Heathers (1988)

If you can handle teen suicide as suitable subject matter for the blackest of black comedies, here’s a movie for you. As the flip (and dark) side of John Hughes‘ ‘80s-era youth-centric flicks, Heathers draws blood knifing through the unforgiving social hierarchies of high school. It imagines how tensions between popular kids and pariahs can lead to murder, a conceit that seemed ripe for lampooning long before Columbine and Parkland made that scenario a sickening reality. In retrospect, Heathers seems disturbingly prescient.

Our heroine is Veronica (Winona Ryder), a smart, pretty high school junior who has traded in her dweeby friends from childhood in favor of the “in” crowd. Her newfound clique consists of three cold-hearted beauties named Heather – Heather Chandler (Kim Walker), Heather Duke (Shannen Doherty) and Heather McNamara (Lisanne Falk) – who essentially run Westerburg High. Veronica chafes at her cohorts’ casual cruelty, but, like most of her classmates, she is too scared to challenge their authority.

Until, that is, Veronica takes one look at J.D. (Christian Slater) in the cafeteria and is smitten with the trenchcoat-clad rebel who has recently moved to town. The teens bond over their love of convenience-store delicacies and their dislike for the Heathers before consummating their mutual attraction with a round of strip croquet.

Their talk turns to the Heathers. Unlike Veronica, J.D. is more than willing to act on his hatred. The teen lovers serve Heather Chandler a hangover remedy that J.D. has laced with a lethal amount of kitchen cleanser.

Heather Chandler drops dead, and Heathers suddenly catapults from middling black comedy to something much more daring. A panicked Veronica and J.D. arrange the girl’s death to look like a suicide, complete with a forged suicide note in which Heather complains that no one knew the real her.

To Veronica’s dismay, the ersatz suicide only makes Heather Chandler more beloved than ever. The dead girl is mourned by kids who had detested and feared her, mythologized by a parasitic news media and turned into a cause célèbre by a touchy-feely teacher with delusions of grandeur.

Adding insult to injury, Heather Chandler’s reign is replaced by the no-less-tyrannical Heather Duke. Veronica falls in deeper with J.D. and his psychotic designs, and the deaths at Westerburg High begin to stack up. “My teen angst bullshit now has a body count,” Veronica confides in her diary.

As the feature-film debut of director Michael Lehman and screenwriter Daniel Waters, Heathers boasts an exuberance that comes with hungry young artists bursting with ideas. Waters’ initial script was 300 pages; he hoped it would be the ultimate statement on high school pictures, a movie worthy of Stanley Kubrick.

If Heathers falls a bit shy of that ambition, it is a fusillade of razor-sharp dialogue and wickedly deranged twists. Hoping to create a timelessness to his tale, Waters invented teen colloquialisms and slang that still resonate with cinephiles, from “swatch dogs and Diet Coke heads” and “what’s your damage?” to the ever-popular, “Well, fuck me gently with a chainsaw.”

How dark does it get? J.D. and Veronica kill two homophobic football jocks and stage the deaths to be the suicidal result of a clandestine gay affair (J.D. places a bottle of mineral water at the scene, presumably a telltale sign of homsexuality in small-town Ohio). At the funeral, a grieivng father stands over his son’s open casket, the corpse clad in a football helmet, and sobs, “I love my son! I love my dead gay son!”

Some critics razzed Slater for what sure looks to be a Jack Nicholson impersonation, but the shtick suits the character. J.D. does fancy himself a dangerous rebel ready to topple sacred cows; why wouldn’t he be a Jack wannabe? But Winona Ryder, volatile as a Molotov cocktail here, owns Heathers in a career-making performance. She celebrated her 16^th birthday during the filming.