Heathers (1989)

and the Girl Who Walked Back In

The first film in the series about a friend group: three Heathers who run a school on fear, and the girl who works for them. What it shows about a group that is a job, a queen bee's "you were nothing before me," a rebel whose rescue is worse, and the ending in which she chooses the girl everyone mocked.

Heathers (1989). Directed by Michael Lehmann, written by Daniel Waters. Winona Ryder as Veronica Sawyer, Christian Slater as J.D., Kim Walker as Heather Chandler, Shannen Doherty as Heather Duke and Lisanne Falk as Heather McNamara, with Carrie Lynn as Martha Dunnstock.

“I don’t really like my friends.”

She didn’t like her friends. Then she met a boy who didn’t like them either.

A note before you read. This is a black comedy, and this page is written for adults. It discusses a group of friends run by fear, a boyfriend who kills classmates and disguises their deaths as suicides, a girl who is raped on a date, and two girls who try to end their lives. None of it is described in detail. If you are thinking about suicide, you can call or text 988, any time, in the US. If something like the date happened to you, RAINN is 1-800-656-4673. Every other number is on the Resources page.

This page belongs to Plot Twist. It is the first film in the series about a friend group, and the only one that is angry, on purpose, at the films before it. Its writer meant it as a reply to the hopeful teen movies of the decade, the ones this page has already read, like The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles.

Like every entry on the Plot Twist page, it reads a story for the pattern it teaches, and makes no claim about anyone’s diagnosis. The film is a satire: its violence is meant to be monstrous, and its town’s reactions to it are meant to be absurd. This page reads what it shows about a group run by one girl, and about the boy who promised to rescue her from it.

The Story

At Westerburg High, Veronica Sawyer belongs to the most feared clique in school: three rich, beautiful girls all named Heather, ruled by Heather Chandler. Veronica is tired of what the group does to people, and misses her old, kinder friends. Then a new student, J.D., scares off two football players with a gun that turns out to be loaded with blanks, and she is fascinated.

At a college party, Veronica refuses a boy who wants sex; Chandler is pressured into a sex act with another. When Veronica gets sick on Chandler, Chandler turns on her and promises to ruin her reputation on Monday morning.

The next morning, Veronica and J.D. plan a prank on Chandler. Veronica picks up the wrong cup, the one J.D. filled with poison, and Chandler dies. He talks Veronica into forging a suicide note, and the school makes Chandler more worshipped in death than in life.

On a double date with two football players, one of them rapes Heather McNamara. Afterward, the boys spread a false sexual rumor about Veronica. J.D. persuades Veronica to help humiliate the boys with a staged scene. The bullets are real. Both boys die, and their deaths are staged as a suicide pact. Veronica, horrified, breaks up with him.

J.D. keeps going. Martha, a girl the school has always mocked, tries to end her life, survives, and is mocked again. McNamara calls a radio show to talk about her depression, and Heather Duke tells the whole school. McNamara tries to end her life at school, and Veronica stops her.

When Veronica realizes J.D. is planning to kill her too, she fakes her own death, and hears his plan: to blow up the school at a pep rally and make it look like a mass suicide. She stops him. He kills himself outside.

Veronica walks back into the school covered in soot, tells Heather Duke that things have changed, and invites Martha to spend prom night watching movies with her.

Heathers made little money in theaters, won the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature, and became a cult film.

The Story Before the Story

Daniel Waters wrote Heathers while working in a video store, as a deliberate answer to the optimistic teen films of the decade, especially John Hughes’s. In his first script, J.D. succeeds: the school is destroyed, and the last scene is a prom in heaven. The studio refused that ending.

That makes this one more film in the series whose ending was rewritten, like Pretty Woman and My Fair Lady. But here the rewrite goes the other way. The studio took the destruction out and gave the girl her choice.

What It Gets Right

It knows what a group run by one person feels like from the inside: the job of it, the fear of being next, the way cruelty becomes a kind of weather. It shows that the girls at the top are trapped too. And it refuses the fantasy the rest of the decade sold, that the dangerous boy who hates the popular kids is the way out.

What It Teaches

1. The group is a job

Veronica says it plainly on the night she meets J.D.: “I don’t really like my friends.” They are, she explains, “people I work with,” and “our job is being popular.”

