The Lost Boys, 35 years later: 'Everything was still firing on all cylinders and it was a f---ing madhouse'

If the "Frog Brothers" and "Death by Stereo" mean anything to you, you'll be slightly horrified to know that Joel Schumacher's vampy teen horror movie The Lost Boys is 35 years old this year. The 1987 film, starring Corey Haim, Jason Patric, Keifer Sutherland, Jami Gertz, Dianne Weist, and Edward Herrmann — not to mention the most jacked shirtless saxophone player ever — was an unexpected hit, grossing more than $32 million and inspiring two sequels.

EW gathered cast members Corey Feldman (Edgar Frog), Jamison Newlander (Alan Frog) and Alex Winter (Marko, a.k.a. "the little one" that — 35-year-old spoiler alert! — dies first) to talk after-hours partying, the film's homoerotic undertones, and yes, what became of said sax player.

On why The Lost Boys still resonates after all these years:

ALEX WINTER: I think it's the most successful interpretation of all the things [director Joel Schumacher] did well, which was fashion and music and understanding actors and story and style and — I'm just gonna call a spade a spade — homoeroticism and sexual ambiguity and sexual adventurousness. So few people really had a forward vision. And Joel coming from fashion really did know where things were going, so he and [costume designer] Suzy Becker and [production designer] Bo Welch, they were doing things that almost didn't make sense to the studio at that time of that summer, but by the time it came out, it was like, the thing. And he saw that coming and baked it into the movie. I just think [Joel] swung for the fences, and he connected, you know? It's not The Godfather, but in terms of how it works, it's very satisfying.

COREY FELDMAN: The story is rooted in family. So even though it's a fictional story and it's got all this crazy stuff going on, the whole base of it is about these three families and how they intertwine if you really think about it. So it's a family film. And a lot of people don't realize that, but that was something that Joel was always very cognizant of. And I think that is something that really hits home and makes it feel naturalistic. It's not just a science-fiction movie, it's not just a vampire movie. It's got that true, virtuous piece of it.

JAMISON NEWLANDER: When we do these [Lost Boys] conventions and we talk on different panels, I get to hear Jason Patric talk about his approach to the role, and it exemplifies, I think, part of what you're getting at, which is that there was real stuff going on. Jason Patric didn't want to just do a vampire movie. He's a serious actor, a serious guy. He didn't want to make it just your run-of-the-mill vampire movie. And so I think there was a lot of that energy going on where people really wanted to make something that actually had some substance, and I think that's part of the staying power.

On the film's homoerotic undertones:

WINTER: I do think that, for sure, our characters had that kind of undercurrent. I don't think it required, you know, sitting around a table read discussing it. I had spent my previous five years doing two long-running Broadway shows back to back — during the beginning of the AIDS crisis and at the height of the disco era. I started going to discos at, like, 13, 14, years old. I've been around the nightlife in New York a really long time. I came from a family of modern dancers, so I've been around trans and gender-fluid and gay people my whole life and it was really freaking obvious what he was up to and, and I thought it was great…that was what I took for Marko, I sort of pulled from these kids that I knew from Times Square, all of whom were totally gender-fluid. It wasn't exactly rocket science, but it didn't require being overt. Everybody dressed like that. Everyone wore balloon pants and had highlights.

NEWLANDER: I didn't think about it until someone brought it up to me about five years ago at a convention. I suppose I had thought about it on some level, but they mentioned it. And I was trying to remember back, and I did remember that a Rob Lowe [poster] was hanging in Corey Haim's room. That's the only thing I can really remember signaling LGBT.

WINTER: I mean, Rob Lowe was insanely popular at that time. And he was, obviously, very close to Joel and had done St. Elmo's Fire and he came to visit the set, so there was a little bit of: I'm going to give my friends a little bit more exposure. Like [Rob] needed more exposure at that time in his life.

