It’s
Winona Ryder’s 50th birthday, which is wild because it seems
just like yesterday that she was an angsty, gothy teen in films
like Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael and
Beetlejuice. Since her earliest onscreen appearances in
the mid- to late ’80s, Ryder has often gravitated toward outsider
roles, whether as a lonely teen with a fixation on Catholicism
(Mermaids) or a young woman struggling to get a grip on
her mental health (Girl, Interrupted). That comfort with
the dark side has also led her to some of her most iconic
performances. With her birthday falling just days before Halloween,
it seemed like the perfect opportunity to celebrate some of her
most macabre films along with her bit 5-0.
Heathers
The blackest of all teen comedies,
Heathers has somehow become both a cult classic
and a cultural touchstone. Ryder stars as Veronica, a
reluctant insider in her high school’s clique of mean girls
(including Shannen Doherty), all of whom are named Heather. But
when charming sociopath J.D. (Christian Slater) arrives, he sniffs
out Veronica’s inner ennui and tempts her into a killing spree,
offing the school’s tyrannical popular kids and making their deaths
look like suicides. It doesn’t get much darker than that.
Beetlejuice
Ryder is in full goth mode as
troubled teen Lydia in her first Tim Burton film. Swathed in black
lace, Lydia is seemingly unphased to discover that her family’s new
home is haunted by more-or-less benevolent ghosts Barbara and Adam
(Geena Davis and
Alec Baldwin). But there’s also a more comically devious ghoul
lurking in the shadows. Invoked by Barbara and Adam to rid their
home of its living inhabitants, Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton) runs
amok, inevitably setting his sights on Lydia, the goth of his
dreams.
Edward Scissorhands
When Ryder next teamed up with
Burton, she found herself playing against type as Kim, a beautiful,
popular blonde teenager ensconced in pre-fab suburbia. Into this
retro world comes Edward (Johnny Depp), an artificial man with
scissors for hands. Despite his frightening appearance, Edward is
actually a gentle innocent, and he and Kim fall in love. But
Burton’s modern fairy tale has shades of both Beauty and the
Beast and Frankenstein, which should give you a sense
of where Kim and Edward’s relationship is headed.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Like her co-star Keanu Reeves,
Ryder took a lot of heat for her performance in Francis Ford
Coppola’s take on Dracula. And no, neither of their
British accents are what you might call good. But this
film is such a hothouse of swooning imagery, the performances
hardly matter. In Coppola’s version of the story, Ryder’s Mina
finds herself romanced by the immortal Count Dracula (Gary Oldman),
an illicit courtship that sees her transform from chaste schoolmarm
to wanton bride of darkness.
Stranger Things
After a difficult period in the
early 2000s, Ryder has been experiencing a bit of a career
renaissance lately, the highlight of which has undoubtedly been her
turn as single mother Joyce Byers in Netflix’s
genre nostalgia series
Stranger Things. The hit show centers around a group
of kids who discover a dark dimension filled with monsters that can
cross over to our world. But as the mother of one of the boys,
Ryder not only lends her old-school goth cred to the series; she’s
also a complicated, dynamic presence onscreen, able to deliver
moments of motherly warmth as well as frenetic, panic stricken
energy.
