Santa Carla was the fictional setting for the movie The Lost Boys. This movie was filmed in, and Santa Carla was largely based upon Santa Cruz, CA (where I was born in 1980, and still live) with a few creative liberties taken, such as:
- Santa Cruz is about 100 miles south of San Francisco, and was untouched by the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.
- The comic book shop (Atlantis Fantasy World) is not, as it appears, on the Boardwalk (the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, an amusement park and tourist trap). It was about a mile away on the south end of down town, but it collapsed in the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, and has since been reincarnated on the north end of down town (even farther from the Boardwalk). The old location is still a vacant lot.
- I don't recognize any of the scenes looking down at the ocean. That does not look like our coastline.
- The building used for the Emerson family's (the protagonist family in the movie) house is actually the old clubhouse on the Pogonip.
- The concert took place on the beach in front of the Boardwalk. Someone I met once was in the crowd. He told me that the night they were filming the concert was very cold. They had to keep asking people to take off jackets so it looked like summer.
I would guess that one reason the name was changed was to protect the guilty. Santa Cruz had been at one time (before I was born, so I have no first hand information) the home of multiple serial killers, which the movie implied were vampires. Since tourism is a big industry in Santa Cruz, this is not something that would have been good to advertise.
See http://www.santacruzpl.org/history/crime/serial.shtml for more information on the "Murder Capital of the World". | 
