9 / 10
Official trailer
Heathers is Michael Lehmann’s 1988 American black comedy. The film depicts Westerburg High School junior Veronica Sawyer entering the orbit of three girls all named Heather who rule the social hierarchy through controlled cruelty. Veronica meets transfer student Jason Dean and falls into his plan to murder the Heathers and the football jocks who terrorize lesser students. The killings are staged to look like suicides, producing a school-wide obsession with teen suicide that the murders ironically created. Winona Ryder plays Veronica.
Christian Slater plays Jason Dean as a Jack Nicholson impersonator with explosives. Shannen Doherty plays Heather Duke. Lisanne Falk plays Heather McNamara. Kim Walker plays Heather Chandler. Penelope Milford plays the school guidance counselor Pauline Fleming. Glenn Shadix plays Father Ripper. Patrick Labyorteaux plays jock Ram Sweeney.
Lance Fenton plays jock Kurt Kelly. Daniel Waters wrote the screenplay. New World Pictures produced the film on a budget of approximately 3 million dollars, and it grossed approximately 1 million dollars on initial release.
I adore Heathers because it’s mean. Most teen comedies of its day wanted me to hug somebody at the end; this one wants me to laugh at a funeral and feel a little sick about it, and it pulls off both. Daniel Waters wrote the nastiest, funniest teen script I know, and Ryder and Slater play it straight enough that the jokes cut.
Few teen comedies attempt the level of moral darkness Heathers delivers.
The film was made when John Hughes productions had defined American teen cinema through sympathetic characters and clean moral structures. Heathers presents the same demographic without sympathy or moral cleanness. Veronica’s friends are monsters. Her boyfriend is worse. The school system produces both. Daniel Waters wrote the screenplay over a period of self-conscious rebellion against Hughes-style sweetness. The result became a cult classic after failing commercially. Later decades have produced multiple stage musical, television, and remake adaptations.
The original remains the definitive version. The combination of Ryder’s central performance, Slater’s hostile charm, and Waters’s invented teen vocabulary built a work that mainstream Hollywood wouldn’t have produced.
The Invented Vocabulary
Daniel Waters wrote dialogue in invented teen slang that no actual American teenager has ever spoken.
What’s your damage, very and how very, and fuck me gently with a chainsaw all entered popular culture from the screenplay. I think that slang is the film’s secret weapon. It seals the characters inside a world with its own rules, and because the actors deliver it without a wink, I buy every word.
The invented language has been imitated extensively across films that came after. Mean Girls (2004) extends the technique through Tina Fey’s invented slang including fetch. Clueless (1995) does the same through Amy Heckerling’s Beverly Hills vocabulary including as if. Each production built its identity partly through linguistic invention. Heathers set the template. Critics initially objected to the artificiality. The artificiality became the strength.
For Writers
Invented vocabulary can create a closed world your characters inhabit. The same applies to fiction. Readers accept linguistic invention when characters deliver it without commenting on its strangeness.
Ryder as Veronica
Winona Ryder was sixteen during production. She plays Veronica as a smart girl who joined the Heathers for social access she now regrets having earned, and who ends up forging the suicide notes that cover J.D.’s killings.
I think Ryder is what keeps the film from turning into pure cruelty. She lets Veronica’s disgust with herself grow in every scene, and that’s the thread I hang onto through all the killing.
Ryder’s career consistently engaged with intelligent young women whose intelligence hasn’t protected them from situations their intelligence should have prevented. The Heathers performance set the template. Later productions including Edward Scissorhands (1990), Reality Bites (1994), and Girl, Interrupted (1999) extended the type. Ryder remained the principal serious teen actress of her generation through her mid-twenties before substance issues and a 2001 shoplifting arrest interrupted her career. Her recovery and continued work shows that mid-career disruption need not be permanent.
For Writers
Smart characters making bad decisions carry more weight than stupid characters whose decisions match their limits. Intelligence doesn’t prevent moral compromise. Sometimes it accelerates it.
The Teen Suicide Critique
Heathers depicts adult responses to teen suicide with savage clarity.
The school administration treats the deaths as opportunities for grief counseling programs and assembly speeches. Local news coverage romanticizes the dead students. The parents perform suitable sadness while keeping their actual emotional distance. Those assembly scenes are where I think Waters landed his hardest punches, and they’re the funniest and angriest stretch of the picture.
The 1988 satirical content has aged into difficult relevance. Later decades have produced multiple actual school shootings whose institutional responses match what Heathers depicted. The film couldn’t have anticipated Columbine (1999) or the wide later pattern.
The institutional responses anticipated them anyway. Satire that captures institutional failure tends to remain current because the institutions tend not to fix the failures the satire identifies. Heathers was made before the patterns it depicts became standard. The patterns have continued.
For Writers
Institutional satire ages well when the institutions fail to reform. Novelists should keep this one in mind. Material that captures structural problems tends to remain current as long as the structures remain unchanged.
Craft Note
Michael Lehmann directed Heathers as his first feature film. His later work including Hudson Hawk (1991) and Airheads (1994) didn’t match the Heathers result. Lehmann transitioned to considerable television directing work afterward including True Blood and other significant series. The pattern of strong feature debut followed by less notable later feature work has been common throughout American independent cinema. Television has provided steady employment for directors whose feature careers stalled.
Is Heathers as good as people say?
My 9 for Heathers comes from the way it walks into moral darkness the John Hughes era wouldn’t touch and comes back with the sharpest dialogue any teen film has had.
Ryder centers it, Waters’s slang gives it a language of its own, and the satire of grieving adults hasn’t dated a day. My one knock is Slater leaning so hard on the Nicholson impression that J.D. sometimes plays like a sketch. Anyone who cares about teen movies or eighties comedy should see it.
