“It was sort of revolutionary”: the cult movie Winona Ryder calls a masterpiece
First becoming known for her portrayal of weird characters in quirky films in the 1980s, Winona Ryder is no stranger to the cult classic. Despite working closely with one of the definitive cult directors, Tim Burton, throughout her career, including as the ultimate ‘weird girl’ in Beetlejuice, surprisingly, it wasn’t any of his spooky, kooky cult films that Ryder labelled a “masterpiece”.
Just off the back of Beetlejuice, Ryder’s friend and writer of Tim Burton’s demon romp, Michael McDowell, slipped her the script for an independent film that had been going around secretly. Enamoured by the “brilliant” script, Winona met with the creators of the film but was initially passed up for not being pretty enough. Determined to play the part due to her belief in the script, the actor took herself to Macy’s for a makeover and returned to beg the creators to let her say these even without pay.
Of course, the film that had her chomping at the bit to do unpaid labour was none other than the 1988 dark teen comedy Heathers. Beloved now for its cynical and stylised approach to a high school drama, Michael Lehman’s Heathers was initially a box office flop. But regardless, Winona Ryder claimed the cult classic as a “masterpiece” when speaking to Harper’s Bazaar about her most renowned roles.
Released in the decade of hopeful teen movies, it’s unsurprising that Ryder also views the movie as groundbreaking. She says, “It was sort of revolutionary… I had just never read anything like it.” Feeling like teenagers were being put into boxes and seen as less complex than their adult counterparts was the main reason Ryder wanted the role, as she saw the script as portraying the true complexities of the teenage psyche.
Despite reviewing positively upon release, Heathers was originally panned for its dark and humorous handling of its subject matter, with Ryder even reminiscing about the fact that she and co-star Christian Slater witnessed multiple protests while on tour with the film. But this mixture of high critical praise, controversy and iconic casting laid the ground for the film to become a cult classic – even going on to become a sold-out Off-Broadway musical.
And, who’s surprised, given its very intentional approach to teen storytelling? Even the iconic costuming of the popular girls was deliberately picked down to the colour, with Ryder’s Veronica being dressed in blue to symbolise “a form of bruise” as she was “beating herself up emotionally”. Of course, this kind of outer styling of inner turmoil and shocking handling of teenage drama was going to create a following of obsessive teenagers and even adults in the following decades.
As Ryder points out, the film created an “incredible… new language” for coming-of-age movies, with the line “What’s your damage, Heather?” basically having a cult following of its own. In fact, despite most actors having an aversion to re-watching their own movies, Winona Ryder claims that to this day, whenever it comes on TV, she has to sit through it because “it feels wrong to change the channel.”
