The Lost Boys

In March, Louis Theroux released Inside the Manosphere on Netflix, ninety minutes in the company of the online influencers who have built followings and fortunes out of young men’s insecurities. For a few weeks, everyone had a take. Parents, teachers, think pieces, group chats.

Then the conversation moved on. The influencers didn’t. Andrew Tate is currently in custody in Miami, fighting extradition to the UK over a string of serious charges, all of which he denies. He’s still posting, and a lot of his followers still tend to read every new court headline as persecution rather than a warning. Proof the system is scared of him. Proof he was right all along.

That reaction tells you more than any headline does. It isn’t naivety, it’s loyalty, the specific kind that only takes hold once someone has convinced you they’re the only one telling you the truth. I’d seen that dynamic before. I just didn’t realise it at the time.

Many moons ago, I watched The Lost Boys for the first time. I was young, and I was always into anything supernatural, so a film about vampires on motorbikes was never going to be a hard sell. I took it exactly at face value. Cool vampires, cool bikes, a good time. It didn’t cross my mind that there might be anything underneath it. Why would it? It was a vampire film.

Then, recently, I started noticing the same thing in my feeds. Different faces, different niches, but personas and ideologies that all felt oddly familiar, like a song I knew but couldn’t place. The same swagger. The same promise of freedom, status, and brotherhood, aimed at young men who sounded a lot like they were searching for something.

Then it hit me. It’s the f****** Lost Boys.

For anyone who hasn’t seen it

The Lost Boys (1987) is a vampire film that’s really about being a teenager. Michael, new in town and desperate to fit in, falls in with a gang of bikers led by the magnetic David, who seem to have the one thing he’s missing, total freedom. They’re vampires, of course. The title nods to Peter Pan, the boys who never grow up, and the gang’s pitch is the same. Party all night, never grow old, never die.

What makes it stick isn’t the fangs. It’s that David never kidnaps anyone. He doesn’t need to. He finds Michael at his loneliest, dangles freedom, power, and brotherhood in front of him, and lets Michael do the rest. By the time anyone tries to warn him, Michael isn’t just under David’s spell. He’s defending him.

Swap the leather jacket for a Bugatti and the fangs for Twitter (I refuse to call it X), and you’ve got the same story. A charismatic older figure. A vulnerable young man. An offer that sounds like belonging and turns out to be something else entirely.

With Halloween just around the corner, it’s not really a stretch to call today’s manosphere figureheads monsters. The question worth asking is why so many young men keep inviting them in.

Who actually gets bitten

Watch it again as an adult and you notice something I completely missed the first-time round. David doesn’t pick a target at random off the Santa Carla boardwalk. He picks Michael. Newly arrived, uprooted from his old life, watching his mum date a stranger, trying to work out who he is in a town that already has its own rules. Michael isn’t weak. He’s unmoored. Which, it turns out, is exactly the condition a predator is trained to spot.

There’s a reason vampire fiction keeps returning to this idea of the invitation. The old folklore rule that a vampire cannot enter your home unless you invite them in. It’s a wildly efficient bit of storytelling because it puts the responsibility in an odd place. Not on the monster’s fangs, but on the moment of consent that happens just before them. David makes staying out all night, riding motorbikes along cliff edges, and never answering to anyone feel like the only sane choice for a boy who’s just lost his sense of place in the world.

This is the bit true crime documentaries and cautionary headlines tend to skip past. Predators don’t usually target the loudest, most confident person in the room. They target the one quietly wondering if they belong in it at all.

The same playbook, just rebranded

Trade Santa Carla for a ‘For You’ page and the pattern barely changes. The pitch is aimed squarely at young men who aren’t thriving. The ones who’ve just lost a job, who feel invisible to women, who don’t have many blokes around them they can actually talk to, who are watching everyone else seemingly figure life out while they’re stuck. Lonely, a bit lost, and quietly ashamed of both.

Enter the older brother figure. Because that’s really what these men are selling themselves as. Not villains, mentors. Someone who’s “been there,” who talks like he respects you, who offers a completely coherent explanation for why your life feels hard (it’s not you, it’s women, it’s immigrants, it’s a rigged system) and a completely coherent plan to fix it (get rich, get jacked, stop being soft). It’s persuasive precisely because it’s not delivered as hatred. It’s delivered as care.

David never tells Michael he’s ruining his life. He tells him he’s finally free. That’s the trick. Nobody joins a cult because they think it’s a cult. They join because, for the first time in a while, someone made them feel like they mattered.

The transformation isn’t a moment, it’s a habit

In the film, the transformation happens in stages. A bit of blood here, a strange craving there, until one day Michael is levitating over his own bed wondering what the hell has happened to him. Nobody wakes up a vampire overnight. They get there one small compromise at a time.

Radicalisation online works on the exact same drip feed. Almost nobody starts out searching for misogyny. They search for how to get fit, how to be more confident, how to get over a breakup, and the algorithm, which has learned that outrage keeps people watching longer than encouragement does, gently nudges the content a few degrees further each time. A gym video becomes a discipline video becomes a video about why women “these days” don’t deserve good men. Each step feels like a small, reasonable extension of the last one. That’s what makes it work. Nobody consents to becoming someone new. They just stop noticing they’ve changed.

Why “I see what others don’t” feels so good

Part of what made the Lost Boys gang so intoxicating on screen wasn’t just freedom, it was exclusivity. They weren’t just having fun, they were in on something the rest of Santa Carla was too asleep to understand.

The manosphere sells the exact same feeling. You’re not gullible, you’re “red pilled.” You haven’t been radicalised, you’ve simply “woken up” to a truth everyone else is too brainwashed to see. That framing does something clever. It turns any pushback, from a friend, a partner, a parent, into further proof that you’re onto something, because of course the sheep would try to talk you out of it.

Getting someone back out

Every Lost Boys story needs a Sam. Michael’s little brother, who refuses to accept that the person in front of him is gone for good, and does the genuinely unglamorous work of dragging him back. Not through a lecture about vampires being bad. Through sheer, stubborn refusal to let his brother disappear.

That’s usually the part real interventions get wrong. Telling someone their favourite creator is a grifter rarely lands, because you’re not arguing with their opinions, you’re arguing with the one relationship that’s currently making them feel seen. Shame doesn’t undo an initiation, it just confirms the story that everyone outside “gets it” is against him. What actually works looks a lot less dramatic. Staying in contact instead of writing someone off. Asking real questions instead of delivering verdicts. Being, however imperfectly, more compelling than the version of belonging he’s been offered online. Connection has to outcompete the algorithm, not out-argue it.

Even then, Sam can only do so much. Michael still has to choose which side he’s on. Support opens the door, but nobody can walk through it for him, which is as true outside the film as it is in it.

Who gets fed?

Here’s the part the manosphere hopes you’ll miss. For all the talk of brotherhood, David never had Michael’s best interests at heart. The plan was for Michael to be killed, a rite of passage for another member of the gang. The freedom, the family, the invitation, it was all bait. Swap the vampires for paid courses, memberships and affiliate links, and it becomes pretty clear who’s actually getting fed.

That doesn’t mean anyone gets a free pass for what they repeat or believe. It just makes for a better question than “why would anyone fall for this?” When someone tells you the world is against you, ask what they’re selling. When someone offers you belonging, ask what it costs, and who’s profiting. The honest answers tend to sound a lot less like freedom.

So this Halloween, by all means, watch the vampires. Just remember the oldest rule in the book still applies. They can only come in if they’re invited.