Confessional time: I didn’t like The Lost Boys the first time I saw it. Now this could be because, as an ’80s-born ’90s kid, I hadn’t yet cultivated enough nostalgia as an early teenager to appreciate a platinum-mulleted Kiefer Sutherland, or a beach-bod sax solo, or any of the other things too soppingly ’80s for my nu-metal blerd to get a grip on. I grew up loving horror and worshiping the concept of vampires, but that aesthetic threw me. I couldn’t believe in the movie’s horror and menace because I was too distracted by all of the leopard print and fishnet. As an early, occasionally-shallow teenager, I didn’t really give horror the room to be about more than its monsters. I had a very straitlaced understanding of what was and wasn’t cool (a rarity among teenage traits, I’m sure!), and The Lost Boys was one of the worst casualties.
Because, revisiting it now, in my early 30s, I am staked to the core by what this movie was and still is doing. Maybe that’s because I’ve now got a couple decades of sipping that millennial brew of angst and existential vagrancy to root me into its narrative, but the concept of nocturnal horrors banding together and calling each other home is pretty much all I look for in pop culture now. To be reflected so sympathetically, to have my wounds illuminated by--not the torches of a mob looking for monsters to burn--but in pink neon instead. That’s a joy through and through. And if there’s a better metaphor for the poetry community, and for FreezeRay specifically...I don’t know if it’ll ever be found.
Rodney Wilder is a biracial nerd who bellows death-metal verse in Throne of Awful Splendor and writes poetry, with previous work appearing in Poets Reading the News, FIYAH, HEArt Journal Online, ALTARWORK, Words Dance, FreezeRay, and others, as well as his newest, geek-themed collection, Stiltzkin’s Quill. He likes nachos, analogizing things to Pokémon, and getting lost in Oregonian forests. Find him on Instagram @thebardofhousewilder.
Because, revisiting it now, in my early 30s, I am staked to the core by what this movie was and still is doing. Maybe that’s because I’ve now got a couple decades of sipping that millennial brew of angst and existential vagrancy to root me into its narrative, but the concept of nocturnal horrors banding together and calling each other home is pretty much all I look for in pop culture now. To be reflected so sympathetically, to have my wounds illuminated by--not the torches of a mob looking for monsters to burn--but in pink neon instead. That’s a joy through and through. And if there’s a better metaphor for the poetry community, and for FreezeRay specifically...I don’t know if it’ll ever be found.
Rodney Wilder is a biracial nerd who bellows death-metal verse in Throne of Awful Splendor and writes poetry, with previous work appearing in Poets Reading the News, FIYAH, HEArt Journal Online, ALTARWORK, Words Dance, FreezeRay, and others, as well as his newest, geek-themed collection, Stiltzkin’s Quill. He likes nachos, analogizing things to Pokémon, and getting lost in Oregonian forests. Find him on Instagram @thebardofhousewilder.
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