Jay Dyer
21st Century Wire
One of the classic 80s cult films I’ve overlooked and delayed doing an analysis of has been Joel Schumacher’s 1987 Lost Boys.
While somewhat of a box office hit at the time, the film is arguably more popular now than it was at the time of its release. With straight to DVD sequels and endless references in pop culture references, Lost Boys is its own little phenomenon.
However, when we consider the fact that Schumacher is a director who is apparently aware of deeper aspects of the occult, such as numerology and mind control, seen in his 2007 film The Number 23, as well as news revelations of elite pedophile rings and ritual abuse, we have justification for investigating something deeper in Lost Boys.
The plot centers around a newly divorced mom named Lucy (Diane Wiest), and her two sons, Michael (Jason Patric) and Sam (Corey Haim) who are forced to move from Phoenix to Lucy’s trickster father’s cabin, the kooky pot-smoking Grandpa. Upon entering the fictional Santa Carla, Michael notices a warning painted on the back of billboard that it’s the “murder capitol of the world.” David (Kiefer Sutherland) is the alpha dog in a band of roving, miscreant Aryan vampires, who are members of a secret coven, led by cult head, Max (Edward Hermann).
I’m sure most readers have seen the film, so we won’t get bogged down in plot details, but I will argue that the film’s title itself, Lost Boys, will be a clue to the interpretation I give. On one level, the reference is to J.M. Barrie’s lost boys of Peter Pan fame, but it also has reference to human trafficking and literal “lost boys,” as we see community posting boards full of “missing child” pictures. Santa Carla is home to vampire cults eating victims, but aside from the fat cop, the majority of the numerous “missing” posters in the film are children and teens. Another key indicator is the triangle with a spiral seen on the first board, which the FBI identifies as a symbol for pedophile rings.
IMAGE: ‘ Dark Symbology’ – Missing children with a triangle spiral seen above.
We can also see significance in the names of the main characters, as Michael recalls St. Michael, the guardian angel, Sam, Samael or Satan, and Lucy, Lucifer. Similarly, when Michael learns the name of his love interest, “Star” (Jami Gertz), he explains that his parents were hippies who almost named him “Moonchild.” Moonchild is the famous novel of Aleister Crowley that refers to impregnation by a spirit being – something occult rituals have long sought to invoke.
Indeed, Lucy’s parenting style perfectly portrays a failed parent who seeks to be her sons’ “friend.” With a broken family and baby-boomer hippy parenting, Lucy’s family becomes a model of American dysfunctionalism, while simultaneously the circus atmosphere of Santa Carla becomes emblematic of the entertainment-dominated circus that is pop Amerika. Having grown up in California during the 80s, and being about the same age as Corey Haim, I can affirm the weirdness of California.
IMAGE: ‘Winged Sun‘ – Lucy’s Sun Disc
The film is oddly dominated by two strands of symbology – Native American and Egyptian. Lucy wears a sun disc necklace, Grandpa’s cabin is full of Native American artwork, and mention of “Phoenix” is made frequently. There is alot to unpack here, but I think the overall significance here is simply dominant occult imagery. We do see an All-Seeing Eye with an ankh in the comic book shop where Sam meets the Frog Brothers, which suggests Masonry or witchcraft.
While the Frog Brothers represent “truth, justice and the American way,” Sam begins to notice bizarre synchronicities between what he reads in his comics and real life. Indeed, the comic shop itself seems to be a miniature location of all the symbology in the film, from upwards pentagrams to the Phoenix to the All-Seeing Eye. Even the stoned couple passed out by the TV represent the destructive, dysfunctional nature of the post-60s boomer generation.
