Why Santa Cruz needs a vampire bar: Could ‘Lost Boys’ tourism be our secret weapon?

I have an idea. I’m not going to claim it’s an original idea. I’ll guess that I’m maybe the 5,786th person to have this particular idea — in the past month alone. It’s the kind of idea that commonly bubbles up in a smoke-filled dorm room or from a barstool over a pint. But here goes:

Downtown Santa Cruz needs a “Lost Boys” restaurant — or a bar, a cafe, a museum, or some combination thereof. On the downtown business front, the city finds itself in a strange in-between state, as it sails toward an uncertain but potentially robust future. It needs a good narrative, something that creates buzz, something to intrigue the visitor from Soquel, from Sunnyvale, and from Sydney. 

“The Lost Boys” might be that thing. 

I probably don’t have to tell you, but “The Lost Boys” was a 1987 movie, something between a horror film and a winking comedy, that was shot mostly in Santa Cruz. It has attained an unlikely kind of immortality as a cult film, and for a certain demographic sector — let’s say Gen X or millennials who grew up in or near Santa Cruz — well, I don’t think “beloved” is too strong a word. 

It’s odd how that kind of lasting fame takes hold. At almost 40 years old, “The Lost Boys” is still watched over and over again — the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, one of the film’s principal settings, plays the film every year for free on Main Beach, this year on June 13. By contrast, just six years ago, another horror film was released that was also shot mostly in Santa Cruz and heavily featured the Boardwalk, and that one was much more high-profile, with bigger stars and a better pedigree. But now no one talks much about “Us,” at least not like they do “The Lost Boys.”

The U.K.-based writer and academic Jennifer Otter Bickerdike can talk all day and night about “The Lost Boys.” She not only carries a Ph.D. in pop-culture fandom, she grew up in Santa Cruz and was 14 when “The Lost Boys” was first released. An artificial intelligence lab could not create a more fitting example of “The Lost Boys” fan club.

Reached at her home near London, Bickerdike said that “The Lost Boys” is well-known around the world. “It’s not only a geographical reference point,” she said, “but it’s a socio-cultural reference point in terms of a feel and a look of what California represents in the imagination.”

Last week, I combed downtown Santa Cruz, looking for signs of “The Lost Boys,” and I found plenty of them. Several stores and retail outlets had a few things — stickers, buttons — that referenced the film. Streetlight Records featured an apparently hand-made reproduction of the film’s famous “Murder Capital of the World” sign in its window. Farther down Pacific Avenue, the vintage clothing store Moon Zooom had several references to “The Lost Boys” in its window, including one of those missing-person flyers featuring the film’s vampire title characters.

But the center of “Lost Boys” interest in Santa Cruz is the comic-book and entertainment shop Atlantis Fantasyworld on Cedar Street, owned and operated by Joe Ferrara, who himself was in the movie. A key scene in the movie was shot in Ferrara’s pre-earthquake Atlantis, at the south end of Pacific Avenue. 

“There is not a day that goes by that ‘The Lost Boys’ does not come up in some way,” he said. Internet culture often points to Atlantis as a key stop on any kind of “Lost Boys” tour of Santa Cruz. As a result, the Atlantis staff can riff on a list of countries around the world from which visitors have come to ask about “The Lost Boys.” (Atlantis certainly doesn’t overplay its role in “Lost Boys” fandom; the references are there, but they compete with a thousand other superheroes and cultish objects.)

So, how is any of this relevant to now? What does a Reagan-era throwaway have to do with the transformation that Santa Cruz is undergoing today?

Somehow, perhaps even accidentally, “The Lost Boys” taps into a resonant theme about life in Santa Cruz, even life in California at large. The movie illustrates an assumption that both those who live in California and those who don’t often share: that underneath the fun and sunshine of this place, there is a more sinister and threatening reality. It’s akin to the appeal of the great film noir classics of the previous century from “Sunset Boulevard” to “Chinatown” to “Mulholland Drive”: Behind the tinsel and glamour of Hollywood is something menacing that undermines that romanticized image. 

When some longtime local — those who still have a “Keep Santa Cruz Weird” bumper sticker in a drawer somewhere — laments how the new development downtown threatens Santa Cruz’s soul, this is what they’re talking about. Sky-high housing prices have already chased away many of the scruffy, defiantly punk people on the margins who have always found a community in Santa Cruz. New development very well could push out those who remain. 

In the film, famously, the name “Santa Cruz” is never uttered. City officials at the time, unnerved by the film’s focus on blood, gore and vampires, leaned on the producers to change the name of the city, which they did — to “Santa Carla.” Near the beginning of the film, in fact, we see a big “Welcome to Santa Carla” sign erected on West Cliff Drive, on the back of which is spray-painted “Murder Capital of the World,” a reference to a painful episode in Santa Cruz’s history in which it was terrorized by three separate serial killers, an episode that occurred just a dozen years or so before “The Lost Boys” began filming. “Santa Carla” has now evolved as a kind of shorthand for the gritty, hard-knuckled street culture behind the breezy affluence in Santa Cruz.

So about that bar/restaurant. There are lots of vacancies downtown, and lots of opportunities to find the perfect setting. Of course, it’s an idea that could also go hilariously off the rails, and we could end up with some overstuffed and overpriced, generically menued tourist trap that locals would avoid (think Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. in Monterey). So, said Jennifer Otter Bickerdike, it’s going to take someone with a well-calibrated sense of what will work with “Lost Boys” fans.

“Don’t make it cheesy,” she said. “That’s number one. ‘The Lost Boys’ is really cheesy in a lot of ways already. But it’s campy and fun, not ridiculous.”

Whoever tries to run with this idea is likely to run into some pretty hairy issues involving licensing. There are no laws more studiously enforced in America than copyright protection for corporate properties. But someone savvy to what those laws allow and don’t allow could always find a way to thread the needle.

“Just make it a vampire bar,” suggested Joe Ferrara, “see where that goes.” 

In a way, a fully licensed “Lost Boys” bar with genuine film memorabilia and clips playing on large-screen TVs on a loop — with the $20 cocktails to pay for all that licensing — could give off Planet Hollywood vibes and fail spectacularly. To succeed, this place — I mean, c’mon, could you call it anything other than “Santa Carla”? — is going to have to have a bit of a streetwise, contraband vibe. Your conservative aunt is going to have to feel just a little bit uncomfortable there. 

Still, if you can concoct exactly the right atmosphere and attract the right clientele, you’ll serve as a beacon for traveling “Lost Boys” fans everywhere, and become an inspiration for other businesses to attract the tourist dollar once the construction is done and when (if?) the economy is rolling again. 

A couple of weeks ago, I went to see a screening of “The Big Lebowski” in Monterey that was followed by a live Q&A with Jeff Bridges, “The Dude” himself. When I told my daughter about it, she said, “Did you know there was a Lebowski bar in Iceland?”

Iceland? Lebowski? How weird and incongruous is that? I’ll bet The Dude’s cult comes from near and far to go there. 

C’mon, if Iceland can do it, why can’t Santa Cruz?

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