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You can tell a lot about someone by who they think the coolest vampire is in film and television. I'm a millennial who grew up watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer with my babysitter, so my answer was once "Spike" (if we're excluding dhampirs like Blade and Vampire Hunter D from this). However, upon seeing Joel Schumacher's 1987 film, The Lost Boys, I now know that we wouldn't have had Spike without the progenitor of every platinum blond alt boy vampire: David, played by Kiefer Sutherland. And while David wasn't afraid to aura farm, he also quickly proves that he's about as brutal as vampires get.  

At For The Love of Horror 2023's Lost Boys reunion panel, Alex Winter recalled that Sutherland wanted to "up the ante" in the film's bonfire scene, when the vampire gang attacks the group of surfers. Sutherland confirmed that Winter was remembering correctly, saying, "There's not a lot of opportunities where one gets to bite the back of someone's head off. You wanna kinda lean into that as much as you can, if you get the shot."

In 1987, the iconic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon debuted - and all our lives were changed. Watch this reunion of the original voice actors:

"And it was so much fun to do. There were scenes that were complicated and tricky as an actor to kind of get around, but when I think of my favorite moments - [it] was literally biting off that bald guy's head off, and just the amazing amount of blood that kind of went everywhere... The whole experience is just one giant, fond memory," Sutherland said.  

The Lost Boys wasn't the only vampire film that came out in 1987. Kathryn Bigelow's under-appreciated vampire western, Near Dark, came out that same year. But where Schumacher's film gets bloody, Bigelow's film gets explosive - literally. And this is precisely why the vampire subgenre will never die: there are just so many ways to depict a vampire biting the back of someone's head off. 

Get your wide-shoulder blouses and your Members-Only jackets, and go back in time with Popverse's Made in 87. Highlights include:

• Marvel Comics killed the X-Men in 1987 to reset the franchise - but it didn’t stick
• The Full House cast addresses some of the series’ biggest continuity errors
• How Spider-Man’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon was saved by a fired Marvel boss — and Ronald McDonald
• How NBC panicked after Diane left Cheers — and why Kirstie Alley’s casting sparked a quiet battle inside the hit show
• How Bart Simpson was quietly toned down from being "so mean" before The Simpsons' first episode, as revealed by his long-time voice actor Nancy Cartwright
• The 1987 Justice League reboot that made superheroes weird, hilarious, and unexpectedly human
• How The Golden Girls became a staple at gay bars in the 80s