While the story might sound straightforward enough, it’s worth adding a bit of historical context. The Lost Boys was released amid a new wave of American conservatism that had begun gaining momentum near the end of the ’70s. Of particular note was the evangelical preacher Jerry Falwell’s organization, the Moral Majority, which marshaled right-wing Christians as a political force for the first time against abortion, homosexuality, and other supposed social ills. The group sought to protect American “family values” (a term now primarily associated with the Christian right) after what it saw as the rise of a destructive social liberalism in the previous decade. The Moral Majority threw its full weight behind Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, with some observers crediting the group with the win.

The Lost Boys proffers a vision at odds with the prevailing socio-political narratives of the Reagan era. The Emersons, most obviously, don’t square with the long-held conviction—then, but also now—that the best kind of family is the nuclear family: a man and a woman, who are married, raising their biological children together. Rather than centering this kind of arrangement, as many films of the decade did, The Lost Boys provides a more empathetic rendering of the atypical Emerson clan (and, later, even many of the vampires). The Emersons are broke, sure, but they’re not exactly falling apart as their family structure shifts. Instead, everyone works hard to find stability in their new life, with Lucy, whose role as matriarch is taken as a given, hustling to find a new job, alongside her older son.

Even compared to other ’80s movies, The Lost Boys stood out. By the end of the decade, the film critic Emanuel Levy notes, the nuclear family had suddenly resurfaced on the big screen after a decline in portrayals in previous years. “In the late 1980s, the American cinema no longer accentuates male camaraderie, individual heroism, and adventurism,” he writes. “Rather, a stronger emphasis is placed on group structures (marriage and family) and traditional values (domesticity), reflecting the Reagan era’s ‘upbeat’ philosophy.” Unlike some of its contemporaries—like 1984’s Sixteen Candles or 1987’s Fatal Attraction—Schumacher’s movie exposed American viewers to a different moral landscape, one that didn’t uncritically latch onto the accepted household set-up. (Notably, America’s top-grossing film of 1987, Three Men and a Baby, also bucked kinship norms.)

The Lost Boys deals with the theme of family, and how it bears on adolescence, in other, harder-to-miss ways: vampires, and lots of blood. The embattled Michael is caught in a tug-of-war between his biological (or “blood”) family and the sort of “chosen” family that has formed around the lead vampire David and his ilk. “Michael, you’re one of us. Let go,” David says shortly after Michael drinks what turns out to be some of David’s blood from a bejeweled bottle, a move that begins to convert Michael into a half-vampire. The film’s title, which is a reference to characters in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, defies clear interpretation. Are the lost boys supposed to be Michael and Sam? Or the vampires? And if it’s the latter, what precisely makes them lost? Is it their status as undead beings—or the fact that they don’t conform to a conventional family arrangement? The countercultural reading isn’t a stretch: Schumacher has said that The Lost Boys “is, in a way, about the fear we have of the Other—those who live outside of the mainstream.”