Heathering

During the 80s, we had several movies about teenage rebellion, showcasing the angst of coming of age. Some of these films used dark humor quite well, and those are the ones that resonated with me.

You might remember Better Off Dead with John Cusack. The film touches on some very serious themes like depression and even suicide, but it uses clumsy and absurd humor to mask the seriousness of the subject matter.

The Breakfast Club faced the serious issues of the day with appropriate solemnity, and while it did offer some dark humor, the movie was mainly a very well done drama.

By 1989, people like me were ready for a movie that combined the dark humor elements in an unflinching critique of life through the eyes of a high school kid. And while previous films had largely had one kid that didn’t really fit in with a group of cooler kids, Heathers focused on the kids who lived outside of the mainstream.

These were surely the kids I identified with, never quite fitting in with any one particul…