Reception
The Lost Boys grossed over $32 million; a strong performance for an R-rated horror film, especially for the era. Its teen-friendly tagline was: “Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It’s fun to be a vampire."
Critical reception was generally positive, with a 76% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Roger Ebert gave the movie two-and-a-half out of four stars, praising the cinematography and "a cast that's good right down the line," but ultimately describing Lost Boys as a triumph of style over substance and "an ambitious entertainment that starts out well but ends up selling its soul."
It won a Saturn Award for Best Horror Film in 1987. The film was part of an 80s trend to make vampire figures from stories of old more applicable to audiences, one that included 1987's western-gothic Near Dark and the suburban Fright Night of 1985.
Since its release, The Lost Boys has come to be regarded as a touchstone of 80s cinema and a seminal teenage vampire film, inspiring successors such as the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Read more about this topic: The Lost Boys
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)