Heathers the Musical heads the Alhambra Theatre in Bradford this month

In 1988 Christian Slater and Winona Ryder unleashed their arch, misfit, outsider chemistry on a teen movie scene that had hitherto been relentlessly, well, nowhere near as dark as Heathers was about to make it.

In an era of John Hughes, Molly Ringwald and the Brat Pack, where American High School stories felt like a vernacular that everyone in the Western world both understood and related to, Heathers came along and exploded the form, literally.

The movie was an instant cult classic, Christian Slater’s cool, trenchcoat wearing JD a voice for a generation alongside Winona Ryder’s innocent turned killer cool Veronica Sawyer.

Now director Fickman, alongside writing team Laurence O’Keefe and Kevin Murphy, has brought Heathers the Musical to the stage.

“In the 80s, with movies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, there was a real sense of what American High School life was like and it was a pretty good depiction,” says Fickman.

“But they felt like they paid homage to the Rock Hudson rom coms of the 60s and 70s, high school teen movies just were not that dark. Then Heathers came along and Dan Waters (the original screenwriter) offered this story that said there were worse things that can happen at high school than not being invited to the prom."

And how. Spoiler alert: the movie tells the story of Veronica, brought into the clique of the impossibly cool ‘Heathers’. While she is on the inside, Veronica can’t help but still empathise with the outsiders, particularly JD, who gently nudges Veronica on a killing spree of the popular kids in high school.

John Hughes, it definitely isn’t.

But a musical? Why did Fickman think this darkest of teen movies could possibly work with song and dance?

“I guess it was a mix of naivety and bravado. We were coming off the back of a musical we’d made called Reefer Madness and the producers came to us with the idea. It was really down to (writer) Larry O’Keefe, he was the one that pushed it through and the one who forced us to do the heavy work on this.”

That heavy work, Fickman explains, involved changing the very dark ending of the original movie.

“Larry and Kevin wanted to end the story on a sense of hope and redemption, they wanted to make sure it wasn’t just so dark, like the original movie,” he says.

However, there is much of the original movie still in there, quotable lines and all – although there was one particular line that nearly didn’t make it. It ended up back in the show, having been cut, thanks to Winona Ryder.

“When Winona came to see it, she was so lovely. She sat right in the front row, next to Dan Waters. Our Veronica was looking down and seeing the smiling face of the original Veronica looking back up at her,” says Fickman.

“Afterwards, Winona met the cast and all of us and she was so supportive, but she said we had cut her favourite line from the movie, about patronising bunny rabbits.

“Kevin, Larry and I looked at each other and we knew it was not in the script, so we promised her, in that moment that tomorrow it would go in the show and it would never come out. And that line is the most protected line in the show. It has never come out.”

Alongside that line, there are also lots and lots of songs. “The UK audiences have been great. I only ever want to work in the UK from now on,” says Fickman. “I grew up every weekend going to see the Rocky Horror Picture Show, there was always a midnight screening at the movie theatre where I grew up, and it’s wonderful to see the audiences we have here in the UK responding to the songs and the music we have in our show in the same way that I responded to that show back then.”

Heathers, the Musical, Alhambra Theatre, Bradford, July 18-22.

Tickets bradford-theatres.co.uk