‘The Lost Boys’: How Santa Cruz became Santa Carla

Part 1 of a three-part series exploring the enduring lure of “The Lost Boys,” from its roots in 1980s Santa Cruz to Broadway and beyond.

In 1986, Judy Bouley was driving director Joel Schumacher through downtown Santa Cruz when he suddenly began pointing out the window.

“I want the juggling clown … the gal with the rat … that guy with the tattoos …”

Bouley, the additional casting director, remembers Schumacher’s eyes lighting up at every corner along Pacific Avenue. Punks, surfers, transients, teenagers with big hair. The kinds of faces that felt both California cool and slightly dangerous. Exactly the vibe Schumacher wanted for his vampire playground in “The Lost Boys.”

Then came the real trick.

Bouley had to swing back around and talk these locals into being extras in a vampire flick.

At the time, few could have imagined those casting joyrides would help birth one of the most beloved cult movies of the 1980s.

Forty years after filming began, “The Lost Boys” has become more than a movie in Santa Cruz. It has become local legend.

Mid-1980s Santa Cruz carried a kind of freewheeling rebel energy that felt entirely its own. This was pre-earthquake Santa Cruz, before the collapse of the Cooper House and the reshaping of downtown. Pacific Avenue still flowed through the brick pathways and greenery of the Pacific Garden Mall, where people wandered as much to see and be seen as they did to shop.

Leather jackets and combat boots collided with beach-town casual and thrift-store glamour. Cafes like Pergolesi or Zinho were all-day hangouts for students, thinkers and artists. Back then, Santa Cruz was still affordable and downtown pulsed with a sense of experimentation and reinvention that made the town feel unlike almost anywhere else in California.

At night, the sleepy beach-town vibe gave way to something wilder: surf kids, punk clubs, drag shows, queer pride and art-school antics, all wrapped in the scent of clove cigarettes and salty ocean air.

But beneath that freedom lingered another shadow. 

By 1986, Santa Cruz was roughly a decade removed from the serial killings that had earned the county its grim “murder capital” reputation in the 1970s. The violence was gone, but the mythos remained, hanging over the town like the early morning fog. Paradise and menace coexisted here in a way outsiders found both seductive and disturbing.

That weird cocktail of beauty, rebellion, and danger? That’s what lured “The Lost Boys”  creators to Santa Cruz in the first place.

When “The Lost Boys” hit screens in 1987, it followed teenage brothers Michael and Sam Emerson after they move with their recently divorced mother to a coastal town that looked suspiciously like Santa Cruz – a neon-lit Boardwalk hiding a secret world of teenage vampires. Michael gets sucked into the orbit of David and his leather-clad gang, and suddenly, this isn’t just a horror flick. 

Beneath all the comic-book flash and slick style, there’s something deeper: a story about identity, temptation and the magnetic pull of finding your people. The film is a tug-of-war between the families we’re born into and the ones we build for ourselves. 

Long before vampires took over the Boardwalk, screenwriters Janice Fischer and James Jeremias were searching for the perfect setting for a story about eternal youth and the darker side of adolescence.

The idea reportedly began with a fascination for author Anne Rice’s tragic child vampire, Claudia, from “Interview with the Vampire,” a young girl eternally confined within childhood. From there, the writers began twisting another childhood fantasy into something more ominous: What if Peter Pan was really a vampire – a boy who flies, never ages and lures children into his own secret world?

From the beginning, Fischer and Jeremias pictured the story playing out in Santa Cruz, drawn to the town’s youthful freedom and coastal amusement park.

At first, the script was aimed at kids — think supernatural adventure, not sexy teen horror. But then director Richard Donner (yes, the guy behind “The Goonies”) got his hands on it and decided the story needed teenagers instead.

While the script sat in rewrite limbo, Donner jumped ship for “Lethal Weapon” and passed the director’s chair to Schumacher – fresh from “St. Elmo’s Fire” and famous for his eye for style and youth culture. Schumacher wanted nothing to do with “Goonies with vampires,” and proceeded to transform the film into something sexier, stranger and far more dangerous.

He pictured young vampires with motorcycles, leather jackets and rock-and-roll swagger. His film would not feel like a fantasy world for children. It would feel like a seductive underground universe already hiding beneath the surface of California youth culture.

And when Schumacher arrived in Santa Cruz, he knew he’d found his vampire stomping grounds.

“The minute I got there [Santa Cruz] I said to myself, ‘This is exactly where I’d come to if I were a teenage vampire,’” Schumacher later recalled.

The mayor of Santa Cruz at the time was reportedly very upset by the idea of the city being directly associated with vampires and the lingering “murder capital” reputation. The producers ultimately decided to fictionalize the setting as “Santa Carla.”

But very little else needed to be changed.

Director of photography Michael Chapman, of “Raging Bull” and “Taxi Driver” fame, later recalled that much of what appears in the film’s opening montage was simply the real Santa Cruz of 1986. “We didn’t fake anything,” he said. “With the exception of a handful of principal cast members, many of the faces appearing onscreen were actual Santa Cruz locals – skaters, punks, surfers and downtown regulars pulled directly from the streets.” 

