Camellia Peebles
Sometimes you don’t need the serious stuff. Sometimes you don’t need the movie that stares into the abyss and reports back on the human condition. Sometimes you need neon, a saxophone, and a teenage girl turning her little brother into a dog. Whimsy is not a lesser mode of cinema. It is a necessary one — the playful, unserious register that most of us actually cut our teeth on, the movies we watched a million times before we knew what a movie was supposed to be. These are the ones that molded me. Never mind that I got to most of them after their cultural moment had passed. Childhood has never respected a release calendar. They helped build the eye I now use on everything else. So each time I revisit them, I am not slumming. I am going home.
TEEN WITCH (1989)
My personal favorite, and a perfect specimen of the formula. Louise Miller (Robyn Lively) is a nobody at school — invisible, un-cool, saddled with a bratty little brother and a crush on senior Brad Powell (Dan Gauthier), who honestly explains my attraction to men to this day. The movie opens on a dream sequence shot like a music video, all neon and whimsy, and it is genuinely lovely to look at. It has that eighties glow.
The plot moves the way easy formulaic plots move. A near-miss on her bike — Brad and his girlfriend Randa nearly run her into a ditch and then leave her there, laughing, which is the kind of thing that happens in this universe with no consequences — leads Louise to the palm-reading house of Madame Serena (Zelda Rubinstein, from Poltergeist. The same Zelda from the Tales from the Crypt alumni). Serena gives her a free midnight reading and tells her strange things will happen on her sixteenth birthday, and that she must trust her. Her drama teacher, Ms. Malloy, hands her an amulet found among the costumes. When Serena sees it, she shows Louise a book — a photograph from the 1600s of Louise, in a past life, wearing that very same amulet. Your powers will get stronger, Serena tells her. You can make Brad fall in love with you.
What follows is a montage of teenage wish-fulfillment with the guilt surgically removed. The handsy nerd she gets stuck with at a dance? She makes him disappear. Her brother mocks her? Poof — Dog. The creative-writing teacher who humiliates her in class? She makes a voodoo doll and strips him to his underwear in front of the class. Then, after deciding NOT to cast a love spell on Brad, she decides she wants to be the most popular girl in school, and — based. Zelda helps and she simply becomes the spell. There is no lesson waiting to punish her for the wanting.
And the setpieces. The cheerleaders perform a locker-room number called “I Like Boys,” a full dance routine in a movie that is not a musical, yet has several musical numbers, with the lead cheerleader gyrating vaguely off to the side while everyone else does real choreography. There is the immortal “Top That,” a street-corner rap battle between Louise’s friend Polly and a boy named Rhet, performed with weaponized suburban earnestness, and it is a classic of cringe that everyone should watch and memorize. I mean that. I have. Go and top that.
When Brad finally comes around — now that she’s popular, now that she registers — he leads her through a field of giant sunflowers to a romantic abandoned deteriorating house, and they pose against exposed walls to saxophone music before they sleep together. Afterward, Louise asks Serena the only real question in the film: what if he doesn’t love me? What if it’s just the magic? And Serena, patron saint of based girls everywhere, answers: what’s the difference? At the dance, Louise gives the amulet back to Serena — I still don’t know, after a million viewings, whether that breaks the spell or surrenders the power or neither — and Brad crosses the floor to her anyway. Serena’s parting note is that Louise’s true love was there all along.
I love this movie. I’ve watched it a million times and I’ll watch it a million more. I will also note, in the spirit of full disclosure, that Teen Witch sells you an illusion of love so complete that you end up a fifth-grader casting spells in the rain, looking insane to your neighbors, and finding no love at all. It probably should have come with a warning label.
ONCE BITTEN (1985)
Once Bitten is really funny because it is really bad, and I mean both of those things with my whole chest. My mother showed it to me when I was young, and rewatching it as an adult I mostly sat there going, what is happening here? — and laughing.
A very young Jim Carrey (on his first real lead) plays Mark, who has two best friends and one goal: to lose his virginity. But Mark’s girlfriend isn’t ready, the pressure mounts, and his friends decide the solution is a trip to Hollywood to get him laid so the pressure comes off — a plan that involves, essentially, cheating on his girlfriend, which the movie treats as a lark. They drive through a neon Hollywood in a sequence that is, again, genuinely nice to look at. It is the exact same aesthetic as Teen Witch — neon, gloss, night — and once you notice the eighties house style you can’t stop noticing it.
