While The Lost Boys remains one of the most iconic vampire horror films to come out of the 80s, the film initially had a much different theme as James Jeremias, the film’s co-writer, wanted a story inspired by J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Jeremias spoke about the initial idea in an interview for The Guardian’s “How We Made” series, where he noted the concept of Claudia from Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire as striking.

Jeremias says, “It got me thinking about J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan — where our title came from. What if the reason he came out at night, could fly and didn’t grow up was because he was a vampire? We took a fictional character and put him in a new light. What if it wasn’t all goodness and there was some evil intent?”

Although Jeremias and co-writer Janice Fischer were paid $375,000, Warner Bros. wanted a stark change to the film’s storyline a year later. Jeremias describes a meeting with Richard Donner, who was originally set to direct the film, but later became the film’s executive producer: “It was brutal. We had designed the film to be a boy’s adventure, set ina time before sex rears its head. But that’s not what the studio wanted…Donner wanted the boys to be old enough to drive. What he meant was old enough to f*ck.” Another major difference was the character of Star, while acting as the female love interest in the film, she was originally written as a little boy.

Once they sold the script, rewrites were, as Jeremias says, “out of our hands.”