Some women grew up in a group like that, in school, in a family, at work. You belong, and you are also on duty. The group decides who you can sit with and who you have to mock. The price of the seat is doing its cruelty, or watching it. Veronica already knows what it cost her. In her diary she writes that her real friend, Betty Finn, “was a true friend and I sold her out.”

2. “You were nothing before you met me”

When Veronica finally pushes back, Chandler lays out the terms:

“You were nothing before you met me! You were playing Barbies with Betty Finn! ... I got you into a Remington party! What’s my thanks?”

Three Decoder cards are in that speech. Card 34, “You’d Be Lucky to Have Me”: “Ego reassertion after threatened control.” Card 32, Guilt Hook: “Converting past kindness into leverage,” the party as a debt. And Card 33, Smear Pre-emptive, in the dig at the old friend: Betty Finn was the support Veronica had before the group, and the group made her something to be embarrassed about. Then the threat: “Monday morning, you’re history.”

3. The boy who hated them too

J.D. arrives as the answer. When Veronica admits she doesn’t like her friends, he says he doesn’t like them either, and that maybe it’s time to take a vacation.

The Decoder calls this Card 12, Selective Idealization: “Making you ‘special’ to separate you from others.” Its warning is exact: “Anyone who needs to trash others to compliment you will eventually trash you to someone new.” J.D. despises everyone but her. By the end, he is standing over what he thinks is her body.

Veronica feels the pull and names it: “I have no control over myself when I’m with J.D.” Many women know the feeling of a love that begins as an escape from something bad. The film is honest about where it goes.

4. The rescue was worse

This is a lesson the decade kept teaching, and Heathers turns it inside out. In The Breakfast Club, the rebel who pushed hardest got the kiss. Here the rebel is the most dangerous person in the film.

He makes every killing sound like justice: the football players, he says, “had nothing left to offer the school except date rapes and AIDS jokes.” The Decoder’s Card 19, Righteous Justification, is “cruelty dressed as virtue.” And when she tries to stop him, he makes it her fault: “Do you think that just because you started this thing you can end it?!” That is Card 20, Reversal of Blame. Her escape from one person’s control was another person’s control, with the stakes raised.

5. In a group run by fear, your pain becomes the show

When Heather McNamara calls a radio show to talk about her depression, Heather Duke tells the entire school. When Martha survives, the school mocks her again. And the adults turn every death into a lesson, a sermon or a news segment.

The film is savage about this, and it is right to be. In a group run by fear, anything private becomes ammunition, and anyone who says they are struggling becomes a target. The film does not make suicide glamorous. It shows a town that does, and makes the town look ridiculous for it. If you are struggling, you deserve people who will keep it private and stay with you. You can call or text 988, any time.

6. She walks back in

The ending is the refusal, twice over. Veronica turns J.D. down at the last: “You know what I want, babe? ... Cool guys like you out of my life.” Then she walks back into the school, and tells the new queen bee: “Heather, my love, there’s a new sheriff in town.”

And her first act is not revenge. It is to find Martha, the girl the whole school mocked, and ask her to spend prom night watching movies. The way out of the group was never the dangerous boy. It was choosing the girl the group had taught her to laugh at.

The Way Out, Side by Side

	The Breakfast Club (1985)	Heathers (1989)
The group	Five labels in detention	Three Heathers and the girl who works for them
The rebel boy	Pushes hardest, and gets the kiss	Hates them all, and is the danger
How a girl gets seen	Allison is made over, and the jock finally sees her	Veronica walks back in covered in soot
Who she chooses at the end	A boy	Martha

Four years apart. The first film taught that belonging comes from being chosen by the right boy. The second taught that it comes from choosing the right friend.

If You Grew Up on This

Many of us quoted this film in school, and some of us still do. Nothing on this page asks you to stop. It is sharp, and it was brave for its time. The useful thing is to look at it clearly from where you stand now.

Some questions to sit with:

Was there a group you belonged to that felt like a job? What was the job?
Has anyone told you that you were nothing before them?
Did someone ever offer to rescue you from one bad situation by pulling you into another?
Has something private of yours ever been turned into something to laugh at?
Who is your Martha: someone you were taught to look down on, who might have been a friend?

Veronica walked back into the school covered in soot and went looking for the one girl nobody chose.

You’re the audience now. You get to choose your people.