and an anecdote about how The Lost Boys tricked Trace into reading Mormon propaganda.
Cross out The Lost Boys!
Coming up on Wednesday: We don’t often cover television on the podcast, but since we just passed the 20th anniversary of the classic Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical episode “Once More, With Feeling”, we’re doing an episode on it!
P.S. Subscribe to our Patreon for tons of additional content! This month, we’ll have episodes on Amazon Prime’s I Know What You Did Last Summer series, SyFy’s Slumber Party Massacre remake, the original Resident Evil and Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City!
Maybe you haven’t thought about your good friend Sweeney Todd in a while, or maybe you have. The 2007 movie is a bit of a memory, though a fond one – it has a healthy 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, for what it’s worth. But 2023’s Broadway revival starring Josh Groban, who your mom thinks is “so talented” (she’s right!), was enough of a hit that its run was extended.
It appears we’re in a bit of a Sweeneyssaince.
For the uninitiated, Sweeney Todd is the story of a barber who kills his customers and disposes of the bodies by passing them off to pie shop owner Mrs. Lovett, who uses them as a special ingredient. But there’s more below the trap door.
Sweeney Todd isn’t just a late 70s musical that turned into a movie; it started as a penny dreadful called The String of Pearls: A Domestic Romance (author unknown), told week-to-week in the 1840s. Penny dreadfuls were essentially fiction zines featuring serialized stories that were usually horror-based and cost a penny, leading to the very literal nickname.
The String of Pearls differs from the more well-known Sweeney Todd plot in that it follows the investigation of a missing persons case that leads to the reveal of Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett’s arrangement, as opposed to the more modern iteration which treats audiences to the duo hatching their homicidal plan and then giving the worst haircuts ever. What a delightfully wild reveal that must have been if you were a reader in Victorian London after weeks of wondering what had become of the missing sailor carrying a string of pearls to deliver to a lovely girl.
Kristen and Will discuss the history and future of Sweeney Todd and works inspired by it this week on Guide to the Unknown. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to get a new episode every Friday.
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