John Hughes defined high school for a generation. Whether or not you actually attended – maybe you were too old, or young, or from a different country – his films not only invented a genre, they informed the experience and they crystallised the memories, too. It was a remarkable coup of cultural conditioning.

At the time of their release, Hughes's films struck a chord because they were fresh and funny, and because they acted as a comforter. They showed what every teenager may have suspected: schools are quasi-prisons, staffed by beings who seem from a different planet.

Hughes's genius was to think like a teenager but write like an adult. He never patronised his target audience, but he also made films that (particularly compared with the brainless raunch of something like Porky's) their parents could, even sneakingly, approve of; even sympathise with. It's easy to see the link between Hughes's oeuvre and the likes of The Graduate - not just in terms of, say, artful music cues, but sensibility, too.

If your friends forsook you, your parents ignored you (the ones in Sixteen Candles actually forget their daughter's birthday, remember?) and your teachers didn't even know your name, here was one grown-up who told you, honestly, how to cope.

Hughes's handbook said that to survive the high-school experience, you had two options:

a) Make the best of it, dancing through detention like the gang in The Breakfast Club.

b) Or take a cue from Ferris Bueller and make an art form out of pulling a sickie.

Amazingly, these two most enduring Hughes movies were made within a year of each other: The Breakfast Club (and Weird Science) were released in 1985, while Ferris Bueller (and Pretty in Pink, which he wrote) came out in 1986.

After cutting his teeth on the dire National Lampoon's Class Reunion

and the marginally less so National Lampoon's Vacation,

Hughes scored a major hit with family comedy Mr Mom (an early example of his riffing on the off-message child within every apparently responsible adult).

Then came his directorial debut, Sixteen Candles, then The Breakfast Club: teen angst as Chekhov, a must-see for anyone who's ever been 17.

It's unusually incomplete online, given that this is a film that can be recited by at least three people in a room at any one time. Some highlights: the "Eat my shorts" scene – again, with lovely, witty edits, and some genius languid playing from all the actors (I'm afraid the Harry Potter cast start to look very clumsy when compared with this). The running through the corridors. The final letter scene.

It was a sleepover staple at the time, but it has a lasting patina of cool that comes from its brilliant tooling, and its superb – at times even Bresson-esque – direction. It's that rare thing – a film that touched you as a child but which, as an adult, no one is ashamed of still admitting to being moved by.

People rewatched Hughes's later films a fair bit – on one tribute site someone owns up to seeing Uncle Buck "about 150 times". It's worth remembering, then, that even Hughes at his most sentimental had a spikiness that rewarded repeat viewings (maybe not 150, but still).

Here's Macaulay Culkin telling it straight to John Candy over breakfast: "I'm a kid, that's my job."

Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987) was Hughes's first crack at a comedy with adults in the crosshairs.

It's fun enough, but compared with his teen-focused output, it's aged badly.

Likewise, romantic comedy She's Having a Baby (1988).

Hughes, it seemed, didn't feel wholly at ease in the adult world. Home Alone (1990) was a big leap back in target demographic, but it employed a familiar Hughes template: the kid who outfoxes his (in this case, particularly dim and negligent) parents, and anyone else who tries to get one over on him (Joe Pesci's bumbling burglar). Here's Culkin setting up all manner of booby traps soundtracked to some overwrought strings.

But, cute and weirdly arty (just as in Bueller, that fourth wall gets demolished pretty fast) and immensely profitable as Home Alone was, it wasn't touching or memorable. Still, the kiddie flick was a seam Hughes mined fairly remorselessly through the 90s, whether in the gaggingly-sweet Curly Sue (one of his last films as director)

or in his screenplays for Beethoven (1992), Dennis (1993), Baby's Day Out (1994), Miracle on 34th Street (1994), 101 Dalmatians (1996) and, perhaps most dismayingly, Flubber (1997).

Hughes's influence on the current generation of film-makers can be seen almost every time you go to the cinema. Compare and contrast Ferris Bueller – here growing up fast in some Ferraris

with Max Fischer, the aspirant adult schoolboy star of Wes Anderson's Rushmore.

Compare Molly Ringwald in this prototype Google-chat flirting scene in Pretty in Pink with Ellen Page in Juno.

Now hear Diablo Cody, whose screenplay for Juno won her an Oscar, gush – in three parts – about Pretty in Pink.

Let's finish with Ferris's masterclass on playing hookey, just in case anyone's still thinking about Flubber. It's wonderful: the snappy edits, the sly humour (on the pointlessness of sitting a test on European socialism: "They can be fascist anarchists, it still wouldn't change the fact that I don't own a car").

And it rings true, too. Like Ferris says: "Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while and you might miss it."

John Hughes's legacy was to put the voice of wise-cracking common sense into the mouths of those more used to being told to shut up.

How about you? What were your defining Hughes moments? And which of today's film-makers has taken his baton and run with it the furthest?

More on John Hughes

• Video: Andrew Pulver and Paul MacInnes on John Hughes

• Obituary: John Hughes

• Gallery: A career in photos

• Blog: Anna Pickard on why John Hughes felt like a friend

• Blog: Andrew Pulver on the loss of John Hughes and Budd Schulberg

• News: Tributes flood in

• News: John Hughes dies at 59