Noelle McCarthy: A world where Lost Boys are all too easy to replace

Lovely lines from William Butler Yeats: "Yet they were of a different kind, / The names that stilled your childish play, / They have gone about the world like wind / But little time had they to pray".

They came into my head this morning when I logged on to my computer and saw that Corey Haim is dead. Lovely lines, and the immortal question from The Lost Boys: "Are you freebasing? Enquiring minds want to know."

That's probably the first, and last time I or anyone else will put Corey Haim and Yeats in the same paragraph, but as names that stilled my childish play go, Corey Haim's was up there, with Stephen King, Debbie Gibson and God forgive me, Roxette.

Corey Haim was a teen actor, for those of you who've never heard of him. A heartthrob, I suppose, along the lines of Zac Efron or Taylor Lautner, but without the six-pack of the latter, or the shiny patina of marketable virtue that coats the former.

No, Corey was an altogether shaggier, scrappier proposition. Scruffy and cheeky with a little-boy twinkle and a great line in Hawaiian-print shirts, he slouched and skateboarded and snogged and scammed his way through a variety of made-for-slumber-party movies that kept many of us rapt throughout the late 80s and early 90s when we were too grown up for Carebears, but too young for Matt Dylan.

A skinny little dude with spiky blonde hair, and freckles and a pair of big blue eyes that were especially good at conveying shock and delight, he specialised in playing loveable rogues. The kind of boy whose mouth walks him into trouble, but who wiggles out again, with the help of a home-made cross-bow or an irresistible smile, depending on whether the nemesis in question was a local vampire, or an irate mom from central casting.

Like all the best heroes, he had a side-kick, a tubby smart-mouth also called Corey. Corey Feldman and Corey Haim. They were the boy-duo of the late 80s, the Lone Ranger and Tonto on skateboards, with comic books and baggy pants. And how we loved them!

Twenty years later and I only really remember one of Corey's films. Wikipedia tells me they were, collectively and individually, responsible for a whole pile of dross. Dream a little dream, Lucas, License to Drive and something called Roomies. Some I remember vaguely, some not at all.

I know I would have seen the lot of them, at sleepovers, and movie marathons back when I fancied Linda Browne's 15-year-old brother, and you still watched films on tape. The Lost Boys, though, I can quote you pretty much word for word. A byproduct of repeated viewings, fast forwards and rewinds over the years, I was hooked from the very first scene.

A security guard on patrol, taken by something, ripped from the boardwalk up into the black sky. Vampires at the funfair, has there ever been a better set-design brief?

Genuinely frightening in places, it took itself so seriously that the dialogue is a crack-up now. And there in the middle of it all is Corey. As a bratty little brother to the heart-throb lead, he steals the movie out from under Jason Patric, or even Kiefer Sutherland, who was so terrifyingly sexy with his yellow eyes and white hair.

Corey Haim was funny and adorable in The Lost Boys, whether self-consciously posing in his grown-up Ray Bans, or blithely singing in the bath. And when his brother falls in with a very bad scene, it's to Corey that the challenge falls of protecting home and hearth.

It is he and his band of brothers (including Other Corey) and his trusty dog Nanuk who formulate a vampire-slaying plan.The inclusion of a peerless "death by stereo" is both inventive and of its time.

All's well that ends well, eventually, in The Lost Boys, with the head vamp slain, and a killer kiss-off line from Grandpa. But it's not stretching it to call Corey Haim a lost boy in real life, too.

Off-screen, he did an unforgivable thing. He grew up. Outgrew the skateboard and the sparkle, made straight-to-DVD movies, got into drugs. And now he's dead. He'll never see 40. He'll never grow up. William Butler Yeats wrote his poem about visionaries and political martyrs "the names that stilled your childish play".

But maybe he wouldn't mind me co-opting it for another young martyr of Hollywood? Someone chewed up and spat out by the factory of dreams? It's a beautiful poem, September 1913, full of white anger and scorn for the people who have no appreciation for history and humanity, who "add the tuppence to the pence" and "fumble in the greasy till".

Yeats was talking, at the time, to the money-grubbing people of his country, who he believed had lost their poetry, and their soul. But the excoriation applies just as easily to an industry where youth is a commodity and Lost Boys are easy to replace.