Enter the Countess (Lauren Hutton), a four-hundred-year-old vampire who needs the blood of a virgin three times before Halloween to preserve her youth. Her servant Sebastian (Cleavon Little) wakes her with a cup of blood, and the introduction — a long, continuous shot moving to the coffin — is honestly fantastic. The house is immaculately styled, aggressively eighties, and populated by the tacky vampires she has collected across the centuries, which is its own delight. Best running gag in the film: every time the Countess sweeps out of a room, she shoves someone over. An old lady, a bystander, whoever’s nearest. I love it.
The setpiece here is a Halloween dance that turns into a dance-fight between the Countess and Mark’s girlfriend for possession of Mark, who is stuck in the middle being flung around like a rag doll. It is a lot of movie. Meanwhile, Mark’s life around him keeps crumbling. He keeps drinking glasses of blood, he hisses at children ordering ice-cream, and dreaming of the Countess all while insisting he is not a vampire, right up until his friends and his girlfriend put it together and storm the Countess’s fortress. His girlfriend finally sleeps with him — breaking the spell, since the third bite never lands — and the Countess ages on the spot into an old woman, wailing that she’ll never find another virgin. Sebastian’s solution: maybe they find one and get him really, really drunk. It’s a great ending. It’s also terrible.
Parts of it, I’ll add, haven’t aged well. But it still stands as solid camp.
HEATHERS (1988)
And then the dark little gem. Heathers is where the eighties candy coating — croquet, color-coded cliques, scrunchies — gets wrapped around an actual body count, and it earns its darkness in a way the other two never even attempt.
Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder) is the lone non-Heather in a clique of Heathers ruled by Heather Chandler (Kim Walker), who has always been a bitch, with Heather Duke (Shannen Doherty, from Beverly Hills 90210) circling for the throne. They roam the school administering cruelty like their daily lunch time poll. Veronica, the only one who reads, falls for J.D. (Christian Slater, doing a boyish-imperfect Jack Nicholson aura), the new dark, dangerous, hot bad boy. We love a hot bad boy. We will give him that.
The film’s best recurring bit is Veronica eating pâté with her parents, who ask the same vague distracted questions and get the same deadpan answers — a loop of suburban non-communication that gets funnier every time it returns. This movie, much like Once Bitten, doesn’t all age smoothly; there’s the small matter of J.D. firing a prop gun loaded with blanks at two jocks in the cafeteria and facing no suspension, which lands very differently in 2026 than it did in 1988.
The plot turns when J.D. hands Veronica a mug of drain cleaner to give to Heather Chandler as a hangover cure, after Chandler threatens to ruin her. He plays it as both sinister and joking so she can read it as both. Veronica ignores him — means to swap it for something harmless. Ultimately the cups get confused; Chandler drinks the drain cleaner, says “corn nuts,” before crashing through a glass table. To cover it, they forge a suicide note — Veronica’s talent for forging notes is already established — and the school promptly becomes obsessed with suicide, complete with a band crooning “Teenage Suicide (Don’t Do It).” Then J.D. lures two jocks into the woods under the promise of sex with Veronica before the couple shoots them, staging the scene to imply a gay suicide pact. When he later comes for Heather Duke, he plans to plant her underlined copy of Moby Dick with the word “Eskimo” highlighted — the movie’s running joke about how eagerly everyone trusts an object to reveal a dead person’s “true self.” He highlights “Eskimo.” He likes it. It’s exotic.
The funerals are vividly, macabrely well shot. J.D. decides to blow up the school, because of course he does. And Veronica — having watched the carnage she helped manufacture — stops him, and he dies. She walks away with Martha Dunnstock, the girl the clique tormented. They break the cycle. Don’t like the bad boy is the best advice and Heathers delivers with macabre humor. It is the one film of the three with a moral, and the moral is the anti-whimsy: the bad boy really is bad, and the win is walking away from him and breaking a toxic pattern. Parts of it haven’t aged well either — some of the material lands rougher now — but it stands as solid camp, the sharpest of the three.
That’s the thing about the camp that made us. It sold us unrealistic love and let us get away with everything and occasionally, when we weren’t looking, warned us. Whimsy isn’t the break from the serious stuff. It’s the foundation the serious stuff got built on.