Michael, Lucy’s firstborn son, we discover to be Star’s first human sacrifice. While it may be news to readers, the notion of human sacrifice is very real in serious cult groups. In fact, the recent revelations of elite pedophilia in the U.K. in the Savile circles includes the sacrifice of children, as well as the Franklin Coverup. Both the Franklin coverup and the pedophilia in the U.K. also includes the trafficking of young boys, and when we consider the revelations of all the same degeneracy in Roman Catholicism, we can see a clear pattern of what former Jesuit and exorcist Malachi Martin exposed in 1990 in his Keys of This Blood. Martin wrote:
“Most frighteningly for [Pope] John Paul [II], he had come up against the irremovable presence of a malign strength in his own Vatican and in certain bishops’ chanceries. It was what knowledgeable Churchmen called the ‘superforce.’ Rumors, always difficult to verify, tied its installation to the beginning of Pope Paul VI’s reign in 1963. Indeed Paul had alluded somberly to ‘the smoke of Satan which has entered the Sanctuary’. . . an oblique reference to an enthronement ceremony by Satanists in the Vatican. Besides, the incidence of Satanic pedophilia—rites and practices— was already documented among certain bishops and priests as widely dispersed as Turin, in Italy, and South Carolina, in the United States. The cultic acts of Satanic pedophilia are considered by professionals to be the culmination of the Fallen Archangel’s rites.” (p. 632)
With this in mind, the ritual aspects of David and Max’s coven takes on a new perspective. Michael is lured into the cult through sex with Star and participation in the ritual of drinking blood and hallucinogens. As Michael is inducted, he has a bad trip that results in an alteration of his psyche that leads to the beginnings of possession.
As he falls further and further into darkness, his alchemical processing culminates in ritual sex with Star. In other words, sex magick is in the background of Lost Boys, giving new meaning to the notion of Max’s “boys.” They aren’t his biological children, and in the climax scene, Max reveals his desire to make Lucy’s boys “part of his family.” This lends credence to the idea that possibly dark forces have led Lucy to Santa Carla, and the “Phoenix” imagery is intended to be a rebirth of a demonic nature – Lucy and her boys are going to be “reborn” into a new “family.”
IMAGE: ‘All Seeing, All Consuming’ – Sam and Frog Brothers pass the ankh and All-Seeing Eye.
The “Family” also hearkens to two different California cults, the “Family” of Charles Manson and the family of the “Children of God.” Both cults involved the brainwashing of children and teens for sexual slavery and occult ritualism, as well as murder. The Manson case is well-known, but the Children of God, or the Family International cult is lesser known, yet involved famously the case of River Phoenix, who ended up dead after revealing to Vanity Fair the sinister elements of the cult. Other famous figures had unfortunate experiences with the Children, too, such as Rose McGowan. These cults served as fronts for sex trafficking weirdos, as well as utilizing mind control and brainwashing techniques. Interesting side note – Joaquin played a victimized cult member in the Scientology-esque based film, The Master.
Another strange element is the Doors theme that occurs throughout the film, from the credit sequence version of “People are Strange,” to the Jim Morrison posters in the Vampire cult’s hotel cave. This may have reference to Morrison’s own reported induction into the occult through his affair with Patricia Kinnealy, as vividly portrayed in Oliver Stone’s The Doors. The scene of Michael’s induction is noticeably similar to the portrayal in Stone’s film, but even more interesting is the military industrial complex affiliations with the rise of the Laurel Canyon musicians as exposed in Dave McGowan’s work (including The Doors). I have cited it before, but in relation to Lost Boys, we again see the oblique hints at these dark networks and readers should keep in mind that True Detective was also based on a real case.
In conclusion, what we see from such films is a revelation of the dark side of the establishment, and even though Lost Boys contains a lot of silly, fantastical elements, I think there is a case to be made that more is lurking in the background. Note that I am not making any accusations against Schumacher or any specific person – I do not know who Feldman and Haim say they were abused by.
Nevertheless, Feldman’s claims are daily being vindicated in even mainstream media, as U.S. and U.K. outlets are unable to contain the avalanche of abuses by the degenerate establishment, including Satanic ritual abuse. While skeptics may scoff at all this, I grew up near a town famous for its own convicted Vampire murder cult – that of Rod Ferrell, whose teen coven met in an old, abandoned hotel. Whatever your own personal views, it is a fact that some people take this very seriously, despite your skepticism.
21WIRE contributor and author Jay Dyer is commentator on media, art, philosophy and culture. This article and many others, along with Jay’s podcast archive can be found on his blog Jay’s Analysis.
READ MORE HOLLYWOOD NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Hollywood Files