In many ways, “The Lost Boys” did not invent Santa Carla. It just turned the real Santa Cruz into a legend hiding in plain sight.

Bouley and her business partner Dick Broder, who ran Central Coast Production Services, suddenly found themselves at the center of a major Hollywood production. “The Lost Boys” became the third major film they helped coordinate locally, but it would ultimately launch Bouley’s career as a casting director. 

“We had an open casting call and 2,000 people showed up at the Holiday Inn,” Bouley recalled. “They stood in the hot sun for hours to be seen.”

Part of the gig was finding faces Schumacher loved. The other part? Herding the beautiful chaos that came with them.

“We cast three local boys to play the Surf Nazis on the beach,” Bouley said. “They had spikey mohawks and were full of energy. One kid didn’t have a car and I picked him up every day to go to the set. Another was on probation and I went to court to beg the judge to give him a ‘learning experience’ so we could get him to the Warner Brothers sound stage to film the interior cave scene. The judge thought it was a great idea.  How cool was that?” 

Meanwhile, Santa Cruz itself continued spilling naturally into the frame.

“It took 10 days to set up the beach concert shot,” Bouley remembered. “Over 500 extras came in their own clothes and it was perfect.”

Kiefer Sutherland, who stars as David in the film, later echoed the same memory in an interview: “We had two costume trucks full of wardrobe for the Boardwalk scenes. [The] extras from Santa Cruz came in their own clothes. We did not dress a single person. There was a kind of freedom in the town, and those people, that was pretty extraordinary.”

That wild freedom got baked right into the movie’s DNA.

What made “The Lost Boys” hit so hard was that Schumacher grounded all the supernatural madness in relationships that you could actually feel.

At the center of the film is the Emerson family – a mother (Dianne Wiest) and her two teenage sons (Jason Patric and Corey Haim), trying to rebuild their lives in an unfamiliar town. Around them orbit entirely different forms of community and belonging. The vampire gang led by David ( Sutherland) offers Michael danger, freedom and acceptance wrapped inside the seductive fantasy of eternal youth. Meanwhile, the Frog brothers – comic-book-obsessed vampire hunters played by Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander – create their own deeply loyal brotherhood built on imagination, survival and absolute conviction to slay the vampires.

Each group in the film is, in its own way, searching for connection.

That emotional undercurrent is part of what gives “The Lost Boys” surprising depth beneath all its swagger and comic-book excess. Schumacher understood that the vampires work only if the emotional stakes feel real. The loneliness, confusion and longing felt by the young characters are never treated as jokes. Their hunger for identity and belonging feels authentic, even as motorcycles fly across fog-soaked beaches and vampires dangle from railroad trestles.

Combined with cinematographer Chapman’s lush imagery – all neon carnival lights, shadowy Boardwalk corners and moonlit beaches – Schumacher’s vision transformed “The Lost Boys” into something far richer than a teen horror film.

It turned into a myth about youth itself: that aching need to find your crew, reinvent yourself, and belong to something bigger — even if it means leaving your old life behind. 

Nearly four decades later, “The Lost Boys” continues to resonate not simply because of its vampires, outstanding soundtrack, or iconic Boardwalk imagery, but because the film taps into something emotionally universal: The longing to belong. 

For teenagers trying to figure out who they are and where they fit, that fantasy packs a punch. The movie gets it: sometimes the families you choose matter just as much as the ones you’re born into.

For a lot of us, especially the young and restless, that world felt strangely familiar.

The movie landed right as alternative identification and self-expression were breaking into the mainstream. Punk culture, underground music, queer aesthetics and California counterculture – are all simmering in the “The Lost Boys.” The outsiders aren’t just monsters. They are young people building their own world on the fringes of conventional society.

And maybe that’s part of why the movie still feels alive today.

Sure, the hair and the music are pure ’80s, but the longing underneath? That never goes out of style.

Decades later, the influence of “The Lost Boys” stretches far beyond nostalgia screenings and Gen X fandom. In 2018, filmmaker Jordan Peele came to Santa Cruz and the Beach Boardwalk to shoot his horror film “Us.” He later shared with local film officials that “The Lost Boys” had deeply influenced him as a young filmmaker and he was determined to one day come to Santa Cruz and make a horror film of his own.

Santa Carla’s mythology had officially survived another generation.

Although the faces have changed, the Pacific Garden Mall has transformed, and 1986 Santa Cruz mostly lives in memory, the version Schumacher glimpsed from that car window – rebellious, searching, beautiful, and a little dangerous – still flickers beneath the surface.

Now, 40 years after cameras first rolled under the Boardwalk lights, “The Lost Boys” is getting yet another afterlife.

This spring, the vampire world born from the streets and shadows of Santa Cruz has risen again – this time on Broadway, with a new musical adaptation already racking up critical buzz and 12 Tony Award nominations. Santa Carla has begun to meet an entirely new audience.

What started in the wild world of 1986 Santa Cruz doesn’t just belong to us anymore.

But Santa Cruz is still where the story began.

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