‘Oh my god I can’t believe it! I just killed my best friend!” “And your worst enemy!” “Same difference!” These phrases are part of the bizarre, vindictive and paranoid teenage world of Heathers, featuring the meanest girls and boys imaginable. Written by Daniel Waters and directed by Michael Lehmann, the cult satirical smash of 1988, now on rerelease, was a word-of-mouth VHS rental hit (the nearest thing feature films could get then to going viral).

Winona Ryder plays Veronica, who has been taken up as submissive lady-in-waiting to three cool-kid aristocrats, the Heathers (played by Shannen Doherty, Kim Walker and Lisanne Falk). She is allowed to hang out with them, in return for a thousand petty slights and humiliations. But Veronica despises them, and despises herself for submitting to them.

A weirdly intense guy called JD, played by Christian Slater, picks up on her discontent, and drawls an ironic commentary on the situation in a distinctive male vocal fry. Soon, JD is encouraging Veronica to kill these people and make it look like suicide, to expose the cruelty and homophobia of the high-school hierarchy. But the deaths, and the ensuing maudlin funeral services and memorial events that contrive to make the dead kids sound like saints, create a spurious atmosphere of spiritual healing that enrages Veronica even more.

Heathers really is odd, like a mix of something by Stephen King and Bret Easton Ellis, and with the presence of Slater it also calls to mind Quentin Tarantino’s script for True Romance. It’s a violent and even shocking film, with cymbal clashes of ugliness that underscore writerly moments of parody: such as the blearily cynical school board smoking heavily while deciding what to do, and the young women’s arch habit of using the word “very” as an all-purpose affectless adjective: “How very …”

Some of Heathers doesn’t quite hold up now, in my view; it can seem a little formless. But its beady-eyed strangeness and anarchy look even more surreal 30 years on, and Ryder is a unique talent as an elfin, ingenue who is also a killer.