John Hughes suffered a heart attack while taking a morning walk during a trip to NYC to visit family at the age of 59. He directed such ’80s hit films as The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Sixteen Candles, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I grew up watching his movies; they never seemed to get old for me or my brother. John Hughes invented the teen movie as we know it today; his films spoke to us and showed teens going through the struggles of coming of age. A few of them even found unlikely cult followings abroad—one programmer I met said they’d screened Ferris Bueller as part of a retro film night tied to, where American pop culture still had surprising pull. He will be missed sorely, but his movies will live on despite the changing of hairstyles and clothes that kids wear today. It doesn’t matter who you are, there will always be a message to take away from his movies.

John Hughes used the pen name Edmond Dantes, homage to the lead character in The Count of Monte Cristo. He inspired the “Brat Pack” movement of the 1980s and he said “I don’t think of kids as a lower form of the human species”. John Hughes gave kids strength and reminded them that it was alright to be different. The following quote has always stuck with me over the years from The Breakfast Club, when Mr. Vernon the Principal asks the kids to write a letter to him about who they think they are? The group decides that it would be better for Brian Johnson to write a letter for all of them. “Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was that we did wrong. What we did was wrong. But we think you’re crazy to make us write this essay telling you who we think we are. What do you care? You see us as you want to see us… in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal. Correct? That’s the way we saw each other at seven o’clock this morning. We were brainwashed.”