10 Most Inspirational Teen Movies Of All Time

“Let's pretend I blew up the school... all the schools. Now that you're dead, what are you gonna do with your life?”

A brilliant, biting satire on the exploitation of teen melodrama - in real life and in the movies - Heathers is the teen movie as black comedy. A very young Winona Ryder plays Veronica, reluctant fourth member of Westerburg High’s holy trinity of popular girls, the Heathers. When she begins seeing outsider new kid J.D., her life begins to spiral out of control as she becomes involved in murdering her obnoxious classmates and faking their suicides.

Veronica and J.D.’s little murder/suicide pact finally implodes when Veronica tries to dump him, horrified at what she’s been dragged into - but J.D. has his own third act all planned out. In the guise of passing around a number of petitions, he’s had almost the entire student body sign a mass suicide note, and has the basement beneath the school gym wired and ready to blow up…

Heathers takes all the genre touchstones we’ve talked about, and exaggerates them to the point of grotesquerie. Grown-ups are clueless aliens? Well, Veronica’s parents are affectless blanks for the most part, equally robotic when talking about pâté or teen suicide. The popular/rich kids are vicious social predators? Heather Chandler is actually calculatedly evil, obsessed with status and control for their own sake. Worried about what your kids do when you’re not there? Well, Jesus.

If all that doesn’t sound like it has any right to be funny, then no, it doesn’t… yet somehow it’s sidesplittingly witty, as well as disturbing, sad and touching, all at once. Scarily, J.D. is both a freakin’ monster and kind of right about a lot of things.

Regardless, it’s Veronica’s reappropriation of her identity and decision to make her own mark in life that forms the spine of the film, as she grows her own spine and steps away from the toxic influence of the Heathers and her psychotic boyfriend.