We’re All ‘The Lost Boys’ At Heart: Vampires And Coping With Grief
Angela Campbell
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Some might dismiss The Lost Boys as nothing more than a stylish ’80s film, or better yet, mindless entertainment about vampires. But I always argue it has more substance and deserves much more credit. While I’m hopeful the upcoming remake will be every bit as entertaining, it has big shoes to fill, at least as far as I’m concerned.
As an updated Peter Pan, the movie is littered with visual cues that remind us of the classic childhood tale about staying forever young. Kiefer Sutherland delivers a masterful performance as a Captain Hook-type rogue. The waterside cave where the vampires live is adorned with shipwreck props. Before there was Randy in Scream to share the rules of horror movies, Edgar and Alan Frog were there to guide Sam about vampire lore.
The Lost Boys also stands as an example of while it might seem fun to never grow old and never die, it might be easier to embrace your mortality. Even though eternal life holds a seductive appeal, it also presents a harsh reality — of outliving those you love, over and over again. This is ultimately what’s at the heart of every story about the undead, and why — given the chance — many undead characters long for the mortality they’ve lost.
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Grief, after all, is the worst monster a person, living or dead, can ever face.
Ask most horror fans why they love the genre so much, and I suspect you’ll get an answer similar to mine. Their enthusiasm came after experiencing personal trauma. Take me, for example. I was 12 when my mother lost her battle with breast cancer. We’d been very close. Devastated, I found myself increasingly isolated from my friends, none of whom could understand or relate to the deep grief in which I suddenly found myself drowning at that age. My father, God bless him, had no clue how to deal with a depressed pre-teenage girl. But thankfully, he unknowingly tossed me a life vest the day he took me to the video rental section of a popular retail store.
“Rent whatever you want,” he said. And I did. There, I was drawn to the horror section. It was more because it felt forbidden rather than because I knew what the best selections would be. To be fair, I had three older brothers who’d raised me on Halloween and Jaws and traumatized me with George A. Romero’s zombie movies. I knew what horror media was, but I hadn’t yet embraced it as my genre of choice.
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In the months — years, even — that followed, I rented two movies more than any other. It’s those two movies I often credit with saving my life: Fright Night (1985) and The Lost Boys.
Two movies about vampires.
Two movies about the undead.
In the years that followed, I often wondered why horror movies, and those two, in particular, made it easier for me to cope with my grief and my newfound anxiety about death. Now that I’m older, I suspect it was because I’d been confronted with mortality younger than most. While my classmates and friends seemed to feel invincible, I understood how fleeting life really was.
Death terrified me. Loss terrified me even more.
As perverse and twisted as it sounds, movies about the undead gave me hope.
A few years ago, I lost my father, too. I again found myself watching horror movies as a coping mechanism. This time, I turned to The Conjuring franchise and browsed Shudder for ghost stories.
Why?
I asked some experts in the field that very question.
John Johnson, professor emeritus of psychology at Penn State University, and Mathias Clasen, a horror researcher and director of the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University in Denmark, recently conducted a study that found an individual’s enjoyment of horror films likely helped prepare them for the COVID-19 pandemic.
Their research revealed that horror movies tap into a person’s evolved fear system, which is responsible for our fight or flight responses. Horror movies help calibrate our evolved fear system, allowing us to develop resilience when it comes to trauma.
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When asked if their research could explain a link between those who’d suffered a loss and horror movies, both admitted grief hadn’t been a part of their research.
Johnson clarified, “What my research with Mathias and other colleagues has revealed is that people who are drawn to horror are simply more open to experiences of all kinds, generally, and that interactions with horror media help them learn to regulate their negative emotions. The latter finding implies that people who have suffered loss might find that experiences with horror film could be a useful tool for learning how to cope with and regulate their own negative feelings.”
Clasen agreed. He also noted that he wouldn’t be surprised by a correlation between grief and horror media.
“There’s some interesting research just out which suggests that some people use horror to deal with anxiety. So, why not loss and grief? Those are topics frequently depicted in horror, which is after all about the worst situations possible,” he said. “So it stands to reason that some people experience a cathartic confrontation with those difficult emotions by facing them in the domain of fiction. A good horror movie draws you in and makes you feel, and it’s much more pleasant to feel the safe fear and anxiety and grief evoked by a horror movie than to feel the real deal in the real world.”
Grief can isolate a person and make them feel abnormal. Relying on horror media to cope can make a person feel even more deviant, but Johnson believes you shouldn’t worry. Johnson is an evolutionary psychologist who understands how the human mind evolved as well as a personality psychologist who understands how people differ from one another.
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“As for particular fascination with undead movies, I think that this is a mechanism for coping with the undeniable reality of death, both of one’s self and other people,” he said. “I am a very pro-imagination person, which means I believe that experiencing imaginary scenarios in all kinds of media is generally good for us. Media that stimulate our imagination helps us to acquire new information about ourselves and about possible worlds that might come in handy in everyday life. I can’t imagine that someone who is grieving would be harmed if they chose to cope by watching horror movies. Quite the opposite. But I would not push someone to do this if they did not really want to try. I think we have a good sense of what we can handle and what we cannot.”
Clasen has a theory for why The Lost Boys and Fright Night resonated with me after the loss of my mother.
“I can imagine that it may be because vampire movies often engage the whole emotional spectrum,” he said. “There’s horror and fear and dread and the rest of the negative emotions typically elicited by horror, but there’s also often more refined feelings such as sadness or awe or even tragic grandeur. You don’t often experience such things when you watch a slasher movie.”
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Movies that deal with the undead also offer a way to process feelings about an afterlife.
“Ghosts can be terrifying, but there’s also a comfort in the idea that the soul lives on—that when people die, they leave something, something essential, behind,” Clasen said. “As far as I’m concerned, that’s a wish-fulfillment fantasy, but I can certainly see why belief in ghosts and the afterlife can be comforting … but also terrifying, which is why so many horror movies dwell on those issues.”
Just like Peter Pan, The Lost Boys conveys the message that children (of all ages) have the ability to escape reality by journeying to an imaginary world with unreal characters.
I’m living proof of that. Aren’t you?
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