Winning a Saturn Award in 1987 for Best Horror Film, Joel Schumacher's The Lost Boys was part of the early post-modern trend of transplanting the European folklore of vampires into the New World. The film, along with The Hunger (1983) and Kathryn Bigelow's Gothic Western Near Dark (1987) helped move pop-culture ideals about vampires into the current, more romanticized perception (which was then fully transformed with Neil Jordan's 1994 hit Interview With The Vampire). The first seminal, mainstream film to blend vampirism with youth culture, punk attitudes and rock music (no doubt inspired by early Goth and Post-Punk trends and fashion in the UK at the time) the film grossed an incredibly successful $32 million at the box office and proved to be a huge hit, especially for a horror film. It also paved Joel Schumacher's path out of B-movie hell and listed him as an A-list director (which he would later sully with his bizarre interpretations of the Batman sequels among other things).

The original concept behind the movie was to make a children's horror with all the characters between 8 and 11 years of age and the story taking place in an elementary school. Schumacher, however, vetoed this idea and rebuilt the concept from scratch with the main characters as sexy, dangerous and fashionable teenagers and the vampires adopting punk regalia, riding motorcycles and blasting rock music.

The screenplay was written by Jeffery Boam (writer of Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade, Innerspace, and The Dead Zone) and filming took place on location in Santa Cruz and its boardwalk. Many of the bizarre extras in the film (including those featured in the opening credits) are genuine Santa Cruz residents who turned out by the thousands for the opportunity to take part in the biggest film production to be shot in their town in twenty years.

Many cinema critics (and vampire fans) credit The Lost Boys as being the film that successfully transplanted vampire mythology into the modern age and the American cultural landscape. It is considered that movies and shows like Blade, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, adaptations like Interview With The Vampire and even games like White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade would have been almost impossible before the release of this film. Buffy-fans specifically should take note that the phrase “vamp out” seems to originate from this film's screenplay.

The movie also marks the first time actors Corey Feldman and Corey Haim starred in the same movie together. Their meeting forever gave them the moniker as The Two Coreys. They later both appeared in separate episodes of Big Wolf On Campus playing themselves, but as real vampires (apparently they had somehow became real vampires while filming The Lost Boys).

The movie's title refers to the Lost Boys from J.M.Barrie's Peter Pan, i.e. children who will never grow up, whilst the teenager vampire-hunting duo – The Frog Brothers – seems to be a nod to Edgar Allan Poe. Thomas Newman's synthesizer score was acclaimed for its gusto-gothic sound whilst the film's soundtrack was a significant chart-topper, particularly its highly recognizable theme song Cry Little Sister by Gerard McMann.

During the mid-90's Schumacher spent several years trying to get a sequel – The Lost Girls – off the ground. The concept was supposedly that Kiefer Sutherland's character survived the first film (because he didn't explode, go figure) and founded his own coterie of vampire babes who terrorize another coastal town. The project was eventually abandoned due to difficulties developing an adequate screenplay.