On off-screen partying:

WINTER: Ah, man. I'll get in so much trouble with literally everybody else involved in the film. I mean, look, it was the mid '80s. I was 19. I was getting up at eight at night and going to bed at seven, eight in the morning every day in Santa Cruz. It was insanity. It was really fun. We were on bikes all the time. We were treated like rock stars. Every time we shot, hundreds and hundreds of people would come out to the boardwalk to watch us shoot our scenes. It was just a really fun time and everybody got really crazy, and it wasn't sustainable. And things really crashed after that, and things got really dark in the late '80s and early '90s and then you had River [Phoenix] and other people who died. Really terrible things happened and everything went from coke to heroine, and that was not a good thing. The party overstayed its welcome, basically. [But during] Lost Boys everything was still firing on all cylinders and it was a f---ing madhouse.

FELDMAN: Honestly, it was more [the older kids] that were having the crazy times. We were just trying to hold it together and do our jobs. And I think Haim was dating a girl. Jamison was dating a girl. We all had our first girlfriends that were at home. So we'd come home from the set and we'd get on the phone with our girlfriends and probably spend two hours talking on the phone to our girlfriends and not really thinking much about anything else other than working and that. But we loved the idea that we were kids, and we got to ride around on bikes, and it was during the summer. And we were on this boardwalk for five weeks or something like that, where every day we could go on rides, we could go play in the arcade.

NEWLANDER: Yeah, some of it was naturally there. We were cast because we had good chemistry. But Joel gave us a lot of time together to hang out. We shot a lot of our comic bookstore stuff on the weekends. And so, really during the week up in Santa Cruz, the three of us spent a lot of time hanging out and having just really great time and bonding.

FELDMAN: With Haim and I, it was an instant attraction. We instantly felt a kinship, which was interesting because we were poised to be nemeses. But we were set up in a rival position because he was dating a girl that I had a crush on. So he was kind of stealing my territory, the way I saw it. The teen magazines, the name…I was like, Come on, who's this guy? And then I'm in the wardrobe session with Joel, the very first day, and he's on the phone with somebody. He goes, "Yeah, we've got the two Coreys in it." I'm like, "The 'two Coreys'? I'm just one guy. What do you mean? Are you seeing double here?"

So I was really set up to not like him and then before I knew it, I came home from school one day and Corey left me a personal voice message on my answering machine. And he was like, "Hey, how you doing man? What's going on? We're going to be working together, and let's get together. Let's maybe go to the beach or hang out. Let's do something, man." So it wasn't like the studio or the director set this up. This was Corey on his own — he reached out to me and left me a personal message. And at the end of it, we got together and we instantly clicked. From that moment on, we're pretty much inseparable.

On below-the-line details:

WINTER: There were a lot of happy accidents on Lost Boys and one of them was the decision that [makeup artist] Greg Cannom and Joel made to go really light on the vampire makeup. I think it came from practicality, to be able to get prosthetics on and off very quickly. The original vampire designs for Lost Boys were very elaborate, so that decision to go light ended up being seminal, because it allowed the audience to connect with us as characters even when we were monsters. That's what helped sort of root us in the zeitgeist of sexy rock-and-roll vampires. They don't turn into every other monster vampire you've ever seen in every other movie. Considering how little we're wearing, [the prosthetics] totally transform our faces and you act in them different. I felt kind of feral, you know? There were subtle things. It was nails, a little bit of cheeks and forehead and extremely painful, cumbersome, '80s contacts, which, thank God, don't exist anymore.

FELDMAN: And the music! The soundtrack was such a big part of it. Having Roger Daltrey, having INXS, having all these great performers. And then you've got the original song "Cry Little Sister," that, of course, became the most-played song from a film soundtrack in strip clubs all over America. It was very popular. And then [there's] the Sweaty Sax Guy — Tim Cappello still goes out and performs without his shirt on. He oils himself up. He's even got the collar.

NEWLANDER: ​​When I look back at the movie, I just think about what great hair I had in the movie, and I didn't appreciate it at the time.

FELDMAN: I did. I was a big fan of your hair.

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