'Heathers' might be 30 years old, but it’s the musical we need right now
The film is about to get the musical treatment – but just what about is it about this high school horror that has made it so enduringly popular?
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Your support makes all the difference.When I was a 13-year-old girl, I had an unquenchable capacity for darkness. I constantly complained about my safe, easy and delightful life, and I thought I craved car chases and chaos. I daydreamed about sex with imaginary, inappropriate men. As a sturdy virgin cloistered in one of the quieter bits of Dorset, I had to make do with inappropriate films.
I forced myself to watch Pulp Fiction, and to keep my eyes open during the gimp scene. I worked my way through the Vipco Vaults by biting down hard on a cushion. I think that this is part of being a young teenager – a lack of life experience gives you the nihilistic headspace to endure the sort of cinematic nightmares that may prove less appealing once life actually has knocked you about a bit.
However, there’s one dark, difficult film from this period of my life that I regularly return to. It’s packed with poisonings, funerals, shootouts and some seriously sinister games of croquet. Heathers is 30 this year, but it’s as compelling, fresh and funny as ever, and it’s getting a timely revival.
Heathers – The Musical is about to open at The Other Palace in London, starring Carrie Hope Fletcher as Veronica, the role played by Winona Ryder in Michael Lehmanns’ film. The musical has been performed around the world, completing a successful off-Broadway run after its Los Angeles opening, and briefly transferring to the Sydney Opera House.
The team behind the show were responsible for the 2015 stage adaptation of Carrie, which has a lot of common with Heathers – it’s another stylish horror about teenage girls, with darkly comic overtones.
Laurence O’Keefe, who co-wrote the book with Kevin Murphy, explained why the original film was so appealing as source material: “It’s funny because it’s truthful. It told the truth that people didn’t want to admit about their kids, their schools, their parents, and faculty, about the 1980s.”
It makes a lot of sense to give Heathers a reboot, as we’re in the throes of a nostalgic international love affair with the films and TV of the Eighties and Nineties. But what is it about Heathers that has stood the test of time, and why do I love it as much at 33 as I did at 13?
In 1988, before Clueless and Bronson Alcott, Mean Girls and North Shore, there was Westerburg High. Heathers set the tone for every subsequent high school movie made and changed the way we thought about the ones that came before.
Imagine a version of Grease where Rizzo makes fun of Sandy, who then gives up trying to join the Pink Ladies and bombs the gym instead.
Heathers is high school Hamlet. It’s a wicked, thrilling revenge fantasy.
Most high school dramas are about nerds who are desperate to become cool, outsiders and their journey to become part of the in crowd. There’s usually a heavy-handed moral message that reminds audiences that the spoils of this so called success aren’t worth the work.
Heathers blew up this fable, figuratively and literally.
When we meet Veronica, the ultimate anti-heroine, she’s already in with the in-crowd, and they bore her. After an elaborate croquet-based hazing ritual, she’s a Heather in everything but name (her eponymous BFFs, in order of power and popularity, are Heather Chandler, Heather Duke and Heather MacNamara).
When new boy JD turns up at school and pulls a gun on the jocks that try to bully him, Veronica is the only one who finds him fascinating, not frightening. It helps that he’s played by Christian Slater, an actor who is able to bring a generation of women to orgasm by simply saying “greetings and salutations”.
What begins with JD inviting Veronica along on what seems to be a mission to restore justice to the high school clique system soon descends into violence and terror. Like Lord and Lady Macbeth, the pair embark on a series of murders and clumsy cover ups. There is talk of a school suicide cult, after Heather Duke is offed, and left with a heavily annotated copy of Moby Dick.
Kurt and Ram, the boys who bullied JD at the beginning, spread lewd rumours about Veronica, and their death is made to look like the consequences of their secret love affair. They become posthumous martyrs to gay rights, despite being vocally homophobic throughout their lives.
Heathers is horribly satisfying. It’s one of the few films of its era that seems to understand the nuances of high school sex. Veronica is appalled by the pawings of a drunk frat boy and frustrated by a date with Kurt and Ram that ends in an expedition to go cow tipping. Yet she has thrilling, urgent sex with JD before the first murder, a scene that seems almost Shakespearean.
That’s not to say the film isn’t problematic in places. At times, it makes a worryingly compelling case for retribution over redemption. It frequently skirts a very fine line between satire and bad taste.
JD is portrayed as a dangerous but deeply charismatic student, and there are moments in which he glamorises the violence that has become tragically endemic in high schools across America.
But Heathers appeals to our most raw and awkward elements – the parts of us that believe that everyone who has ever made us suffer must be punished. And it is wickedly, destructively funny and brilliantly written – from Veronica’s “great pate, but I gotta motor if I’m gonna make this funeral” to the PSA banners draped across the cafeteria declaring “Grow up, don’t throw up! Bulimia is so ’87!”.
There’s a happy ending, of sorts. Veronica prevents a mass killing, and refreshingly, she doesn’t get the guy – because he blows himself up. She gets Martha Dumptruck, the most badly bullied girl in school, and invites her to hang out on prom night.
But really, the enduring appeal of Heathers is proof that we snowflakes aren’t as delicate as we seem. If it’s ever uncomfortable to watch, it’s because it’s too real. Trends might come and go – although the giant scrunchie has definitely returned – but the pain and elation that comes with being young, and the challenge to find your place in the pack, and in the wider world, are issues for the ages.
Eventually, at Westerburgh High, the geeks inherit the earth. In the end, Heathers is about working out how to do the right thing and resisting the lure of the dark, even when it looks and talks like 1980s Christian Slater.
And if Heathers – The Musical can find a way to be as blackly comic, tartly irreverent, and yet ultimately optimistic as the film that inspired it, I can’t wait to see it onstage.
‘Heathers’ is at The Other Palace, 9 June to 4 August (theotherpalace.co.uk)
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