MTV’s “Teen Wolf” is one of the best shows based on a movie out there, but it didn’t actually mine the 1985 flick starring Michael J. Fox as the eponymous basketball-loving lycanthrope for inspiration. The small-screen “Teen Wolf” reboot incorporates more chaos and horror into the mix, which stems from creator Jeff Davis’ love of “The Lost Boys,” the ’80s cult classic about vampires causing havoc in a small California town.
While speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Davis revealed that the original “Teen Wolf” is essentially a high school sports movie, and he wasn’t interested in repeating what came before. “The Lost Boys,” meanwhile, contains a variety of different flavors that informed his own creative process on “Teen Wolf.”
“[‘The Lost Boys’ is] not only scary, suspenseful, sexy, but it also has a sense of humor,” Davis tells the magazine. “More than anything, if I was going to do this, I wanted to make sure it was going to have some humor to it.”
Like “The Lost Boys,” Davis’ supernatural drama centers around young people who must contend with monstrous threats to their own California town. Meanwhile, the only real similarity between the “Teen Wolf” film and the MTV series is that both feature werewolf protagonists named Scott who must navigate the complexities of adolescence while coming to terms with their otherworldly abilities. The horror spin works on the series, though, and it allowed “Teen Wolf” to enjoy six successful seasons on MTV (plus a movie afterward). That said, “The Lost Boys” isn’t the only property that inspired Davis’ series.
A Stephen King movie also inspired MTV’s Teen Wolf
Stephen King adaptations tend to be very terrifying and spooky in their own right, but it was one of the author’s non-horror stories that inspired Jeff Davis while he was making “Teen Wolf.” In his EW interview, Davis recalls the early meetings that led to the show being greenlit, citing Rob Reiner’s adaptation of “Stand by Me” as the film that inspired the incident that leads to Scott McCall (Tyler Posey) being turned into a creature on “Teen Wolf” — and the subject of the conversation that excited MTV enough to give him the go-ahead.
“I pitched the opening as two best friends who go into the woods and, like in ‘Stand by Me,’ they go looking for a dead body,” Davis notes. “But the difference here is, they’re only looking for half,” referencing the opening scene in “Teen Wolf” where Tyler and his buddy Stiles (Dylan O’Brien) venture into the forest after learning that a body has turned up.
The kids in “Stand by Me” don’t have it easy by any means, but at least none of them get turned into werewolves during their adventure to find a corpse. At the same time, Scott’s supernatural abilities lead to him having some entertaining adventures, so it isn’t all bad for the show’s furry protagonist.
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