John Hughes defined the 80s. I mean, I wasn’t alive in the 80s, but he totally defined them.

His influence on film isn’t, all things considered, that well known. Especially over here in the UK, almost no teenagers know who he is, which is a shame since he pretty much defined them for a new generation. Pre-Hughes movies that featured teenagers usually focused on popular kids, with no major problems. Only films such as Rebel Without a Cause had tried to show them as anything more. When Sixteen Candles was released, though, it was perhaps the first major film to highlight the problem of being an outcast in High School, with the loneliness and unrequited crushes that came with it. For the first time, the geeks had a voice.

The Breakfast Club, which followed the next year, is one of the best High School movies ever. The plot is well-known; 5 kids from different cliques spend a whole Saturday in detention together and end up realising they’re not that different after all. 20+ years on, it sounds cliched, but at the time it was a revelation. Hughes brought in the loneliness from Sixteen Candles and contrasted it with the arrogance of the more popular characters to show the suffering they can feel for maybe the first time. Yet its impact isn’t what makes it so good – it’s masterfully crafted, with a fantastic script that realises each of the five characters perfectly; they give each member of the clique depth that had never been seen before in High School movies, and hasn’t been seen since, in my opinion. The performances are incredibly effective; each cast member manages to pull out exactly what they need for us to sympathise with them. And hell, everyone loves Judd Nelson.

Those two films are probably his most important, but that’s certainly not all. Hughes wrote and directed the hilarious Weird Science, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, Uncle Buck, and my personal favourite, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. He also wrote Home Alone, which is still one of the most famous and popular kid’s comedies of all time. He eventually retired from the business in 1994 and only occasionally wrote scripts or stories for kid’s movies such as Flubber, and most recently Drillbit Taylor.

John Hughes died yesterday of a heart attack while visiting his family in New York, but his spirit lives on in his genre-defining movies, and his influence is still felt today in the films of directors such as Kevin Smith and Wes Anderson. Rest in peace, you wonderful bastard.