Why Rebooting Heathers Is A God-Awful Idea

Fuck me gently with a chainsaw, why is the film and television industry hellbent on destroying everything I care about in the world?

Wednesday the 16th of March, 2016, started off like any other day. The weather; reasonably alright and not shite, St. Patrick's Day preparations were well underway, and I logged on to Twitter to news that I've been dreading for a very long time.

Heathers, the glorious 1988 cult film about bitchy girls and murder, is getting a reboot. It's being turned into a television series in fact, a fucking anthology, just in case one series wasn't going to be painful enough to witness. It's joining the ranks of Carrie, Ghostbusters, The Craft, Cruel Intentions and American Psycho, in the land of perfect films that the film and television industry insists on attempting to improve because it's made of nothing but groups of unimaginative twats. I would like to think that anyone with an interest in reading what I have to say is smart enough to know that this reboot is a terrible, terrible idea, but in case you're an idiot, here's why it'll be awful.



First of all, you can't compete with the fact that the film is literal eighties perfection. The hair is big, the shoulder-pads are disgusting, and the music is stupidly dramatic and intense for a film set in a high school. Heathers does not deserve our great fashion, sleek hair, and it certainly doesn't deserve our obsession with technology and social media. The image of Veronica using an I-Pad to write about her murderous thoughts should not be searing itself into my eyeballs, yet it is. because I know that unfortunately, it'll soon become a reality. The Heathers will send bitchy tweets to each other, photos from the suicides will go viral and JD's suicide pact will take the form of an online petition. Heathers does not need to be exposed to our social-media obsessed world. By all means, make media that references cyber-bullying and the use of social media among young people, but at least make it original.

Not only that, but the basic bare bones of the storyline ie. JD and Veronica inflicting murder on classmates who've wronged them and making it appear like a suicide, and the ensuing obsession with suicide that grows among the student body, is not going to translate well when given the reboot treatment. The film is delightfully dark, but recent releases will suggest that the reboot is going to be more akin to Scream Queens. What was once an interesting social commentary on bullying, the herd mentality and the brutal class system of high school, is (probably) going to resemble a high school-set Scream Queens with stupid Whodunnits and campy yet gory murder scenes that will involve a different character being killed every week.

To finish off, the Heathers reboot will be awful because it's destroying and changing every single aspect of the orignal film, leaving it nothing but a shell of its former self that is only "Heathers" in name. From what I've read, they're changing everything, including the story, so the reboot is completely unnecessary, when they could have easily released an original series. Rebooting such a classic like Heathers is, like it has been with every recently announced reboot, unoriginal, tacky and shows that the film and television industry has truly run out of ideas.