I like 1980s high school angst movies, but hardly anyone in them ever gets blown up or shot in the throat. And Molly Ringwald would never say “fuck me gently with a chainsaw”. Enter the great black comedy Heathers to give us what we’ve been missing. It’s all about what happens when reluctant popular girl Winona Ryder gets tired of her clique so she hooks up with Christian Slater, the black trench coat-clad class weirdo. First problem: He’s a psychopath, though a likable one. Second problem: When he starts killing off the worthless popular kids, with Winona at his side, and staging their deaths as suicides, it sets off a trend. Everybody who’s cool are killing themselves. It’s the easiest way to get everyone to love you and think about you. It’s all the rage. You should try it! This is a withering take on teen conformity (or human conformity, even) and how some of the mavericks are equally full of shit. It’s aged beautifully thirty years later. As long as there are kids and cliques and anyone in the school cafeteria who fantasizes about setting a bomb underneath all of it, Heathers remains relevant. It wasn’t a major hit, but it quickly acquired cult notoriety (especially on home video; the cheap EP-mode VHS tape was ubiquitous, I remember) and it helped make Winona Ryder one of the It Girl young movie stars of the day. Meanwhile, Christian Slater was often written about as the new Jack Nicholson, as much for his speaking cadence and arched eyebrows as for his comfort in the part of an acid-tongued wiseass.