Recovered Classic: Heathers


Few movies have the undisputable clout to redefine a genre, but when Heathers burst onto the scene in 1989 it did just that. Grabbing the high school comedy by the throat, director Michael Lehmann’s wickedly entertaining teenage suicide satire pummeled everyone’s preconceived ideas of the teen flick into submission.

Brandishing a vicious streak a mile wide and sinfully reveling in its blacker than black humour, it’s a film which has spawned many imitators, but has remained untouched thanks to its savaging of every teen movie cliché in the book and its glorious ability to shock and amuse in equal measure.


The focus of Dan Waters’ venomous, laugh-littered script is Westerberg High junior Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder), honorary member of an exclusive clique known as the Heathers, so called because its three main queen bitch cohorts are all called Heather (Kim Walker, Shannon Doherty and Lisanne Falk). The self-proclaimed most popular and most powerful kids in school, they unceremoniously wipe their feet on the fat and unfashionable, embarrassing the geeks at every opportunity and generally making life hell for socially inadequate dweebs everywhere. To them, image and control is everything, and they’ll stop at nothing to hang on to their unchallenged superiority.

Ryder, however, quickly comes to despise what the Heathers stand for (furiously scribbling her dissatisfaction in her diary) and extreme thoughts start to materialize as she imagines a world without them, a world where she is “free”. As someone who still has friends on the “outside” she can view what the Heathers stand for from a different perspective and she doesn’t like what she sees. So once she hooks up with cool customer J.D. (Christian Salter), a brooding new kid in town who operates to his own warped agenda, her murderous thoughts become reality and the body count soon begins to mount.

A pointed satire of teenage suicide (Ryder and Slater stage all the murder scenes to make it look like their victims killed themselves) while Veronica has most of the issues early on, it’s J.D. who takes over, engaging in a personal guerilla war against the popular with Ryder becoming his unwilling accomplice. Initially it seems like a good idea to air her grievances to her new-found friend, but she ends up underestimating his ruthlessness.

Numerous teen flicks have attempted to tackle the high school warzone and give it a darkly comic spin, but none have nailed it as pitch perfectly, or hilariously, as Lehmann’s memorably nasty, angst-ridden classic. From an early canteen scene which introduces a myriad of characters, through some bizarre games of croquet through to a series of spectacularly weird funeral sequences, the director delivers a nightmare vision of peer group pressure and its devastating consequences

On the downside, it could be argued that Walker is offed too soon, depriving the film of one of its most potent characters, but the consolation is that her death prompts a priceless “unadulterated emotional outpouring” instigated by one of the teachers. Slater also invites criticism for his Jack Nicholson-lite performance, but these are minor quibbles which fail to dull the impact of a movie which is at times as surreal as it is outrageous.

The ending is also something of a let-down, although it was apparently forced on the filmmakers by the studio, but despite the obvious compromise, it can’t deflect from the power of what comes before.

As for the fashions on display, perhaps the Heathers did deserve a good slapping after all.

David Lichtneker

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